 the history of a clandestine scene through the eyes of the folks who lived it. I'm Matthew. I'll occasionally be joined by my co-host, not-so-daught, breeder and grower from Mendocina. Welcome to the Underground. So we're here with Heavy Days from the podcast and we wanted to talk with him about his journey through cannabis, where he started, how he got into podcasting period, not only that but taking that journey into breeding, into making seeds, and the whole political climate in Australia and how he's grown throughout this journey. So I want to start from the beginning with you. Do this kind of A to Z. How did you get started? Where did you get that spark for cannabis in Australia? Yeah, great question. I guess first off, I'll just say huge thanks for having me on guys. It's a pleasure to be joined by some of my favorite podcasts, so super stoked. And yeah, to your question, good question, right? Because the Australian scene historically has been just very fledgling and very much in the shadows of the US sort of wasn't a lot of notable figures doing much when I first started getting interested in cannabis, which would have been around 2013-ish. Yeah. That was when I started getting really serious. And I think initially, the thing that really was the light bulb moment for me was I actually tried some imported Californian weed. And I was like, wow, weed can be this good? And prior to that, all I'd had was the Australian equivalent of beasters. So for a long time, I was like, yeah, cannabis is cool, but whatever. And yeah, then you try this Californian stuff. And I remember specifically it was it was said that it was granddaddy purple. But looking back with what I know now, definitely was not granddaddy purple. It was it was very green and had a very generic sweet smell, not that sort of irkly. But it was nonetheless a light bulb moment. And then the next batch I got, there was a few things like there was like some Jack Herra, which wasn't Jack Herra. There was some Girl Scout cookies that wasn't Girl Scout cookies. But there was purple kush. And I think it is the purple kush that sort of goes around a bit. And that one made a very lasting impact on me. And I think the ball got rolling from there. And I had I had done a grow before that. But I got mediocre results. And it was my first grows, you know, it's going to be a bit dog shit anyway. And yeah, you end up growing out, you know, like DNA or whatever, because always, yeah, like, it's a given your first grow, you don't know who's a good breeder. So you're just going to get lost in the marketing. So so yeah, so I came back to it. And I just started getting interested in it. And at the time, I was applying for graduate school and part of the entry requirement was, there was like this essay component, and I wasn't good at writing. So I started writing these largely speaking sort of opinion pieces on cannabis and sort of the state of the scene in Australia. And I would talk about how I was sort of a bit let down. I would talk about how sort of a bit let down by the Australian scene, because from my perspective, the penalties for growing cannabis were far less than the states. And so there was a huge incentive to get at it. Like why not the penalties are pretty minimal. And yet no one had really done it. And so I sort of wrote this opinion piece saying, you know, I think the Australian scene is pretty apathetic compared to the American scene, you know, like during the Reagan administration, like people going to jail for just for incredible periods of time. And I just don't think the same legalities were at play in Australia for a long time. And so yeah, I was just writing these opinion pieces and saying like, you know, if you want to help get things legal in Australia, we need to be more open because at the time I knew a bunch of like white collar professional guys who grew, but they were totally in the closet. They wouldn't tell anyone about it. And I sort of tried to encourage people and I was like, the more you put this out there, the more people accept that you can be like, you know, a family man with a job and and still grow on the side, you know, yeah, you don't have to be a criminal like in a criminal organization, you can you can have a normal family life and grow unlike the way I look right now. But but yeah, so so I think that was sort of how I got my my feet wet was I was writing these opinion pieces. And I got to admit, it was all sort of guised as just an experiment for me to get better at writing. And it was just subject matter that I was somewhat familiar with. And then I guess the and this is probably the part that I haven't really spoken to people much about. I then got the idea of like, well, let's do a podcast. And what you find is if you're like a no name person like I was at the time, and you ask people, hey, would you like to come on this podcast? The first thing they'll say is, can you like send me something to listen to? So like, I have an idea of like what it's going to be. And if you're then like, oh, you know, you're actually the first person. People stop replying very quickly. So I remember specifically, I am at the time Brothers Grim was like just announced they were reinventing themselves. I didn't know who Duke was yet. I just knew Mr. Soul from like reading online and stuff. And so I reached out to him. And I was like, do you want to come on? And he was like, yeah, we'll do it. Send me some questions. I sent him some questions. And then like after a few replies, he's like, what like, organization do you work for? And I was like, oh, it's like, it's just sort of me. And he abruptly stopped replying. Yeah, anyone who's met Mr. Soul will know that's pretty par for the course. So then again, being a bit of a newbie, I reached out to Swerve Calycon. And a very similar thing. He expressed interest. And then after one or two replies, just completely ghosted me. So at that point, I was sort of a bit like, I don't know if this is going to actually happen. And I just started following Duke, because I'd seen on the Brothers Grim website that, you know, he was pairing up with Mr. Soul. And I had just asked a few questions in the comments. I think he had posted about some 88G13 crosses he had done. And I just sort of said, oh, you know, I read this line's pretty old, and it's a bit inbred. Do you find like it dominates the crosses? Yeah. And I think just a few questions like that, he was sort of like, oh, you know, you seem to be interested in the genetics. Yeah. And so yeah, I just I floated the idea by him. And I think I even linked him some of those opinion pieces. And I think that might have been what sort of got him over the line a bit thinking like, oh, this guy seems to you know, it's not just like haphazard, do you want to do it? He seems to be sort of passionate. Yeah. So yeah, then we did that. And that went really well. And I ended up we chatted for a couple of hours. And then we actually ended up probably staying on the chat for probably an equal amount of time. I think we chatted for like three hours on the episode. So then we probably spent another three hours just chatting afterwards about general stuff. Yeah. And you know, we sort of developed a rapport. And at the end of it, he was like, I'm going to do you a favor. And I didn't really know what he meant. I thought coming on the episode was the fact that I was very grateful. But so I just went to bed thinking that was great, you know, what a once in a lifetime experience to talk to like a professional because like at the time, like, you know, I was just a nobody. Yeah. And yeah, so I was really grateful. And then the next morning, I woke up and I had an inbox from Skunk VA. And I'd never spoken to him at the time. And in my mind, you know, he's this mythological figure in the chemistry very inex, and he was also very inaccessible at the time. He wasn't online. He wasn't talking. And he just basically said, Hey, you know, Duke said, I should message you. And that was all it said. Yeah. And, and so then we ended up lining up the episode. But 100% without a doubt, those two things happening was definitely the momentum, which allowed the show to continue in my opinion. Yeah, I think that it was a big get to get a Skunk VA on for sure. And, you know, yeah. And, you know, he, he turned, he's a good, he's a pretty good storyteller. And he also told the truth about a, about a, you know, a lot of aspects of chem that were, that people didn't wanted to know. So it probably sort of launched it a bit, I would imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Hugely. And I think, not so dog, you said this in one of the breeder syndicate episodes not so long ago, but you said, listening to that episode, he was, he was pretty honest about a lot of things. And as the years have gone by, and I've learned more about, you know, the behind the scenes of the various incidents he maybe spoke about, I did sort of start to gain a bit of an appreciation that like, yeah, it did sound like he gave a pretty honest recount. And, you know, like, there's a lot of funny things, not funny, but how can I put it? Like people, and, you know, not so you probably deal with this a lot too. People still constantly ask me, you know, who's the Staten Island guy? Oh my God, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, what's a bummer about that for me is that because he shunned the spotlight on the forums and anywhere else, he's probably the single biggest person responsible for keeping the Kems alive, right? At least for that period of time until he spread them out a little bit to his friend group. And he does, and he brought the Super Skunk West, and he doesn't really get talked about. And he doesn't want us to say his name. So I asked if Staten Island was like an acceptable, you know, Diplom. Yeah, you know, and he was like, okay, you can call me that, you know, so that's funny. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And as, and as I learned more about the story and sort of the interplay between, you know, skunk VA, not so dog, some of the other characters in the scene, the Staten Island guy, I started to like realize the story a bit more on the back end. And I was like, oh, okay, this is actually like really interesting. And yeah, I can understand the Staten Island guy's perspective. And he's he always, like, you know, obviously, I've never met him or spoke to him and whatnot. And I know not so dog, you're very close with him. But um, yeah, yeah, there you go. But I just I just sort of understood that he was from that older guard, which was like, you know, I keep to the shadows, I do my thing. So yeah, that that was definitely really interesting. But I think that was largely speaking how I got into it all. And then, you know, it all sort of just started to gain a bit of momentum from there. And we just sort of branched out a bit really goes everyone, you know, I owe a huge amount of, you know, appreciation and gratitude to to everyone in the first 10 because as much as, you know, the first two I referenced gave me some momentum. I think I have to be honest, I think there was a bit of a lull between episodes sort of four to seven where I had some people that I was interested in, but maybe weren't super, super big. Right. Yeah, definitely. So some of the most interesting people aren't who who like necessarily everybody wants to hear about that moment, but it's who we want to talk to, you know, I feel you. Yeah. But yeah, definitely people like yourself, mean Jean and Bodie and you know, some of the big name guys in the first sort of 10 to 12 episodes were just hugely impactful. And I honestly all the time think about how different it would have been if like I didn't have those people including yourself, you know, I imagine I look at a lot of other podcasts and I see it takes a long time to get a big following. And I just think I was very lucky to get that sort of push initially. You got some people that the community likes a lot and some people that were interesting and stories that they wanted to hear. And I think that that probably had a lot to do with it too. I've always been super interested to be frank in that the fact that you like because our world is so underground, right, there's like layers of what people know about each other, you know, from like insider information that I'm sure like as you've been in the scene now a while, you've heard a lot. But when you're first getting involved, you typically only know like legends or public personas, right? Yeah. And so even figuring out like who's who can be, you know, I always looked at that because it's like it happened for me like organically or Matt just being around the forums, being in the scene, living in California for so many years. Like I knew a lot of these people in real life. Yeah. You know, but you're on the other side of the planet, you know, and you're trying to determine who to talk to. And you know, we're a quirky bunch. Yeah. How did how did that work for you? Like, like trying to slowly figure out like maybe not necessarily who is full of shit, but who is more whose perspective aligned most with how you see the history going? How did you start figuring that out? What was what were some of the the steps in stepping stones in that process? Yeah, what a great question. I have to be honest. I'm probably I haven't actually super thought about that. So I'm just going to give you the ideas that are coming to my head right now and get it wrong. Yeah. But basically, I think that I'll be honest, it probably wasn't until like episode 40 or so that I actually was able to stop viewing every episode as like this real fanboy thing. In a sense, like, I feel like before every episode, I would get nervous and it was like, fuck, that's deal with this big name, dude. And you know what I mean? Yeah. So I think I just want to put that out there that, yeah, that definitely was the case. I was a bit starstruck initially because, you know, as you guys said, you know, these really infamous figures online who you just get little tidbits about here and there. I think largely speaking, I didn't have too many people messaging me saying, hey, stay away from this guy. There actually wasn't too much of that. Except, except for my name. I believe that was one of them you got a lot about. No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, like maybe, but like, fuck those guys. Like, I always view it as like I've always said, you know, consistently that your episodes are some of my favorite because I think that a lot of guests are very diplomatic when they come on the show. And I liked the fact that it didn't feel like that with you. It always felt very free flowing. But to jump back to the question quickly for a second, I think generally speaking, I just picked a few people in the scene who I thought were really stand out. And then I thought, if if the guest I'm thinking about is sort of friends or cool with these people, then they must be okay. So I think that probably would have been the guiding sort of feature. But also, I have to reference I was lucky enough to come visit the States probably within the first six months of starting the show. So I got to hang out with a lot of people in person. And I think that helped guide the guest selection a little more. But like, I'll be the first to admit, you know, there are there are some episodes that I think haven't aged as well as others. And there is a number of episodes that are just not available anymore. And that's for a variety of reasons. And sometimes the guest has requested it to be taken down. Other times, we just viewed it as inappropriate to keep it up. So yeah, I think that the selection has gotten better over time, I hope. And I certainly also think that I like to chat to people a little bit before I get them on the show. And the other guiding principle I have is that I don't really take requests so much like people will message me and say, Hey, can I get on the show? And they might be like a decent size following. But I have always said, you know, in order to get a good episode, I think I have to genuinely be curious about you. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're not, it's just like a stale conversation, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's really hard when it comes to to guests like I mean, even with just doing the live streams for a long time, there are so many of those that I look back on that did not age well in my brain. Like I'm like, wow, I was really friendly with that person. And later on, I'm like, wow, I don't really like how that went. Looking back, but you can't, you know, I mean, you can only do what you do at the time and how it goes at the time and how you're feeling at the time. And I think like over years and years and years, it's easier to go easier on yourself about the fuck comes when it comes to stuff like that, because it's just so it's able to control other people's actions. And I think I think my opinion on it actually has dramatically changed in the last few years. I used to think about it where like, to be honest, there was some people that you you've had on does I don't need to name names or anything like that, because that's irrelevant where I was like, oh, that person, oh no. But then over time, I think I thought about it and like, I actually think to let people really judge someone, it's really hard to bullshit for two or three hours. Yeah, like your interviews are pretty long. And like you give pretty open ended questions and you let people talk, you know, and when you talk, that gives the public a chance to see, do I vibe with this person? Do I like what they have to say? Do I get a sense of who they are? And in some cases, people can't talk the talk. Yeah, I remember it. Yeah. And so that and so that allows and I'm not, you know, good or bad or whatever. And so it just it just allows like, because our our our scene is full of characters, you know, there's definitely reasons why people like to be isolated and growing weed and not dealing with humans. Yeah. And you have to have a certain risk profile and people get into cannabis for all kinds of reasons. Sure. You know. And so yeah, like you give nice long interviews and you let people speak, you know. I'll say this, I was one of the people that gave you I think this is the first time we butted heads was during and I'll say it be the sub cool interview, I was super pissed at the time. And I've told you recently, like looking back on that, because Monty's no longer with us. Like I am so glad you didn't listen to any of us because because regardless of whether me and him got along or what happened, none of that matters because he did work. It was it was important. It was in a lot of people's gardens and those those stories need to be there. We need to whether they're accurate or not or whether you know, he was right or not. It doesn't really matter. We need to have those stories regardless. And he was a major part of the scene for a long time. So I had a choice on that. Yeah, he did. And I was pissed at the time. But I mean, because there's your shit. Yeah, I just wanted to, you know, I like now it's like even if even if it's not somebody I prefer, like I like to hear what they have to say. Sure. You know, because I'm always curious about people's perspectives. You know, and you know, and then there's an also thing where like, there's this huge there's this huge gig to like, you know, when you were saying before, it's like there's a lot of people that come on to be diplomatic. You know, there's a lot of people that are coming on that are trying to project an image. And so it's probably really relaxing for you sometimes when you get somebody on and you just get a sense, oh, this person's just being themselves. Yeah, hugely. And it's I don't want to say it's rare, but I can understand like I do it myself, you know, sometimes you've got your own personal thoughts and then you've got more public thoughts, you're happy to put out there, but it is super refreshing when someone's very up front and to sort of reference the the the Monty interview you talked about, Matt, that was actually a very interesting moment for me because I didn't actually I knew there'd be some people unhappy with it, but I didn't anticipate it would be to that level. And I remember old CSI left a comment and it's not like over a hundred likes. I think a whole crew probably said something. Yeah, it was it was yeah, I've never seen anything like that. And it was like to the effect of like this ain't it buddy. And yeah, I guess, you know, sort of a related point I've been thinking about recently is that, you know, it's it's it's kind of scary to think that three of the people I've had on the show have passed away now. Yeah, you know, being Monty, Bogg, and Jaime Chiba. Oh, yeah. I forgot about I forgot about too. Yeah. Yeah. And so sometimes you lose sight of the fact that like, um, yeah, some of these guys are a bit older and like, you know, as you said, for better or worse, it is good to get their perspective on some things. And sometimes it's tough if you're feeling like some of the things they're saying might not be a hundred percent true. But if nothing else, you know, it's I am grateful that I got to speak to sub. And interestingly, you know, I never put this out there, but it but like from a technical level, it was a very interesting interview. You know, some sub got a bit mad at me throughout it and actually hung up the call at one point. And then I think his friend told him that that probably wasn't a good PR move. And he pulled me back and said that there was internet issues. But but like, it was it was good to get his take. And you know, I obviously, you know, don't want to speak negative. Because, you know, I think we all can sort of look at the last few years of sub's life and draw our own conclusions. But sure sub cool definitely was the person who got me into growing organically with super soil. I don't think super soil is the best nowadays, but it was a great stepping stone for someone who just never done organics. Yeah. So so yeah, for that reason, I had a bit of a personal like thing with sub because I was like, you're the dude who got me in him. And actually, you know, it was the Rev, him and the Rev. So I listened to your episode the other day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Rev he was he was great. And I tried TLO. And I had pretty decent success with it. And then I tried super soil. And I had pretty good success with that. And then I ultimately just moved on to sort of the more general no till, you know, it's it's such a mindful these days. But like, yeah, I felt an obligation to sub for that reason, because he yeah, he showed me the organics. You know, anybody who came in during my era, like 2006 to, you know, all the way up to 2013, like even me, like some people that I entered in seeing it was DNA. But once you got past like the DNA greenhouse, like, you know, Spanish bait and switchers, you get into the Americans. Sub was at the top of the game then, you know, like all of us got into that, even I was inspired by him young. I have his first book bank, you know, like I still have it. So it was it was an odd fall. It was an odd fall out when we when we had our fall out because I did respect him and I did look up to him at the time. And it was just like, I was I was his antithesis, I guess, you know, sometimes what I've learned is I've gotten older. Sometimes just do people's energies just don't match. It doesn't have to be a hate person or I hate that dude or anything. It's just sometimes energy just don't jive, you know, and that's definitely what it was a slight digression, but we're connected. When I first started going over to Amsterdam in the mid 90s and buying seeds, right? And after I'd been there a number of times, I started getting introduced to people. Okay. And what I realized was that everyone had their own version of history. Some of these old timers didn't like each other and there was significant beefs. And it was really illuminating compared to today because, you know, Matt and I talk about all the time how you can pick any hero from Neville to Shanti to art to all these different folks. And you can kind of tear them apart if you want, right? And so people have their favorites or whatever. But there's a difference between like lasting contributions to the scene. And, you know, and being a good person and someone you get along with and someone who you agree with their decisions. Yeah. You know, those two things are totally different. You could make lasting contributions to the cannabis sea game and to clones and to the gene pool and to the knowledge. And you could kind of have a variety of, you know, personality quirks that aren't that cool. Yeah. Those things exist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hugely. And I think it's only as I get more deep into knowing people, do you realize how deep some of those divides actually run? And something that's always lasted with me is sort of this quote, which was, you know, I can't tell you who said it, but it was like, you know, considering we all smoke this plant that chills you out, there's a lot of aggressive, unhappy people in our community. I always thought that was interesting, you know, because it's, you know, maybe it's like that with every ultra, you know, maybe in like the 0.01% of the craft brewing community, maybe it's like that too. I don't know. But like, it is an interesting point. I think, you know, some of it is because we come from a subculture of like the cowboy attitude of just like, fuck it, we're here, bring what you brought. Like it's different now. There's obviously a big culture clash going on. We have the dudes who are isolated, like to stick to themselves, move weight. We don't want to deal with tax stuff or anything like that. We don't want to deal with the normal business shit. It's why we're doing what we're doing. So we don't have to do that kind of work. And now we're merging with the realistic climate of legalization. And it is a hard clash of personalities. Plus we have two different generations, maybe even three or four in some cases, apart, trying to work together or not work together, but it co-exist in the same sphere. And it's definitely going to cause some strife. I'd love to know how you've navigated that when you're doing a lot of these interviews. When you hear something that maybe you don't love so much, and you want to push back, but what is that dividing line for you? Yeah, great question and brings us to something I definitely wanted to touch on with the audience. If it's okay with you, maybe I could chat a little bit about our falling out and how that sort of guided my view on the question you just asked. Yeah, it goes with what we were talking about, the heavy beefs, everything. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, of course. And I can completely appreciate that there may be some people listening to this right now going, why is this guy on here? I'm not a fan of him. And I can understand why you would have that view. So I guess the first thing I would just say is we had a falling out probably about two years ago, and I want to take 100% responsibility for that. And the first thing I would say is that I never wanted to really discuss this publicly until I was able to do it with you because I just didn't feel it was appropriate. And so I just sort of wanted to do it with your permission so to speak. So I think historically I always viewed the interviews as like my goal is to get the guests comfortable enough that they share their inner monologue, and then you listen to it and then you decide. So what that would mean is sometimes people would say things that I didn't agree with or that I didn't like. But if I push back in the past, they would get cagey, they would close up. And I sort of didn't know how to handle that at the time. And as a result, I just felt like it was better to just try to keep them comfortable, keep them happy, let them express their inner monologue. If they say something that's really weird, hopefully the listener picks up on that that was really weird. And we sort of go from there. So sometime about two years ago, I had Gage Green on the show. And I asked them specifically, in one of our prior episodes, we'd spoken about the Colombian black from Jojo Rizzo. And I said, oh, I know that you and Matt both had those seeds. He has said something to the effect of you guys put them out cheap just to, you know, sort of get it out there so it wasn't valuable, you know, what's your take on that. And they initially started out by giving this sort of long winded answer about how largely they try not to focus on the negatives in their life. And it was sort of a diplomatic answer at first. And I was sort of thinking, okay, this isn't too bad. And then at the end, he just went off really left of field and essentially made an extremely inappropriate comment relating to you and your childhood. And honestly, in the moment, I was taken back. And I thought to myself, this guy's a scumbag. And it's crazy, he just said that. And in the moment, I tried to voice some opposition to that. And looking back, I wish I'd given a much stronger rebuttal. I believe I said something to the effect of, I can agree with most of what you just said. But I want to acknowledge that it actually, it wasn't a strong enough response on my part to what he said. And more importantly, I just, I didn't, I thought that people would listen to that moment and basically go, this guy's a scumbag. You know what I mean? And I also thought that largely speaking, you and him had had conflicts in the past. And it was sort of just two people flinging insults at each other. However, as time went by, I realized I had made not only a grave mistake, but one that I was deeply apologetic and sorry about. And I think the reality is the simple truth is that there's no place for comments like that on a cannabis podcast. It's just, it's just not appropriate. And so I definitely want to take responsibility for that going to air. I think that, you know, as the editor of the show, the buck stops with me. So even if I didn't say the comments myself, I have a responsibility because they went to air. And that's under my sort of leadership, so to speak. And I was actually really grateful because it was actually Not So Dog who messaged me and he let me know some info that allowed me to sort of reflect on the situation and realize just how inappropriate it was that those comments had gone to air. And I specifically wanted to say, you know, thanks Not So Dog, because I always have felt grateful in the manner in which you approached me. It was very humanistic. It wasn't like coming in hardcore, like you're a fuckhead. It was like, Hey, just want you to know, it would be cool. You know, and I've always been very grateful for that response. And I thought it was very telling of you as a person that even though, you know, I'd essentially done something bad, so to speak to your buddy, you were still, you know, kind enough to come in and give me the sort of that gentle influence. So that I was very grateful for. So since that time, I have been applying a much more active level of moderation to the show. And this is sort of getting to the crux of your original question, which is that I realized that there just is some things that get said that you have to give pushback to because the reality is there's going to be some listeners who just don't find what the guest has said to be acceptable or like maybe it's like insulting to them. And so you need to provide some amount of feedback. So these days, I tried to I try to provide some degree of feedback. So if someone says something I don't like, I'll try to come in and say, yeah, but like, what about this angle? It doesn't seem like you're considering that. And I try to give some degree of feedback. But I also apply like a sort of more active level of moderation in that in the past, I literally would not take anything out the guest said unless they asked for it to be taken out. Sure. Whereas nowadays, there may be some things I'm like, you know what, we're just we're a bit off topic here, maybe not appropriate or relevant. And so you get rid of it. I think overall, it's definitely a continual learning process. And, you know, again, I sincerely apologize for any, you know, harm or distress that that caused and I take full responsibility. And I view it as a very big learning experience in my life, one that I'm not proud of, but I'm glad that I hopefully have, you know, grown as a person and can recognize that that wasn't right. And I'm not going to make that mistake again. I'm not going to let you eat grow totally because you did try to reach out to me and I just totally blew it off. And I think, you know, it took me a long time over over because I can hold the grudge of people that know me and have known me over years and know that I can hold a fucking grudge like no one's business. But there were certain things about that that I took very personal, but it wasn't necessarily from you. It was from it was because the dude knew me personally and had personal info about me. And the thing was that not everybody listening knew that because it could have just sounded like a fucking mean slander at the time, you know. But yeah, so it took me a long time. But when we finally spoke, I was very glad because it was, you know, it was heavy on me. We were friends. Like I had you out to our Cannaluminati party because I liked you, you know, so I'm stoked that we moved past it. But I was mainly asking you because I am learning that process now myself, you know, like you had the podcast. We started this way after and I'm slowly learning like, okay, there's going to be people that like I might have to edit what they can say. Like I don't know where to draw this line. And I don't know like, is it is it different between each person? Like do you just try to draw a line based on that person and how accepting they are certain? It's hard, man. It's hard. And I've come to appreciate what you've put together a lot more, a lot more being on the other side. And so you know, I appreciate the apology, but I apologize as well because, you know, you were reaching out, you were trying to communicate and I didn't communicate back and really that's all it took. So it's always the shining star trying to like be cool with everyone. And I, you know, I appreciate that. I do think it was very effective for a lot of people at showing them exactly the kind of person that Gage Green was. Yeah, you know, I never asked you to take it down to us. So there's that. I mean, it obviously sucks, you know, in that regard. But I mean, it, you know, as far as like me reaching out to you or whatever, like, I mean, Matt knows this very well. Like one of the reasons why I'm even public is I'm trying to build community and culture, you know, as sort of like a bulwark against all the changes that are coming. And so like I try to like in on IG and all that, like, you know, when you mentioned about like not just like flaming you or something like that, like, there's a lot of there's a lot of of that kind of like, like snippy back and forth thing that goes on in public. And I don't think that's like particularly, you know, conducive to anything positive. So, you know, I always try like, you know, to reach out and see if there's like common ground or to like show someone your point of view, and maybe you can bring them along. And I always try to be open to that as well. You know, because to me, like being a good person doesn't mean you don't make mistakes or fuck up. It just means that you try to learn from it and you try to, you know, make amends when you do and you like being a good person is a work in progress. And you know, and that kind of and and so it's not like you never make mistakes. So you never look back and be like, Oh man, I wish I would have handled that differently. Because that's asking for perfection, which is far different, you know? Yeah. And I don't think you ever did anything out of a viciousness. That was a whole another thing to it was like, there's never anything mean like you didn't do it to be mean to me ever. And I always appreciated that even when I was fucking mean, you're never fucking mean back. So I appreciate that dude. Because I feel pretty goddamn mean. Look, in all honesty, I think during that time period where we weren't chatting, I just tried to appreciate that anything you said, the feelings were essentially warranted. And I couldn't I couldn't deny, you know, that this person is understandably probably not happy with me. And I think that was part of the learning process. And to speak to not so dog's point. I definitely am a big advocate. And I try to tell everyone that you know, that like before you go and rip someone's head off, drop them a line. And because one thing I know for sure having had a bit of experience in like sort of the mental health field, I've realized that there's a very common saying you hear in that, which is like, always assume ignorance before like maliciousness, which is like chances are when someone does something to piss you off, they probably didn't think about it hard enough to wreck, you know what I mean? It probably wasn't like any. And I've certainly learned a lot from that. And that's not to try to, you know, take any onus of what happened. I definitely can resonate with that that sentiment that you know, I think our community would be a much more hospitable and friendly place. If everyone just sort of tried to yeah, exactly what not so dog said, you know, just message someone in private, you know, chances are they'll respond positively and say, Hey, thanks for letting me know. I'm sorry about that. How can we make it better? You know what I mean? Like generally speaking, I've had that response from people. Yeah, you know, and I hadn't, I had just completely blacked it out. You know, after that, I was just like, I'm not going to deal with it, not going to deal with it. And then Tom Hill episode happened. I was like, wow, this is a good episode. He knocked it out of the park. So, you know, I mean, I finally got to hear how much you've grown. And if listened to several other episodes since, and I'm really proud of you, man, how far you've come. It's pretty exceptional. And the Tom Hill one was a massive get and a huge, I think a huge achievement for the whole community, because nobody really ever talked to him for a long time and had him put all that down on record. And you asked him some of the most amazing questions that anybody could have asked him. So, mad props on that. If anybody hasn't listened to it yet, go check it out. You're too kind. Honestly, if any episode strikes you as particularly good, it's because of the guests, not me. So, you know, all props to Tom for everything he's done in the scene and for being willing to share that knowledge. And more importantly, I've been very adamant about this from the start. I wholeheartedly believed that, you know, you guys will be able to coax a whole different library of information out, because you can probably relate to this, right? When you're doing an interview often, you know, they say something and you're like, oh, that's interesting. Let's follow that trail of thought. And like you forget to ask something else. So, like, I think that there's so much stuff that we didn't get out of Tom that we do need to get out. And I think that it's going to come out when you guys go and visit him. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord. I will, I will disagree with you a little bit there in the sense that I think you're being too humble and that interviewing people, I think, and talking publicly is a skill. Yeah. You know, and I definitely think that, you know, you do something more and more and more, you probably learn what questions to ask. You know, you probably got better at researching your subjects and trying to think of good questions that your listeners might want to know. You know, I mean, I personally, when we started doing the podcast, I started listening for all the weird verbal ticks that I had that I didn't realize because you don't realize you have them in normal conversation and you listen to yourself and you're like, oh, man, I need to get rid of that. Yeah. Right. And so talking, talking in public is hard. Even if it's pre-recorded or whatever else, it's like, it's definitely a skill and being entertaining, you know? It's not even that. Like with cannabis, there's so much, like especially, I mean, you can interview a lot of people in cannabis that make seeds. And it's, even if you have no knowledge about breeding, it doesn't really matter because odds are either. Well, going into interviews, someone like Tom Hill is a whole nother, a whole nother aspect because he's going to tell you're fucking stupid if you ask him a stupid question that makes no sense. So yeah, no, I mean, there is, there is, you know, it's guests are great and all that, but there is a big part of it. If you don't know shit and you get the wrong guess, that can be really catastrophic. And that's one of those guests that could have gone really catastrophic. You didn't know your shit because he will call you ass out. So I'm proud of you for that one, dude. It came out good. It came out good. And you remember to ask about the chemist and stuff like that. So thank you. Thank you. In all honesty. Yeah, Tom, Tom's a great guy who let you know when you're wrong, which is a good trait. I enjoyed our chats with him. And, you know, he's a, he's a cool guy. I'm glad that we're able to get that some of that info out from him. And, and hopefully at some point someone can touch base with the chemist, right? That would be really cool. Yeah. Well, there is, there is a chance that, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't live too far from me. Yeah, he lives, he lives, you know, he never mentioned exactly where he lived on your show. But he lives probably like on one of the most famous roads in Mendocino for cannabis growing. I would literally call where he lives sort of like the beating heart of, of the, of the Emerald Triangle. And he's lived there since the 80s. So you could literally like, I actually thought you did a good enough job on a lot of the genetic stuff. I was like, man, maybe we'll just talk about life in Mendo and growing up like in a, in a subculture. Because like I live in a bubble, but where he lives, that's like a bubble within a bubble within a bubble. It is, it really is like I, it, people don't know how much that little, that area that he lives in and what kind of world he comes out. So the chemist is supposedly his neighbor. So maybe if I end up going up there and chatting with him in person, which he says he prefers like who knows. But there are a lot of old time breeders up here. And that's, that's one of the interesting things is because, you know, you, you have a tendency, which is very obvious, like to interview people that are currently selling seeds, right? Like to be like a commercial seed seller, right? Because those are the people that get their name out there. But a lot of those people got their start from people that have never been commercial seed sellers, right? They took a bunch of that work, even when you talk to Tom, he was like, you know, most of Tom's most famous stuff is the stuff that he liked the best from the chemist stash. And he just improved with the exception of the haze, you know, but the rest of it was pretty much just stuff that was, he got from older people in the neighborhood. Yeah. You know, and I think that's a big thing that a lot of people miss where a lot of people think current breeders kind of come out of nowhere and they created all this stuff themselves. But they all had a starting material as well. And a lot of times that we all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and we just popularized certain things, you know? Yeah. I was just going to say something I've certainly learned which resonates with that is that as time goes by, you realize a lot of the people with the big reps, it may have been just because they were particularly vocal or loud, you know what I mean? Like, a lot of the people you're referencing, they just, they weren't putting it out there, you know? Yeah. I mean, I will say that the skill set required to survive in cannabis during the prohibition era was very different than like the show my face, you know, burner publicity. This is who I am. This is putting your name on a strain. Yeah. You know, was crazy. Like trying wanting to know people people to know who you were and that you were responsible or associated with this. And so in America, a lot of people that didn't actually create the strain just became associated with it because they were the first people to become famous around it. Yeah. You know, and a lot of people got scared and like, you know, you know, hide in the shadows, you know, for a variety of reasons. Unlike the king of cannabis, we saw Matt hold up just too long ago. Where is he? Where's our guy? Did you see that they put out the, like, you know, cookies is opening their own seed bank? Oh, you did. You see greenhouse seeds in the tag? Like, yeah. What's he going to add? Like, I really, I genuinely want to know what's going to be on the menu that's his contribution. Well, you know, I think like, Ariane is the prototype burner for in the Netherlands. So I'm sure burner could learn a lot from him when it comes to seed banking. I mean, for one thing, cookies opened up a smoking lounge, I believe, in one of greenhouse's coffee shops in Amsterdam. Oh boy. And so the collab, the collab, if you will, started early. And, you know, Arjun, for all, all of you could, there was a, and it's going on in America now. There was two camps in Amsterdam. And one of them was sort of like the weed history and the weed nerd camp. And the other camp was like straight businessmen who were looking to market and, and, and, and make a lot of money. And Arjun was extremely successful at the second. He was in, he is an extremely successful businessman. He's probably the wealthiest dude in cannabis. That's what I mean. I mean, he can teach burner how to go get Spanish seeds who to everyone to introduce him to, you no longer have to use these frontmen, like, you know, whoever they're using that for the smaller companies that are repping cookie stuff, you can just buy direct from the Spaniards. And here's the, I'm sure they have a beautiful business. I bet I bet Arjun's angle is that for 25 years, his town was the center of the cannabis seed universe. And it's shifted to California. So probably greenhouse getting promoted by cookie in California will probably drive sales. Oh, I'm sure. And I'm sure their sales are far, far down from what they used to be when they were the primary place you went to get seeds. Sure. And you know, the attitude is popping up in the U S now, right? You know, who's running that? I mean, I, uh, yeah, I, I, uh, greenhouse probably greenhouse coffee shop is probably the prototype cookie. Yeah. And look, something that sort of jumps to mind when we're talking about this is that I did want to try to slip it in at some point in our chat is that I, uh, I really wanted to encourage people to consider their own personal weaknesses and, and try to address that. So as we've been talking, right? Like we just said, you know, Arianna and burner, both great businessmen. And we all know that there's a lot of great cannabis, um, people in our community who are maybe good at cultivating, but not so good at the business side or maybe vice versa. And I think that one of the ways we can stop everything going to shit longterm is through, yeah, trying to encourage people who are like the heads, the, you know, the guys who we align ourselves with to try to get a bit more business savvy, you know, it's always beneficial to try to improve your deficits. And this is something I'm learning myself all the time is that, you know, it's easy to assume that like, you know, yeah, I'll start a company and like, I don't, I can just do it. You know, you just make a website and you just, you know what I mean? And then when you start to really get into the business world a bit more, you realize like, Hey, you know, I was actually selling those guys short. They've got a whole unique skill set that I don't have at the moment. And it's probably beneficial if I try to cultivate some of those skills myself. So highly encourage people to like be self-reflective and consider your own personal weaknesses in terms of, you know, are you just limiting yourself to one thing and, and, you know, listen to some audio books, look at people who are doing it successfully, like what we've just said, you know, plenty of people have walked this path before us and they can show you maybe some of the areas you could do things better in. And that's certainly where I'm at in my life now is trying to recognize all of the areas where I might be a little deficit compared to others and trying to become a more well-rounded person because I think there's only advantages to that. Sure. So here's a good spot for this. When you, when you got into the idea of wanting to start making seeds and see your own creations and, and see all this stuff, you obviously were working with, you know, what you're working with at the time based on your, your education level. How has that changed now? Like what, what, where are you at in your, your seed career now as far as what you're working with, what direction do you want to go and how has it changed from where it started? Yeah, that's actually a brilliant question because I think the answer is going to be a little counterintuitive. When I first started making seeds, so this is actually before I started the podcast or anything. I was just, you know, some dude in Australia just making seeds for him and his friends. And at the time, I had already completed my undergraduate degree. I had a dual major, one in organic chemistry, the other in molecular biology and genetics. So I actually have a degree in genetics. One of the few people making seeds that do. But what I found was that besides the most basic principles, it actually wasn't that applicable. And I started to realize that I didn't, I didn't actually think it was a real credential after a while because for me, for example, the majority of people who have a degree in genetics or molecular biology, it'll largely be focusing on human biology, like eukaryotic biology, not plant biology. So I think if largely speaking, if you understand the principles of like, you know, Punnett squares and Mendelian genetics, you don't need to go too much further because when you do a degree in this sort of stuff, you then move to humans and you start talking about, you know, proto-onka genes and tumor suppressing genes. And these things just don't exist. Yeah, there is not applicable in botany. Yeah, for sure. Totally. So I came into it thinking, I've got this background, let's see if I can use it. And what I basically found as time went by is that, like, I don't feel like that specifically has made me any better. I think that largely speaking, the things you hear our community commonly talking about are true. I think that empirical observation is like hugely important, just having experience making seeds, looking at different plants. And that's what I try to stress to people in Australia is you're limited by your exposure. I have lots of people who message me in Australia and they say, hey, man, I got this super killer clone. And I'm like, have you ever tried a USA clone only? Because you might and be like, oh, my, my clone is actually not very good compared to this. So, and I say to people, you know, if you're growing your first ever plant and you take a cutting of it, by definition, that's a keeper. Like you got nothing else, right? So yeah, yeah. So as you get more exposure, you get better. So for me, the thing that's helped me specifically is to just have had time making seeds, popping them, just sort of seeing what comes out. But then obviously, there's also the side of it, which is like the podcast and what people say, how does that play into it? I think honestly, as time's gone by more and more, I've become more in line with the sentiment that Bodhi expressed on the show, which is basically that the proof's in the pudding. Don't judge anyone until you've grown their work. And if it's good work, then like, what are you going to criticize? You know, mate, like, I like to think of it as though we've got all these tools. And the reality is, the more of those tools you incorporate into your repertoire, it's probably more likely you'll have success. But at the same time, that's not to say you can't haphazardly make the next cookies, because we can all point to various bag seed that have gone on to become clone onlys, and they take the world by storm. Absolutely. I think, yeah, it's great to have all those tools in your toolkit. But I also think that you shouldn't limit yourself because you don't have a genetics degree or whatever, you know, like, make some seeds, like, do something that you're passionate about, and you'll probably find you get better results. If you're crossing stuff together just because you're like, gel and aid cross, whatever is going to sell well, like you probably won't get too much out of that in terms of like fulfillment or experience, like doing things you're passionate about going through the numbers, and tying it back to what DJ Short said, you know, the real way to tell if a male is good is to pop the seeds and find out, you know, that's the only way, the only way to actually run the project. Yeah. And I think, you know, obviously you can be a good breeder. It's not all like random or anything like that. But I think that people shouldn't like trick themselves into thinking that they can't make something really cool because they don't have a degree in genetics or they don't understand this certain thing. They don't have access to tissue culture cuts. So, yeah, I just would really want to encourage people to get on board because as time goes by, the more I myself encourage the people around me to make seeds, get into it, it's fun. It's what's going to keep you passionate over the long term. And the more people do it with like honesty and passion, the better it'll help combat, you know, stuff which maybe is produced from a more financial point of view. Absolutely. I mean, one comment I'll add to that, other than I basically totally agree with it, is, you know, I talk all the time about there's kind of two sides to breeding. One of it is some like basic information, but then the other is the eye, right? And I kind of look at the eye as like the artistic side of it, where you don't have to have an immense amount of technical knowledge to create something great. You just have to have enough of a sense and enough of the eye and enough of being able to smoke and tell, you know, and also on that, you know, it's like breed what you like. And, you know, the best way to breed in my opinion isn't to grow what you think other people will be hot on. It's more to like be like, here's these two strains, can I get things I like about each one of them in the same thing? Or maybe it'll give me something unexpected, you know? And then on top of that, too, the most important part of weed, the high is invisible, right? So you can't actually see it. You have to test it. And you can't really test it with testing. You have to test it the old fashioned way by consuming and then get feedback on it. And so I like that you came around to that side of things, because, you know, when I went out here in cannabis is becoming legal, you're starting to meet with a bunch of big ag people. And they just can't believe how, you know, I don't even know the term to use. They probably think that the cannabis gene pool is just nuts. Because they're used to growing these strains of vegetables or fruits or whatever that have decades of breeding out of all these universities that they bred them to be extremely like reliable to these certain traits. There's all kinds of IVLs all over the place. And then comes this big, crazy, manic, very poorly documented cannabis gene pool that doesn't do anything they think it's going to do. And they're like, what is that? This is a mess, right? But to us, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful mess. Yeah, you know, but to them they're like, how do I make an IVL out of this? Does the exact same thing in the whole field? And that's what we're about. So it's, it's funny you mentioned that because the Australian legal medical scene is really starting to take off. It's sort of only occurred in the past two, three years, but it's really starting to take off. And I'm really fortunate that I've been able to be involved with a few facilities, be it like consulting or even looking at maybe trying to get some of my genetics into the facilities. And the most crazy thing, which relates to what you just said, is that one of the facilities told me that they had spent millions, like literally $10 million from the moment they started the company until the end of their first year of operation. And it was because they hadn't been able to put out a single successful crop in that first year, and they're paying overheads for this huge facility, whatnot. And it was basically because they said the first six months, we had to teach our growers to grow. And the second six months we had to phenohunt. And it was just mind blowing. It was like, you guys didn't know this is what to expect. Like they didn't, they thought like what you said, they'd pop a seed, it would be the exact plant they wanted. And they were like, oh, you got to hunt through this and then propagate the keeper up and then get a, you know what I mean? It was, it was very eye opening that the big ag who had all this money seemingly had so little insight into the very foundational practicalities of like growing plants. I saw that when I worked at the grapeery and I was doing that big them reversal on hint there. And they, I mean, some of these are some of the best grape growers in California that have been doing it 50 years plus, you know, like growing some of the best most expensive grapes sold in California. And they were shocked. They had no idea what to expect from cannabis. They didn't understand that the lack of sex control that we have over the cannabis plant in the first place, that is totally baffling to them that we can't control the sex very well through environment or spray. I mean, we can reverse it. Sure. But like as far as keeping it female and 100% non-staminate, like they don't understand that because that's the sex sexual stuff isn't as plastic in a lot of their plants that they work with. So yeah, it is a whole different ballpark. It's a weird plant. It's a very weird plant among plants even, you know, it's not just weird from humans to plants, but actually plants to plants. It's a very weird plant. Hugely, hugely. It's a different game down here. And yeah, it's cool to see the medical market opening up in Australia. I would actually love to see like there's no surprisingly no one from America has come over here and like, like just set up something that works because as it stands, all of the Australian producers are not really producing a good quality product. It's all sort of mid-Z. And the only decent herb you can buy is imported from Canada. And so you can already tell that it's not the best of the best, right? Yeah. So yeah, it's very interesting. I hope that someone comes and sets up a facility in Australia and just crushes it. But it's sort of yet to happen. That's wild. I mean, the second Thailand opened up cookies was there. So I'm kind of surprised that Australia just has been a blank spot. I used to have a dream of being wealthy enough to avoid winter. And so I would spend half the year in Australia avoiding winter. And then I used to see these grows posted from Northern Australia by people growing Neville's haze outside. And they actually had a climate that they could grow like these beautiful sativa plants and finish them without getting cold and getting ruined. And so it's I never really did anything serious about it. But I always kind of had this back in my mind. Oh, maybe I could go to Australia one day and grow all these different plants in my backyard that I could never do in NorCal. Yeah, please come on over. So I know the Aussie fans are going to be super bummed if we don't talk about some of the heroes from over there. Yeah, sure. And where do we begin? Where do you want to start with? You have a much better grasp of it, but please. Sure. I mean, I think for a lot of people, the obvious thing would be like wanting to talk about like Neville or Shanti or any of that. But I think in all honesty, I actually I actually listened to your episode talking about some of the old European guys. And I think people should just listen to that if they're interested. Like there was so much information about the seed bank that I just didn't know that I got out of listening to you guys hash that one out. So I don't think we'll touch on them. But I'd love to touch on some people who the international audience may not be quite as familiar with but were like pretty focal people. So I think it might in fact be the people you're referencing not so dog, but there's this crew called the Wizards of Oz and it was made up of two dudes, largely speaking, Wally Duck, who goes online by the name Donald Mallard. He's on ICMAG. He's one of the moderators. He's a very well known dude. And then another guy called Moon unit. And then the third guy you probably familiar with or heard the name of is Kanga Tiva. So oh yeah. Yeah. So those three guys are what I would consider to be like the the dudes who are sort of like me. But a few years ago where it was like a sort of notable guy you could point to from the Australian scene. And largely speaking, there hasn't been too many others. But what they did that I love was not only were they growing like cool Thai stuff and the mum bim bim and all that. But they were actually working on trying to make some unique hybrid. So Donald Mallard is the guy who brought the duck's foot to the scene. And that's how he got that name. And I've done an interview with him. It's a sort of interesting story how it came about. But he sort of it's not too dissimilar to ABC. In fact, he just sort of got it given to him. And he was like, wow, this is a real mutant plant. And it sort of went from there. But they they're notable for doing the Z 99 hybrid. So that's a cross of zoid fuel and an F four C 99 from the original heavens stairway stop. So what was interesting about that was that the zoid fuel is a super interesting strain. It's made by moon unit on his own. And he basically did what Neville said he could never do, which was he spun together three land races to make something that is like very representative or akin to modern cannabis. He basically took a Chinese Yuan, a PNG gold, and an Australian heirloom sativa. So probably like an acclimatized tie. He spun those together to make something which to me looks very similar to like an amnesia haze or something like that. Except the high is like 100% anxiety from that PNG gold. You know, while he when he was a homie, he told me that was like the whitewell, the PNG gold. Yeah. Yeah, you know what? I've got a buddy who reckons he might have some I'll send it over because he wants me to send some stuff to the state. So we might look into doing that because I'd love to see people grow it out. It's going to be a big plant, man. Let's do a group project on it between the two podcast. Right. I will say that 100% anxiety isn't my favorite buzz. Not mine either, but it's one that everybody faces and it usually ends in hallucinating. It exists in weed and it is strange sometimes what different strains give people anxiety and others relaxism. I find that very interesting. But yeah, the 100% anxiety crawl out of your chair. That's always an interesting description. Did you ever run into smoke and moose much in your in your research in the Australian stuff? I know the name. I do remember the name from ICMAG. Did you have much history with him? Yeah. He was on Mr. Nice forums. He was friends with me, Wally and Moon unit. And he was one of the guys that a lot of us like looked up to as an elder in the scene. But I don't know much more about like his actual history in Australia, but I know him and Tony Mulloway and a few others are real big out there. Yeah. Do you have much info on Tony? Yeah, he's still doing his thing. He's been providing like, so I've met him, I think two or three times over the past few years just haphazardly, not at like events just randomly bumping into him. He's a big dude in the underground medical scene in the sense that he would give medicine to really sick people before you could really get it. So yeah, he's definitely like an OG in terms of having provided a lot of like RSO type medicine for people who are really sick over the past 20 or so years. Yeah. And he definitely gives out a lot of seed that he says, you know, if you grow this and you want to make RSO, it's going to be good genetics. I'm actually not familiar with what the genetics he gives out, but he's definitely a known dude. He hasn't got online, unfortunately. There's a few guys like that. Yeah. And he's more of like a local legend in like Nimbin, that sort of thing. Yeah. Nimbin's a bit, is that like your Humboldt out there? It is and it isn't. So the Australian scene is very interesting because there's a huge divide between the old guard and the sort of younger generation. The old guys largely speaking, they like smoking, but they're also equally driven by financial motivation. So like things have to yield well, those sort of factors. Yeah. The younger generation is more indoor, cookies, hype, that sort of thing. So in Nimbin, you can get lots of outdoor stuff. It'll be sort of Thai-esque. It's not, unfortunately, it's not like the Thai you would hope you would get, where if I said, oh, hey, I found some Thai and you'd be like, oh, shit, are we about to have like a once in a lifetime experience? Yeah. Unfortunately, it's not that. Yeah. But it's just like what we would call Australian bushweed. Yeah, the acclimatized Thai. Yeah, exactly. It's going to get huge. The high is not as unique, but the yield's good. It's generally uplifting. And it's generally grown by guys who only ever had exposure to Sativa in their life. Like they wouldn't have got Indica until like, you know, probably the mid 90s. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like even way after California sort of thing, when it was just super commercially available, that was when they would have got it. So a lot of those guys are just like die-hard Sativa dudes. So you can definitely get that at Nimbun. These days, if someone came to me and said, how can I get good weed in Australia? Or like they were like, I want to come to Australia for a holiday. I just want to make sure I got like some good weed when I get there. Yeah. I would say it's actually very easy to just find a good grower on Instagram from Australia and just be like, can I buy a bag? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What a different world, dude. What a fucking different world. Let me interject something before I forget. So one of the things I was thinking of when you were talking about the differences in, you know, in Indica, in America versus there, is, you know, because I bet most of our listeners don't know, like in a place like Nimbun or different places like that that had some weed culture, how intense was the police pressure in that area? Because really what I think what started the huge wave of outdoor Sativa to Indica in California was helicopters. Before the helicopters, it was all Sativa. And then as police pressure became incredibly intense, they wanted bigger yielding, thicker, and most importantly, earlier stuff. But I don't know if that would have happened without that outside pressure, you know? So if you're a bush grower, as you were talking about, what's it like for those people? Yeah. Great question. I think there are some people who could tell you they've had to battle with helicopters, but I don't think it was on the scale of like camp and some of those notable campaigns in California. I think that largely speaking, a lot of those outdoor growers, if I had to go out on a limb, I'd say their primary consideration is yield. And so I think the acclimatized ties always just sort of out yielded everything, honestly, because if you're like where Wally Duck is, which is like the northern part of Australia, you're basically out the equator and stuff will flower all year round. And so it was sort of hard to compare yields if you've got like a tie that goes for 21 weeks, and it's just growing that whole time. And that's where you'd see those crazy photos of Kanga Tiva post in the Mullum Madness. I'll never forget them. Never. Old Mother Sativa? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Old Mother Sativa is a good one. And yeah, it's interesting. There are definitely some guys outside who grow Indakers. And I suspect that they would have had luck with that. But I think that like a lot of people who I speak to are interested in like sort of what Wally Duck has to offer, which is like, I've got this Z99 hybrid. So like the C99 tames the anxiety of the Zoid fuels, because they didn't want to get rid of the Sativa edge. They still wanted it to be like an uplifting effect, but not so like shit yourself. So the Z99 is sort of what you're alluding to not so dog. It's that shorter plant, but it's still got that Sativa high that they used to because they grew up smoking tie. So I think that was sort of the middle ground. And I think that is in fact why they made the Z99 because it was like, Hey, this is like an indoor friendly, really uplifting Sativa strain that is just a little bit more versatile. I want to modernize Australia and start pushing Appalachia over there. It's like to me, to me, it's like the like what C99 kind of always pushed for an early flowering, something that had that really nice almost what people would typify as a Sativa type high, and but fast flowering, good density, all the looks, but just lacking a lot of the paranoia, but still with the potency, you know, I'd love to get that over there. I'm always fascinated by things in breeding that occur because of where you're at, not necessarily what you're after. And so I think like for people like Sam Skunkman or something like that or Rob Clark or whoever, like breeding Colombians in California in the 70s, they probably would have stuck with them, but they wouldn't finish. So then they're like, Oh, I'll add this Mexican that's a little faster. And then, Oh, this is a little faster. Oh, then I'll add in this Indica that's a little faster. Now I have Skunk one type of thing. And, and, you know, in Australia, like, you know, it, like I said, like I can't, I can't grow a 20 week in the Emerald Triangle, you can't grow a 2022 week strain, unless you light depth it starting months earlier, it just won't finish, it gets too cold, the sun goes away, sometimes it rains, sometimes it freezes, it just doesn't have the weather. And, you know, so without with, with, with tropical weather and no police pressure, like California might be a vast Sativa land still. Yeah, because, you know, it's interesting how those things shift. And it sounds like Australia didn't have the same intense pressures to shift. Yeah, well, I guess like the one thing I could say in relation to that point is I think another reason why the like the old mother Sativa and those things fared so well was because for the longest time, people weren't growing indoors. So you were really limited by the conditions outdoors. And if you're up like north, like where Wally is, dude, the humidity and the temperatures are off the chart year round. And so I think that lended itself to why they just kept growing the tie for so long because it would never mold, even though the humidity is like 80 plus percent all year round. And during summer, the heat can get pretty, I mean, this is the funny thing. Historically, people are like, Australia gets hot. The hottest it gets in California is the same as here. It's just maybe we get a few more days of that heat. It's not particularly more. But yeah, just endless weeks of heat and humidity, I think the tie lends itself to that. Yeah, I could see that. I don't think people from America realize how different the climate is from say like Sydney and Adelaide and those places down there up through Byron Bay and Nimbun and then up into like the tropical north. And then you have this vast hot, dry desert in the middle that's very uncomfortable. And then you get over to like, you know, I don't even know what the weather is like in Perth or like that kind of like isolated part of Australia. But yeah, it's essentially northern Australia is tropical, right? Yeah, that continent is massive. So yeah, it's it's got a quite a diverse climate. Yeah, so there's a guy in Australia, he's an American dude, he's from Oregon, his name is Steve Solomon. He is one of the guys who sort of taught Koot. And then like so he was like one of Koot's gurus. Anyway, he moved to Tasmania because the climate is the exact same as Oregon. So if you look at Tasmania and start going up, so like, you know, you'd say Melbourne would be sort of the next thing above Tasmania, which is at the bottom of the continental Australia. That might be somewhat equivalent to like Northern California. So as you go up Australia, you're sort of going down from Oregon. And there is some a degree of overlap in the climates, not not 100%. Obviously, you know, Oregon's like very humid and wet sort of place. And maybe Tasmania is a little less wet, but it's still largely speaking very similar. So you can try to replicate some of the sort of micro climates. But I think Humboldt and Mendocina, you know, they're their own special little egg, I don't know if we have anything like that in Australia. And the only reason I saw recently something that really helped me with that was that it was this map of Australia that made the weather patterns in relationship to places I knew from my from America. Right. And like, you could be like, oh, this area is like this weather and this area is like that weather and this area is. And I think that was like really helpful actually for me to like understand, you know, the climate differences and all that because I do think like maybe down south, you know, where most of the population is probably is more like California. Right. And so you're saying like in, in Tasmania, maybe does the 45th parallel go through Tasmania? I think it's pretty close. Hey, yeah, I think it's, it's very similar. And I know some dudes who do try to grow similar stuff outdoors. Like, I've got a mate who got some Jaeger S1s of Caleb. Yeah. And he did really well. So it's like, okay. I'm sure. I mean, the 45th parallel in America goes through like Portland, Oregon. Right. Yeah. And, and, but obviously it would be the 45th north and you would be the 45th south, you know. Yeah. So, you know, probably like probably for you guys, like northern Australia is probably like something a little bit like Mexico, but more humid. Yeah. And it's funny you mentioned that because I did sort of wonder how did Nimbin become this hotspot of Australia? Because it's not geographically quite in the right spot. It's a little too north. It rains a little too much for it to be like, like a lot of the guys who grow in that Nimbin area, like they're always battling like the first rain of the season and stuff like that. So it is really interesting that it got set up there. I think maybe the reason is that it was the police's priorities were a little less there. But yeah, I'd have to imagine that somewhere down near Melbourne would theoretically be the better spot to have your cannabis mecca of Australia, because it's just colder. The humidity is more manageable. And you just don't have these prolonged hot periods, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the, you know, I, one of the things that when I first read, like for instance, this is going to sound, but DJ Short's book, right, which is an interesting one, but it had some tidbits that always stuck with me was he talked about how in different parts of the world, there's just, there's these cannabis regions that are ideal for certain types of ranges of varieties, right? And it just so happens in America that Humboldt and Mendocino County and some of Lake County and some of Trinity are in this like sweet spot, right? Where the temperature is nice. And like, it's also like remote and hilly and away from authorities. So you could kind of get away with it, you know, and it was dry as well, or at least dry. And, you know, it doesn't rain in the summertime in California very, very frequently. So it's interesting how now that we see legalization going on, you see all this gear being put towards growing cannabis in all these places that aren't very well suited for it, you know? Yeah, it is, you know, there's lots of places that it's not very well suited. And, but a lot of times you grow where you can get away with it. Yeah, you know, right. And so a lot of the most famous cannabis zones in the world are places that A are suitable and B, you could get away with it. You have to have both, you know? Yeah, that's a hugely valid point. I definitely get that. And I have to imagine that there will be some new hotspots coming out of Australia as more time goes by. And you know, it's interesting as you said that you made me realize all of the facilities, largely speaking that I interact with the legal ones, they are down in Victoria. And so I guess they've made the decision that like now it's legal. Like why wouldn't you set up in the place that has the best environment for it, you know? So I guess there's some forethoughts there. There is one or two operations in that far northern rivers, that Nimbun area. And I think they're just having to try to brute force their way through bad conditions with... Yeah, you end up spending more money in order to grow the same kind of cannabis. I mean, one of the interesting things is that when I first started going to Amsterdam in the 90s, almost all indoor technology is like trickle down technology from their professional greenhouses that they have in Holland and in Belgium and in Germany, because their climate sucks, right? So they grow vegetables. Like they'll have like 100,000 lights of cucumbers and tomatoes, right? And almost all of our indoor technology that we have that we use to grow cannabis all descends from that happening, you know? Where Australia or America is the same way, they're both big enough that you can probably grow various crops where the climate just suits it, right? And you know, some places indoor is the only viable thing because the climate sucks. Some places you can grow maybe in a greenhouse, but you'd have to have huge dehumidifiers and lights and all kinds of climate control because you're fighting the weather isn't as ideal as you want. Yeah, it's so interesting you mention that because that's literally all I've been thinking about in regards to Thailand is like it's so humid and hot over there. I don't even know if you could produce high quality outdoor crops. I think you'd have to do it indoor. And like, yeah, I have questions about whether the logical answer for them will just be to try to import it because like it's just so costly to try to overcome this just strangling humidity. Part of the reason I think that part of the reason when you see some of those like Thai sativas and they end up being like wispy calyxes that are just like, you know, a trimmer's nightmare and most people would just want to eliminate because of what modern cannabis is supposed to look like. But it's probably with that level of humidity, that's the kind of buds you need to grow to not have it all rot. Yeah, right. And like the effect is like, I also like the I can't remember who said it, but someone was like, you know, life at the equator, it's sort of a little easier because it's warm than like up north. And so it's interesting how equatorial plants tend to be more like sativa and fun and uplifting. And as you get north or south, you get these more indica varieties that are sort of a bit more medicinal. And maybe it's because life's a bit harder in those environments. I've always been interested in like, so what you're talking about like the environment as well as like how that may be affected the type of high that was selected over thousands of years. That's a huge subject too. And I think that one of the reasons is that, you know, a lot of those sativas were bred for smoking the flower, where all those indicas were bred for harvesting the hash, the trichomes, they were they were resin farmers. And so Americans and Australian others, you know, it's basically, you know, when we started getting those indicas that we started blending them with what we had and smoking them. You know, there there's a there's a funny story that Camara tells about, you know, one of Sam's stories or whatever about trying to get seeds in Afghanistan and he wanted flower to get the seeds. And the warlord or whatever looked at him and was literally like, you know, women and slaves smoke flower. Men smoke hashish, right? And so yeah, you know, like the they're they didn't breed for smoking flower. Yeah, you know, yeah, we did. You know, so it's it's an interesting divide the parts of the world that breed for resin and only smoke hashish and the parts of the world that breed for flower. Very different, very different selection pressure, in my opinion. Hugely. Can I actually take this somewhere a little unexpected because this thoughts need my mind. I want to ask you specifically not so dog. What's your thoughts on Mendo breath? Because it's such a hugely popular strain. And I think largely speaking, the popularity comes from the Mendo perps that's utilized in it. And I'd be interested to know like, do you look at a strain like that knowing it's got Mendo perps in it and that if you actually look at the Mendo flower now, there's a good few characteristics that are actually you could say, oh, that's actually from the Mendo perps like the smell and the flavor specifically. I'll be interested to hear like, do you ever do you get invested? Do you like sort of track it or you just like it's not really my thing anymore? I mean, I, you know, there's, I'm like, you know, I'm super interested in genetics and what passes down and what think and what things breed for, right? And one of the interesting things is because, you know, I'll be I'll be totally honest. I don't think Mendo perps by itself is like an elite complete strain, right? It's THC content and it's high. It's like people that don't smoke weed a lot really, really, really like it. But if you smoke heavy indica all day long, you try to go from like, you know, pure kush or something to a Mendo mom, it's lighter. But it breeds really well and it adds color and it adds all these unique flavors. And I will say that anytime I ever smell anything that I think, Oh, that smells like Mendo perps. I turns out that it has Mendo perps in it, right? And not to say, not to say that Mendo perps has that unique and nothing else does, but there are things that are older that had smell profiles like people hunting for super skunk aromas that have been lost, right? And are either rare or only found in one or two lines these days. And so, you know, I think, I think Mendo breath got popular because I think with IG, IG made everything that was going to be popular. It had to be photogenic. It became very hard in the Instagram era to have ugly weed because you couldn't tell what it smelled like and you couldn't tell what it was high was like, but you could tell what it looked like. And Mendo breath is very pretty. It's thick. It's juicy, huh? I remember when it came out, a lot of the popularity for it was because of the looks and a lot of the looks were OGKB at the time. I think the staying popularity and the reason people used it was because of the Mendo perps, to be honest. There was a lot of other OGKB offerings at the time. Like it was one of the later ones that came out. And one of the last ones from the original era of the OGKB hybrids. And it had some of the best pictures of it, but I think it's staying power in lines was Mendo perps because of the turp content, stuff like that, that adds uniqueness to lines, for sure. That's a good question. Heavy days. One of the things about that, for someone who likes to know lineage and history, is that a lot of breeders like to obscure where they got the sauce that they got to make what they made. And so people, generally speaking, are not super honest about origin stories. It's more rare than you would like because they want to be like, oh, I made this famous thing and it's all my gig. They don't want to be like, oh, I took a piece from here and a piece from there and a piece from there and it blended together and bam, I got lucky, there it is. And maybe they don't even like the person that one of the strains came from, so they don't want to credit that person. And so, but good weed is good weed. And so I do think that Mendo perps is in a lot more things than people give it credit for. It's a shame that Phylos and others were unable to do what they promised, which is reveal family lineages and ancestry genetically like that. But it is in a lot of things and it blends well with a lot of things and it adds color and a lot of turps. We're about to crack the F1 derb whole thing around that right now. And I'm putting my odds on Mendo perps being an F1 derb. I haven't really told them that, but I'm putting my money on it. There's been an aspect of, people ask me sometimes on the lives to talk about the cookie story and I kind of held off because they're such a juggernaut of money and they have these various intentions about being the biggest cannabis thing in America, obviously. So poking around at their story, they don't really care about the truth as much as they care about the PR of developing their brand. They have a massive brand. And so, things that add to that brand are positive, things that take away or whatever, maybe not so much. So the cookie story is a hard one to tell because of that factor. Money gets involved in things and who created what? Who's responsible for what? When you interview them, make them break it down for you. We'll do that. We'll do that. I have to admit the reason why I was curious about the Mendo Purse question was because it's exactly what you guys said. A lot of the work I'm doing now relates to this very special jelly breath clone I found. And largely speaking, it's just a very Mendo breath dominant clone. And so, I've always been very interested in asking you about that because through trying this jelly breath, I'm like, man, this stuff's amazing, but I can tell a lot of it's coming from the Mendo breath and I can tell a lot of that's coming from the Mendo Purse. Yeah, it's interesting. That's cool to hear the backstory and I definitely think that the Mendo breath performed the best out of the OGKBs because a lot of people are going to put up an argument and say, dosy dos better. I just don't think dosy dos better, especially considering jelly breath is a cross of Mendo breath and dosy do. I'm very grateful it came out leaning towards the Mendo breath side, the particular cut that I kept. And the other stuff like grandpa's breath from dungeon vaults, like he's a cool guy. It's cool strain. I just don't think it's quite in that same category as dosy do or Mendo breath. But yeah, it's beautiful stuff, man. And like I've done a BX on it. And I see more of those sort of Mendo phenos coming out where I think they're a little less cookies looking a little more magenta and a bit more cerebral high. It's really enjoyable. Yeah. I wonder how much of the trainwrecks leaking through in that from the crystal locomotive. That's what I always wondered. And I have to imagine that the majority of the Mendo breath flavor you get is just from the Mendo perps because it doesn't strike me to trainwreck at all. I've never tried it. The Mendo breath. I think the trainwreck gives the structure and some of the density and some of the crystal content, visible frost. And I think the color and the perps and the and the Terps and the flavor profiles get dominated by the Mendo. Here's one for you. The original line that was said to be used in the Mendo breath was supposedly Keyplay said he created it. Somewhere in my seat, I have the original pack from Jozo of Mendo perps crystal locomotive. So it did exist prior to Keyplay playing with it. That did exist. And if I have it, that means a lot of people that knew Jojo had it. Wow. So it does still exist. The original mother stock does still exist and is out there of that. Leading back to the Mendo perps crystal locomotive pre blackberry pyre, whatever the age called it for Keyplay. Wow. That's rad. That's super cool, man. Would you ever want to pop them or are you just like, nah. The last time I tried popping some of Jojo stuff was a friend of ours working man gave me some pure crystal locomotive that he had. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to pop these right now. And then I like, right after popping them, it's just screwed everything up. I was just never going to pop these things because every time I do something screws up, but yeah, if you're ever, if you ever want to run through them, I know you like that line. I'll send you out some of that stuff to try. Oh, you're too kind. You're too kind. Maybe I could spend a second or two just talking about some of the stuff I'm doing, but also some of the stuff in Australia because go for it. Yes. Yeah. Like something I'm trying to do is sort of help grow the scene and whether that be like, you know, trying to mentor some up and coming people just, you know, help avoid make the mistakes and pitfalls. I did or just more importantly, trying to help put Australia on the map a little bit and just highlight the thing that I think is the real selling point for Australia is that, and you could say this about many countries. We don't have any USA clone onlys in Australia. No one has successfully brought them over. These days, I actively tell people, don't do it. We don't want the mice, the whole blatant virus. Like you don't want to be the dude who brought that to Australia. Exactly. So what I say is that the selling point is that there's a little bit less of that same sameness about the offerings because everyone has to hunt seeds, find killer mums. And I'm now at the point where I am confident that there are a few cuttings in Australia that could stand up to some of the cuts in the States. Of course, you know, there are some cuts that, you know, the chems, the TKs, like, you know, I'm not talking about that. That's the next level, right? But like a lot of the stuff that's commonly passed around is clone onlys. Like we've got stuff that stands up to that. And the cool part is it's from people, you know, like, you know, there's a, there's a, a Bodie cutting, the chem easy. So that's chem 91 cross to the 88 G 13 hash plant. There's a beautiful cutting of that that goes around Australia. It won one of the smaller cannabis cups one year. So really beautiful stuff. I think it tends to tap a bit more into the hash plant component of the 88 G 13. Yeah. Yeah. It dominates. Yeah. But so you know, what's, what's good about that though, is that the chem 91, and I've talked about this before, but out of anything, you know, my, our buddy CSI is one of the most prolific breeders I know. And he said there's nothing in his collection that passes potency as consistently as the chem 91 cut, which came 91 was in that one. Yeah. Which in the Bodie one, do you know which one was in the Kim Kesey? Is the 91 the real one? Because I remember there was two different releases at the chem 91 G 13 hash plant. And that's why I was asking, I can't remember which one was named which that one had one had the Joe brand cut that was a diesel and one had the skunk VA, the skunk VA. Yeah. So, I mean, I just, so, you know, if it adds potency and the G 13 hash plant is pretty and frosty and dense and more modern looking, you know, in a way than, you know, chem 91 is some like ancient looking, ugly Afghan weed. I don't care. It's legitimately ugly. You know, I mean, I think it's beautiful, but like, you know, it's kind of ugly compared to modern weed. The way it applies, it's its own leaves during stuff like scope the egg and grow it as you grows it beautiful. I have no complaints about the way it's going to eat grows it beautiful, but I could never get it to perform like he does at all. I just could. I mean, Staten Island, he used to joke about like, you know, sometimes some of the best runs that we had with it, every fan leaf would do that and die before harvest. And the bud, the bud would still be beautiful, but it would like, you would just be like, Oh my God, the last two weeks of bloom, it's dying. It's dying. It's getting worse. It's dying. It's eating itself. Oh no. You know, but then it would come on fire. So it's funny you mentioned that because I think most people I know say, Oh, if you want like a real benchmark for the chem 91, like try some from Skunk VA, but I think in his mind, he would say those early Staten Island guy harvest were probably the benchmark for him in a sense, you know what I mean? So it's interesting you mentioned that. What's funny to me about, even though the chems aren't, they weren't named that because they were, they were grown chem. They really do respond well. Like my Staten used to joke. He's like, it really likes GH, you know, it really likes general hydroponics three part, you know, you can try all this organic, this and that and everything else. And it comes out pretty nice. And then you grow it in three part and you're like, Oh my God, it's out of the park. And you know, what's funny about that is he was organic for so long. The reason why we all started calling it dog was because he wouldn't call it chem because he didn't grow chem wheat. He grew organic in dirt weed. So he couldn't call his organic weed chem. So he called it, you know, he called it dog chem dog, you know, and that's, and it's stuck in our little crew in Skunk VA and I see collective and me and Staten Island, I mean, forever until the, until really the forums, it was just dog. Someone gave Joe Brand, according to Joe Brand, his story is that someone gave him shit because they didn't want to give him the real shit and he started passing it and didn't know. That's his, from his point of view, that's how it was. And it sounds like from talking to some of the other guys that maybe it was more intentional because Joe Brand's a little harder to deal with for most people. I like the guy. He's a great guy, no offense from my angle, but like they had some troubles, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some of that stuff, people want history and knowing a decent amount of those people pretty well, I can say that like what's a lot of what's been publicly told is true, but then there's some interplay between various friends and falling in and out of friendships and different things that happened at different times. And some of that has been, I think withheld, you know, but, you know, and people miss, people mislabeling cuts, people going through some bad times in their life maybe and partying a little too hard and letting cuts get out that, you know, and so it never got lost in the crew itself. But there's different individuals at different times that, you know, may or may not have intentionally or not passed out things that ended up being quote unquote, fakes. That's how we ended up with seven chem D's is what he's trying to say. Oh, no, I'm not going to put that in his mouth, but that's what I'm saying. Yeah. No, I mean, you know, Joe Brand, you know, it's Joe Brand's a big partier, you know, there was some chaos and I see collective's life at that point in time. And like, that's where my, that's where my not so dog even came from was him selling a bunch of dog to Staten Island and he couldn't believe what it looked like. And I was like, oh, it's not so dog. And so it's been, it's been lost a few, it's been lost a few times amongst it, but no, but none of the four of us ever all lost it at once. Yeah, let's put it that way. You know, so it's been a furbished. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and honestly too, it's like it took, we all had it for so long before anyone even cared to, you know, to be, to be clear about it too. It's like before the forums and the internet and all that, like it, it wasn't famous. You know, it is back on the, on the tail of like, you know, there are some people who intentionally obscure stuff. There are some people who, you know, whatever, but there are also some people who genuinely are trying to get it right that just can't for whatever reason, because of past stories being muddled. And that's just that. And that's where it's left. And you can only correct what you can at the end, you know, but there, there are people that are genuinely, you know, try to get it right and nail it. And then something comes out where it's like, Oh my God. And it's how they take responsibility for it and how they act with it. Like, you know, at the Kim 91 thing, a lot of us had different Kim 91 cuts at the time and none of us knew. We were all passing them to each other and we all thought it was the same thing, you know, different time. It can be hard. Like you want to be historically accurate, right? Sure. But then you also, because we come from a clan to sign society and like not everyone, you know, it wants to show their face or be associated or have their real name known with it. And so in some cases, you know, you're protecting someone's wishes. And, you know, for the larger point of their life or in another case, you might be glossing over some things that aren't absolutely critical to the history because it might paint them in a bad light or be personally embarrassing or not the greatest, you know, not the greatest time in their life when they were struggling with something or whatever. And so you don't want to just put out gnarly details for the public to consume that might like hurt someone's feelings or something like that. So you're trying to stay as accurate to the story and as and history as you can without it necessarily being a grimy tell-all. Yeah. So let's talk about what you're what you're working on now. Like where it's brought you to now, what interests you now genetically? Yeah, great question. I'd love to delve into that. So historically, I was really, and I'm even still now, but I'll quickly cover the back story on it. But historically, I was working with this strain that I called Raspberry Mama. It's essentially a Phantom Cush F2, which is an offering from Ken's GDP. And it was a cross of pink champagne to Ken's Cush. Ken's Cush is essentially OG cross to Sour. I don't know how they got a mail out of that, but somehow they did. They managed. So yeah, so crossing that OG Sour thing to the pink champagne. And then from that, I bred it to the F2 and tried to just steer it 100% to the pink champagne. Because when I smelt that turb, I was like, man, this is real interesting. What was the pink champagne? Pink champagne is an unknown clone from the NorCal area. It came out largely around the time of about cherry pie. Probably because cherry pie came out at the same time it stole the limelight. It's a very similar plant in the sense that it's a very sort of different turpent profile. Cherry pie in my mind is quite a unique smell. There wasn't too much at that time that smelled like it. And it's got, for me, pink champagne obviously has this sort of champagne component to it. So like this sweet, fizzy, effervescent quality. But there's also like this really nice feminine perfume aspect to it. And I think to me cherry pie is, I would describe it similar, right? Like there's like this perfumy component. And anyway, so I'm working with that. And a few people from like the Bay Area remember it and they're like, oh yeah, I remember pink champagne. That was cool. Anyway, so I'm working with that. It's an F2 and I'm doing my thing, making seeds. At that time I wasn't really putting out much. I was still just, you know, doing my own thing, figuring out the ropes. And I eventually reversed it, made some fems, gave those out and they did okay. But then I had to move and I lost the plant. I didn't have it. The two guys who I had backing it up, they both lost it thinking someone else had it. These were kind of a stuff. And so that was what then stimulated me to move on and start looking at the jelly breath stuff I mentioned. However, about a year ago, a good buddy of mine and another breeder in Australia, his name is Ferrell Genetics. He's a cool dude. He works with like Land Race Tie and crosses it to like Elephant Stomper and stuff like that. Like cool stuff. And he hit me up and he was like, bro, you probably don't remember, but you gave me a pack of the S1s you made. And I hunted through them and I found something that I think you should take a look at. And so I went to his house and it was like the original, the plant I thought I had lost, but it was actually better because the original, it would just stay green. It wouldn't budge, but this one went purple. So I was like, yes, this is like, this is even better. And so I've been working with that more recently because it's come back. And I guess what's interesting is from a genetics point of view, it's like an F2 S1. So that's a bit interesting in itself. And then I recently did some feminized crosses with that. And so that then made the F2 S2. So again, from a genetics point of view, a little bit different to what you might see. I think it's very interesting for, especially like speeding up stabilization. Yeah. Well, what was interesting was the majority of the original S1s did not come out like the mum. So I'm like, all right, the mum is a recessive phenome. Most plants aren't coming out like that. So when this one was the same, I'm like, oh, fuck, that means both recessives have lined up in this one. And you need to self it. Yeah. And it can only possibly pass on the recessive trait, which means theoretically most of the offspring should come out with these sort of traits and not be like the S1s. So yeah, I've definitely been interested by that. And then at the same time, I'm also working the JB clone into a seed line. And what I did was I initially made, so I got this jelly breath clone, and you just may as well think about it as a cookies thing, right? It's just easy. So I crossed that to this strain I got from Duke, which was ChemD. Here's ChemD. I know there's discussion around that, but I'll quickly move on. Here's ChemD crossed the local H. And the local H is sour diesel crossed to diesel slash cuttlefish hash plant. So I remember a cuttlefish. I remember that one. I made S1s of it a long time ago. Oh, actually, it was a black Russian cuttlefish. That's cool, man, because like no one really worked with it, right? No, so sunny and me. Yeah. So yeah, so I crossed this ChemD sour diesel sort of hybrid-y plant to the cookies. And I ended up like there was clear, like I'm not going to take credit for it. There was clearly just something about those two strains, which just really clicked. Yeah. Like it's not me. I'm not taking credit. These two lines were just meant to cross together because I did a 40 female, phenohunt of these seeds. And I found like eight keepers. I was so surprised and I was like, man, I've got to wheel these down to just like two or something. And for the life of me, I ended up just sort of being like, you know what? These plants are different and they really do stand on their own feet. So that's been really cool recently to be really trying actively to disseminate those clones out into Australia. And a lot of people come back to me and say, dude, this is the first thing I grow where I feel like it's on par with California and stuff in terms of like just, it's just the genetics. It's not like me. It's like just how it happens sometimes where like that zipper lines up perfectly and everything just matches. It's just how it works. It's great. Yeah. Totally. So I use that strain, which I call dog jelly. And I cross that and I use that as the initial male stock to then start doing the back cross onto the jelly breath. So I then did the BX one. And that was great. It came out very potent. It fixed up a number of the issues that I had with my jelly breath clone, which was like all cookie strands. It's a little less yielding than you'd like. And a little more prone to mold than you might like because, you know, those little golf ball dense nugs is anyway. Yeah. So it fixed up that. And as a result, I'm now just about finished. I don't know if you can see it. That's my little tent there. I have a bunch of seeded plants in there. It's just the little tent for seeded pollinations. And yeah, I got the BX twos being, they're in the oven, you know, the plants are seeded. They're developing. So that's sort of largely what I'm doing at the moment. And I think it's interesting because it's a pretty stable seed line as far as like a high quality cookies sort of offering. Because in the past, when I bought cookies, hybrids, admittedly probably from some less than reputable breeders, they were all over the place. You know, I could never get like a cookies type plant until I had this jelly breath really. So that's sort of what I'm doing at the moment. But the next cycle I do, because I'm about to head over to the States, come hang out with y'all. And when I get back, I want to do a big sativa hunt. That's where my pattern lies. So keen to do some sativa work. And one of the strains, I'm going to be chucking in there, not super sativa, but I've got a pack of Matt riots for play. Oh, wow. Oh, wow, dude. That so not many people got those. That was the the Fairfax four way cut by the elite guys. That is a special fucking clone, dude. Like I only got to see it express really well once because it definitely had some kind of something. But we never saw it pass to any progeny and dosing. That was a skunky plant, dude. Hempill and those guys are right. That is a very special plant. That's cool. Yeah, man. So I'm excited to do that when I get back, get some some fun stuff in the in the ring. But but other than that, I think the Australian scenes doing really well. We're growing. There's a number of cool breeders popping their heads up. I wouldn't want to do any misjustice, but like some of them that jumped to mind immediately, like, you know, we've already mentioned Wally duck, who's like, you know, a bit of an old legend of the same. But there's some new cool upcoming guys that I'd say check out like my buddy Ferrell, who I mentioned earlier, who does like that land race tie versus modern stuff like a cool sort of clash of the worlds. Another guy who sees I've got recently, Stinky Jones, he's done some cool work. Another guy bootleg. And then another guy finally who I'd give a shout out to is local bird seed. Gotta love that name. I love that name. But yeah, so they're all some cool Australian dudes. If you're interested in just sort of seeing what's going on in Australia, highly recommend you check some of those guys out. Oh, another guy called Easties Treats. Again, I don't want to miss anyone out. I'm sorry if I do it. Yeah, it's hard because like you don't miss anyone. And but yeah, no, I think it's awesome. Get some names out there if you can. But yeah, there's cool stuff going down in Australia. And I think, yeah, largely speaking, you'll see me working the raspberry and the jelly breath stuff. But the one cool little thing I can tell you guys about is when my buddy Ferrell messaged me and said, Hey, you know, I got this S one, you got to come see it. He also said, what do you think the chances are that you had pollen contamination? And I said, I don't think so. The tent was on its own, you know, and he said, I found a male in the S ones. And I was like, okay, I've heard of this, but like probably more likely pollen contamination than because I think Sam said you get like three in a thousand or something like, it depends on how the genetics line up. But yeah, it's usually very small. Yeah. So in the back of my mind, I'm like, it could be that, but it could probably more likely pollen contamination. Anyway, so I've got this male raspberry mama. And so we thought the first thing to do is try to flower it. Like, let's just see. And this thing, like you can't make it flower unless you fully put it into flower. Like I put it in the tiniest pot I could. I made it root bound. I put it under 24 hours of life. I tried my heart to try to stress induce flower. Yeah, would not budge. It's the only plan I have that like basically won't even show you. It's a male in veg. Yeah, yeah. That's a good thing for a male because males usually just flower at the first sign of restriction. I mean, to me, you know, you guys, there are males that appear in in reversals. Yeah. The way to really know is like if you used any pollen from that male on anything, and you rub the seeds, if it was a regular, if it was regular pollen, then you'd get anywhere from 20 to 80% male-female ratio. And if it's, you know, feminized, then you'd only get female seeds or it wouldn't even take. I'm not even be bothered. I'm not 100% sure that's really accurate because we don't understand the whole sexual chromosome nature. Like I don't even remember the proper term. I'm going to make myself sound stupid, but we don't understand the whole, the whole nature of not just the sex chromosomes, but the, what is it, autosomes that that aren't related to sex chromosomes. A lot of those are something is having an effect on the sex chromosomes aside from just the natural genetic sex chromosomes. So I'm not sure if that really plays out that way. I think what we found out most is that when there are males in feminized stock, they tend to be males or females only expressing male for whatever reason, but, Wow. Yeah. I hadn't, I hadn't actually thought about that. I thought, yeah, that's great. So, so they should test female when you test. Yeah. So what my plan initially is, I'm thinking, well, I've done the reversal with like the proven female that we really like. So I was like, why don't I just try to make the regular versions of those femcrosses? And, and if this thing is in fact, you know, a male or a female show, like I should get some similarities between those two seeds, right? The parents in there, right? Yeah. Or I thought alternatively, I could try to do F2S2F2. That would be, yeah, it'd be interesting. So yeah. So just cross that male to the female and just see what. So yeah, it's going to be interesting to dive down this rabbit hole because it starts to get a bit confusing with the lineage, but it should be interesting. And I'm sort of keen to see where it goes. You know, DJ Short's the king of playing with weird lineages, like crossing, making F1, like technically what would be F1s within the same line, each gender, successive generation without ever like breeding for this specific path or that specific. It's interesting. I think it's fascinating and it made some of like my favorite stuff, regardless if it was like considered technical or wrecked, it ended up making some really fascinating stuff that I have no end inside of ever stopping working with. Yeah. Yeah. DJ's stuff is killer and he's definitely done more wild stuff than any of us, which is cool. Yeah. So like if people wanted to get the Australian guy stuff, where would they go? Like online? Is there a place they can get this stuff? Yeah. Good question. Probably about half of those guys I mentioned are stocked at maybe like little Australian seed banks. So that might be Wine Avenue to go down. My work is stocked at a seed bank in Australia called Top Shelf Seed Bank. I know that Ferrell is also stocked there and some of those other guys might pop up on there, but I would always encourage you, if you were interested, drop the guy directly a message. Australia, you know, these guys aren't big breeders. They're going to be very stoked that you're interested in maybe learning a little bit about what they're doing. And I think they would be very receptive to anyone who dropped them a line and said, Hey, I'm in the States and maybe I could try some of your seeds. Yeah. I think they would be receptive to that. So by all means, listen to the names I mentioned and just type them into Instagram or just like go to my Instagram and look at who I follow and they'll be in there. And yeah, drop them a line for sure. Because as I mentioned earlier, if nothing else, you probably have a little bit of a better chance of finding something that just feels a little bit different because we just don't have access to all of those clones. And so things inherently have to be a little different. And I like it. I love it. I love it. Like I've pretty much thought about just dropping every single clone from here on out and only working with what I've made out of seed from here on out. I've lost a lot of that love for finding other people's keepers or messing with other things people, other people called keepers and really, really just looking at what's out there and seed and just trying to enjoy that some more because as Americans, it's really easy to get trapped in the clone only game and constantly chasing that next clone only and that. And when you don't have, when you have a constant access to stuff like that, it's easy to fall into it permanently. And I've kind of tried to push myself out of that when I lost my whole collection. I was bummed, man. That was a long time of collecting and it pushed me into uncomfortable zone of having to pop seeds and it made me find that love and all that again. So I kind of envy a little bit some of that out there in Australia that they still have that love for seed. I'm glad I get to find that again. I think it goes in phases to what Heavy Days was talking about earlier when people were like breeding for what they like. I think it's we've had a massive explosion of American breeding going on, but a lot of it has been profit based. And so it's been crossing a lot of the same 30 to 60 cuts in innumerable ways. And if you don't care to sell seed and you're just doing it for yourself and your friends, you can literally pick any weird thing you want and go in any direction you want. You're not limited by anything in that regard. A lot of times people are like, I want this drop to sell well. Therefore, I'm going to use things that have name recognition and I'm going to walk down this path that's been walked before. But if you don't care about that, then the world is your oyster and there's a lot of weird shit out there that there's a lot of directions you can go. And sometimes maybe you change the game. Who knows? Things aren't new and it's just like new genres of music. It's not popular until it is. It's a fact. To some degree, right? And I can hugely relate to everything you just said because if someone said to me right now, do you think you could base a whole breeding program off something you found in a pack of canette seeds? I'd say, fuck no. You know what I mean? So it was the fact that I wasn't thinking about that, which allowed me to try something that I just thought is a bit weird and different. And then all of a sudden, you find something really cool in there. And I try to encourage people to do that. I'm like, grow what interests you because you never know what'll jump out. And it could be, as you just alluded to, the start of something which goes on to be changes the whole scene. I mean, in the worst case scenario, if you do a bunch of breeding and it doesn't make any money, and a lot of people don't like it as long as you can fall back on, I like it. Yeah, right? You know, I like it. The I like it. That's all that matters in the end. You know, and the experience, right? It's so valuable to just have said, you know, I went through the process of selecting it, making the seeds, testing them, and then having the foresight to say, you know what, maybe this is a dead end, but at least I got experience out of it. You know what I mean? It's interesting. And being able to say that this is a dead end is a valuable tool, too. That is a valuable tool. I mean, everybody should, everybody should realize that most breeding is failure. Yeah, but I don't think that's a common, I don't think that's common sense to most people, though, at least in the seed making, because seed making failure isn't making money. And most of it's about making money. So if there are seeds, you can sell them as long as you can market them. So it's not, it's not as common sense as you think. Neville used to have this joke, right, that everything he did with the haze past F1, he made it worse. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he was never able to make it better. Like the NL5 hazes and the first crosses that they made and did, those were all better than all the later stuff in his opinion, even though he tried really hard, you know, so sometimes, and there's luck in it, you know, you could find, you could not find it in a ton of seeds, or you could find it in the first 10 or 15 you pop. Yeah. Hugely, hugely. And it's, it's interesting you say that because I try to encourage people to also not buy into any paradigms about having to pop any certain number of seeds. Like, of course, the more you pop, the more you're likely, but I talk to people who don't pop seeds because they're like, well, I can't pop 40. So what's the point? Exactly. Yeah. And I just say most of my favorite, like my, the jelly breath, I reference, or I try to, I try to make this clear, that jelly breath, I, I, you know, you could say it's biased, but I genuinely believe it's the best cutting in Australia. And I will be fully upfront in saying that I got those as three feminized freebie seeds. That's cool. You know what I mean? So it's like the best shit can come from who knows where and it could be one or two. Yeah. The Mendo Pebs, right? That was like two seeds, right? Two. Yeah. Literally two. And one of them was a male. So it's the lowest possible phenohunt you could ever have. You know, one of the best blueberries I had found in all of the years of searching for blueberry was a fricking freebie from Dynafem blueberry hash plant. Like of all the odd things out there that you think you, you know, it had some of the best blueberry smells up until, you know, the bonnet during that run. So yeah, it can come from anywhere. It's so crazy. You just mentioned that because one of the earliest strains I grew that was impressive was a Dynafem strain we call, it was called blue strawberry. I think whatever the blue component, like maybe the blueberry was the pollen donor part in this one as well, because I specifically remembered. Oh, blue strawberries, world of seeds. Oh, it mustn't have been blue strawberry then. It was definitely Dynafem. Maybe they did. Maybe they made a couple of hybrids with that. They might have. The blueberry hash plant pollen, but I also remembered like looking back, I'm like, man, how did Dynafem produce that? Like it was pretty good. So the Spanish breeders, what I've learned, like knowing some of them, they're fucking good. Like that, like my buddy Ernesto from, from Buddha seeds. He was one of the first doing, making a lot of seeds for greenhouse in Nirvana, doing the big massive productions for these major Dutch companies. But in the meantime, he was also doing auto flower breeding and moving Pakistan's Jatrali into an auto flower form, into like a reliably true breeding auto flowering magenta plant. And he did it. And I got to watch him, you know, go through this process and they have some serious good breeders over there. And, and I think it's very easy to dismiss it because what they sell isn't necessarily what ends up in the packages of greenhouse, meaning if they're selling a Neville's Haze to greenhouse, it doesn't mean greenhouse is going to stock it as Neville's Haze. It just means that they bought it and they're going to put it in one of the most likely one of those Sativa packages that best, that best fits it. You know, that's how it goes. So when people know that they make this stuff, they might not understand that it's being misrepresented, what's being made, but they have some fascinating, or fantastic breeders, fantastic breeders in the Spanish that are heavily under or what they, for sure. Yeah, man. It's interesting how like the real heads in the Spanish scene are not particularly well known in the USA scene. And I think like, yeah. And some of the clones, like what's that, that one, the queen mother? Oh, yeah, yeah, Reina Madre. Yeah, yeah, like, like, there's a whole bunch of clones that are just absolutely prolific over there. And people who are like in both USA, they're like, oh yeah, that's a good clone. It's not just like the Spanish think it's good, but it's not. Yeah. And I think there's another one called Lily. I'm not familiar with that one, but yeah. Okay, yeah. I think it's from that same crew. It uses that Zamo slash queen mother stuff. Anyway, yeah, really interesting stuff, for sure. It became to get in there. And the more I hear about Lomano Negro's work, the more I'm like, damn, I wish we had more clear info about his life. So most of the people I know that know Lomano real well. He was an excellent breeder, but he did inject a lot of Dutch shit into his stuff and left that out. And that's why it's so pretty, because it is very Dutchified. And he did not keep that very clear. He was a good storyteller and he made some amazing stuff. But for a preservationist, you wouldn't, I think a lot of the people that were around him that liked him a lot were more sad and to find out that it was very injected with Dutch stuff and left out for someone who was such a serious preservationist, but he did make some amazing stuff, for sure. I mean, it goes to your previous point in which you were sort of happy that clones from America weren't making their way to Australia because you were avoiding the whole viroid and super mites and all the various things that we struggle with. But to the Spain point, international borders and customs and oceans are a real barrier. No, they're not. We have Spain, Spain has murdered, like Spain, Amsterdam, all of them are been murdered by the HLB now, all of them, they've been taken out. So there's no good barrier there. That's all I've been hearing about at least the Spanish. But I just meant the sense, I actually meant more in the sense of like, you know, in America, like we don't get very, we don't, it's not like you get Spanish strength. Oh no, no, you're right. It's not like you're getting, you know, like things that he was just talking about that might be very famous in Spain and amazing cuts. You know, it took, you know, there's a couple of the Neville's, not Neville's Hayes, but like a couple of Neville's F1s that have made their way to America now. But it took like 30 years and most of them aren't over here. You know, and so Australia, Spain, Europe, America, even Canada, which like America and Canada share a border, there's, there's that border and, you know, is a real barrier to free exchange of genetics. And there's really good things in Canada that don't really exist in America and vice versa because of that barrier. I'm not so sure they don't make it over here. I'm not so sure that it's, that they don't pick up because they're not popular strains because we've had a lot of the Dutch stuff, even the Quais was over here. I had it, but I was too stupid to keep it. You know, like stuff makes it over, but because it's not popular, it doesn't necessarily spread to. A lot of those Spanish strains have weird names like the critical Bilbo. Like over here, that would sound like critical Dilbo. Like no one's going to grow a critical Bilbo over here. Right? So, I mean, some of it is a naming convention for sure. But yeah, it is kind of crazy that there isn't more exchange between the countries, even with tissue culture, being more prevalent and stuff, that we're not seeing more of an exchange. I don't know what that is other than naming conventions. And you know what, that segues nicely into like something I wanted to ask you guys, which is that there's, I mean, not just now, but in recent years, there's been quite a focal discussion around the nomenclature of cannabis and like how we really need to get with the times. But there's a part of me that thinks that may never actually change because it's just so widely disseminated the current language. I'd love to hear you guys' thoughts. Like do you think we'll ever have a global reset or do you think it'll just continue on and the squeaky wheel will keep letting us know we're doing it wrong and that sort of vibe? It could change over time. I mean, I do think that, you know, like for instance, like how in cannabis we use BX and it's not ever used outside of cannabis, it's always BC, back cross, right? But I don't know, even though it might like scientists and stuff might look at it and laugh at us, we're still using that word BX to convey the right information. Like people understand what the word means, you know? And so some of that is, you know, I mean, I guess like, you know, they misnamed and you know, Indica should be Afganica and you know, Sativa should be Indica because it comes from India and Sativa should really be, you know, Ruderala should really, you know, all that. I don't think that'll ever catch on. No, I think Sativa, Indica is too ingrained in our subculture and I don't think that'll shift. Even people that are evil about it, like me, still use Indica, Sativa. So I think it might work. And then there's also this thing where you look at some stupid seed bank or whatever and it's like, oh, this is 72% Indica and 18% Sativa and you're like, all that's made up. Yeah. They have no idea, you know, like whatsoever. So like it is misleading in a sense because like I definitely think percentages they mostly just pull out of their ass. For sure. Yeah, hugely, hugely. And I definitely have noticed a lot of breeders these days just list everything as 60, 40 Indica dominant. That's a way, man. And the confusion around phenotype versus genotype, some of that kind of stuff is, that probably should change over time. I think we pretty well established it. We got it right on the last episode I did with the PhD lady. I was like, hey, you know what? Like I want to know, am I using this word correctly? Because I'm not a scientist. I'm not a botanist by trade, like phenotype. Like as I learned it, genotype are the genes behind the expressable traits, right? What you're visually seeing are the phenotype, the visual traits that are expressed. This is the phenotype, the genotype are the genes behind it. You're not, you know. So I think we're using it correctly according to her anyways. I hope so, folks. I hate being wrong, but yeah, I think we got it. I mean, I guess my general point is that like we, but you know, that's what cannabis does, right? Like we take, we take these like real world terms and then we like create our own use with them. And it's like what made, you know, legalization so hard in some ways is like in Colorado when it first went legal, they went in and took all these suggestive children names and candy names and trademark names off the cookies as cookies because the Girl Scout sued them. Yeah, yeah. Right. You know, and so we had all this counterculture, tongue-in-cheek, funny names that played off things that people knew. And I don't see any reason why that's not going to continue to some degree in science. I mean, we're a pretty subversive group. And our opinion is you should bend towards us. Yeah. I like that a lot. So I don't know. And I think it like, I totally agree with what you're saying. And I think it speaks to the point of that. The purpose of language is not necessarily to be 100% technically correct, but to facilitate an exchange of ideas where we both know we're talking about the same thing. And that's what you're alluding to. It's like we say sativa because we both know that we are thinking of the same thing when we say sativa. And I think that's almost in a sense the manifestation of language evolving in front of your eyes. It's like maybe it's not technically correct, but we know what we're saying to each other. And that's almost more important to facilitate ideas being exchanged. But, you know, I almost wondered with the continuation of the sativa indicator thing, though, if it really takes away from the effect of the high. Because I think that's where it genuinely confuses people when they go into to collectives and they say, I would like a sativa. Because I know, because this, the I'm Jim Belushi show, it told me that sativas give me energy and I need to go work in the garden. And that's where you run into the problems because just because maybe it is a narrow leaf type plant doesn't necessarily mean it's going to have a specific type high. So maybe that's where the education needs to be. Not in a new whole new terminology, but in explaining high types. And these sativa indicators don't necessarily mean high type. I don't necessarily know if that is going to be it. Because I think now that consumerism and legality is involved, what you see like in food and stuff like that is people will use like the word natural. Like if things don't have a specific legal meaning, but they convey an idea or an image, then marketers are going to use them to their advantage. Sure. Yeah. Right. So you can't say, for instance, in America, this is 100% organic, unless it's actually 100% organic, because there's like a federal rule and you have to, but you can say it's all natural. Yeah. Right. And so I think that's the naming thing that's going to go on. Unless there's some rule against it, people are going to call shit whatever they think makes them money. That's good. That's capitalism. People are going to push, they're going to want to, it's why like to some degree, it's why almost all these strains are candy and dessert names now. Yeah. Right. Nobody would name a strain in 2022 the dog shit. Very unlikely. They would name it candy, apple, something. Right. Yeah. Or strawberry, or strawberry, switch, you know, whatever. Yeah. They would, they would evoke some image. It wouldn't be cat piss. It wouldn't be dog shit. It wouldn't be, you know, so, you know, it, Indica and Sativa, that's just as long as these, as long as these perceptions persist about what the effect is going to be. Some of these companies, they would name, you know, they would name weed strains emotion. Yeah. You know, like relaxation, calm, you know. I think you just gave everyone more ideas. God damn it. But, you know, that's what happens, right? Yeah. Like that's what it's, there's a capitalism part of it. And we, us weed nerds can argue about it. Sure. You know. And then Burner is going to be out there being like, you don't want to smoke some relaxation. This is the shit. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's good. Because, you know, it's what sells. That is bad. That's interesting. Can I actually make a really random comment? I think you guys will be interested in talking about it. But I wanted to push myself to express at least one personal opinion that I've never expressed before. Do it. As I was thinking about a whole diplomatic thing before the show. And I was like, yeah, I shouldn't be diplomat. I should say something. Anyway, it ties into what you were just saying, like about like what we can say and what we can't say and sort of industry versus standard. But basically in Australia, like I, I work in like generally speaking the healthcare profession. And I used to work in pharmacy and I experienced it there. And I experienced it now where I currently work. And what I would really love to do is encourage people to be what I would call academically honest about cannabis and its effect on people. Because I speak to a lot of people in the healthcare industry who are not particularly interested in hearing about the benefits of cannabis. Because for a long time, they've heard people quote, incorrect things like mantra and like the real specific one that I sort of have a bit of a pet peeve with is that cannabis doesn't kill people. Now, the thing that I would say is, first of all, I have a family member who has bipolar. And when he has cannabis, he goes manic and becomes very unwell. Sure. And so I think we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that cannabis actually maybe isn't for everyone. And that that's okay. Because I think that the people I speak to, they take issue that they're told, you know, it's better than anything. It doesn't kill anyone, blah, blah, blah. And I think there's stronger arguments we could use. It's not dishonest to say cannabis causes less damage, both health wise and societally than any other drug. That's a very strong argument and it's 100% correct. However, my buddy is a doctor and he has literally seen people die from getting high and walking in front of a car accidentally and getting hit by a car. He's seen people who present who have only smoked green their whole life and they have emphysema. And so you have to be honest with yourselves that like there are trade-offs. I still think it's the best choice by far. Don't get me wrong. I'm sitting here heavy smoking myself. But I just think that we just need to be a little more mindful about whether we're like a bit whether the claims we're making are 100% genuine. And as I said, I think there are really strong arguments to make that are true. So it's less harmful, clearly. But I think that we just need to get out of this space of like it causes zero harm. Because the reality is any smoke in your lungs, long-term, will cause damage. It's just that simple. And I think a lot of people think, well, it's better than tobacco. And I'd say 100%, 150%, better than tobacco. But that's not the conversation. The conversation is that a lot of people say cannabis has zero negative effects. And I just think, yeah, it would be cool if we could all be a little more honest with ourselves about like it's not perfect, but it's far better than the other things. No question. But that's my little edgy point that I wanted to get out there. Because I do unfortunately see the negative impact of those statements that you get these old school doctors who are like, well, I don't really listen to what the community says because they say it doesn't cause harm. And I can tell you clearly, yeah. Yeah. And so I did want to get that out there that we can still do a great job advocating for cannabis and promoting how it's better than some of the other alternative recreational sources of relaxation. However, I just think we have to be a little more honest and recognize that it does have some health effects. It's not necessarily for everyone, but it is far better than alcohol or tobacco or any of the harder ones, you know? And I just think being mindful of the language we use will probably help that longer term to get some of the more professional white colored people to listen to us. Because the reality is we know for a fact that the underground community was ahead of the medical community. Yeah. The way CBD has helped people clearly shows that the medical community was wrong. They were like, no benefit. And then like for epilepsy, clear proof, undeniable. It's beneficial. So I think we want to try to maintain that moral high ground and not seed it by making these sort of ambiguously incorrect statements and say, look, there's value. We've got we've got proof of it, but you know, there are pros and cons like anything. Sure. I love that. I think it's probably a reaction, at least in America, but probably elsewhere too, to where it was so demonized by society and the government that you felt that like talking about it in a nuanced way, anything you admitted would be used as a club to beat you over keeping it right where they wanted it to be, which was totally illegal and is dangerous. And in America, it's schedule one. So it's right up there with, you know, you know, the worst drugs methamphetamine. It's not even it's worse than Coke. They use cocaine in no surgeries. So cocaine is actually scheduled to in America because it has legitimate medical uses, right? And not that I'm advocating for that, but by any means, but I mean, you know, there's an aspect there where it hasn't really been properly studied for a long time. And, you know, when they did study it, they were looking for harm, right? And so I think we're kind of in the infancy of balancing out cannabis. One thing you didn't mention, you know, I actually don't think that, like, you know, cannabis, I don't think cannabis has ever killed anyone, although I do think that you're probably right. Cannabis has made people do stupid things and they died while high. That's probably true, right? But I have one of my really close friends has cannabis hypermesia syndrome, right, where he gets the vomiting and he's had to quit cannabis. And it's pretty rare, you know, but it does exist. And everyone thinks it's name or this or that or whatever, but he grows his own. And he had to give it up. And, you know, it's kind of like shellfish is amazing for most people, but some people die. Peanut butter is amazing for most people, but some people, no, not so much, you know, people have allergies, people have different physical makeups and different genes that react to certain things. And so I agree with you. I think it's mostly beneficial, but there's it's rare in the world that everything is a perfect good or a perfect bad. Yeah. I mean, anything carcinogenic is going to kill someone. I mean, if you smoke it, it's going to kill you. Not necessarily it being cannabis being the the thing killing you, but the carcinogenic factor from smoking cannabis is probably what's really had a major impact in life. Black pepper is supposed to be slightly carcinogenic, but I put it on a lot of food. Yeah. But I'm not sure it's this carcinogenic is burning up, you know, flour or something like that. But the one thing I'll say about that is that I don't know about the carcinogenic aspect of weed simply because we know that tens of millions of Americans have smoked it every day and plenty of other countries, right? And in America, we lose like half a million people a year to tobacco illness. And they haven't been able to pin cancer on cannabis despite trying extremely hard. And so I think that one is still up for debate. I agree. It has a lot of tar. I agree. It has a lot of carcinogens in it. That's right. But you would think that if tens of millions of Americans have smoked it daily for years, that you would have a lot of them would get sick and die. And we haven't seen that yet. So I think it remains to be seen. Because there isn't necessarily proven correlation, doesn't mean it hasn't been seen. Oh, I agree. And I also think I'll throw this out there to go on to heavy days's point. I think that smoking flour itself out of the traditional ways and bongs or bowls or joints or whatever has been well studied for a long time. And I think that it's generally pretty safe. I don't know if all of the modern dab and extracts and all these other goos that people are smoking all the time. I don't know if those are going to end up being as safe. And I think that people are saying, oh, it's cannabis, so it's all safe. Right? But we also haven't had years and years and years of people using it yet to see what the effects might be later on. I think this is a great example of three different eras right here. Of the modern era, the mid era, and the old era of different pushbacks. To use a perfect example, I remember when all my, I'm not that into hash, but I remember when a lot of my friends would smoke their dabs out of glowing cherry bangers. We now know if you're smoking hash at 800 and 900 degrees, it's creating cyanide. It's creating various carcinogens. It's really unhealthy. And no one does that anymore because that shit is fucked. Yeah. But yet everyone was like heating a torch until that thing was glowing red and then dropping goo in it and taking big hits and coughing until they couldn't breathe. It's probably not the best. Yeah. No, look, I'm so stoked you guys brought those points up because I think I could probably add a few little tidbits of info. So in terms of when you're smoking green plant matter like there's no tobacco in there, they've actually shown that across the board, most plant matter, when you combust it, it turns into this molecule called 4-4 bipyridine, which is basically a relatively benign molecule. And this is why cannabis doesn't appear to increase your rate of cancer per se because the molecules it turns into is pretty benign. What's interesting is when you smoke cannabis, as you mentioned, it produces more tar than the equivalent volume of tobacco. So that one gram of cannabis actually makes more tar. The difference is is that when you smoke cannabis in your throat, you have this thing called the mucus ciliary elevator. It's basically like the little hairs that brush the dust up out of your lungs and stops your lungs from getting filled with gunk. And what happens is when you smoke cannabis, those hairs, they become paralyzed. But after a few hours, they start back up and you can clear that tar out. So it's not actually a big deal. Even though people do like to point out that cannabis produces more tar, your body can get rid of it. It sweeps it up. You don't recognize it goes down your esophagus and you just swallow it and it comes out the other end. What's interesting though is with tobacco, it actually kills those hairs and the hairs take at least two weeks to grow back. So as a result, unless you abstain from smoking tobacco for two weeks, that tar will accumulate in your lungs. And even though it's less than cannabis, your body can't get rid of it. So that's an interesting sort of thing to keep in your stash because people love to shit on cannabis and say it's more tar. And it's like, yeah, but sort of not actually an issue. Interestingly, when we look at the carcinogen aspect of cannabis, that you're right. There's no proven carcinogen. Like it's not going to give you lung cancer per se. But what is interesting is that when you inhale any smoke, it essentially causes the breakdown of the alveoli, which long term is what we would call emphysema. And emphysema long term will turn into chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD. So the way I try to explain it to people is you might think of being exposed to asbestos. And you could say, well, it's not actually the asbestos that kills you. Asbestos causes mesothelioma. And then it's the mesothelioma that kills you. And so I actually view it the same way with cannabis. Cannabis doesn't kill you, but it causes COPD and COPD will kill you. So I think it's just about like sort of keeping it in perspective sort of because a lot of people, yeah, it's hard to understand that it can kill you. But because I myself used to say, well, I've never met anyone who smoked pure green their whole life. So it's sort of hard to know because most people have smoked a decent amount of tobacco. So it's just like, it's just muddled. And it's like, well, how do you know that by the correlation thing? Because yeah, but but I have bumped into a few British guys who reckon they've just smoked green their whole life and they do have emphysema. So it is interesting. But but like, I guess on this point, I have cut my usage back so that I tend to just consume in the evening. And I think this has actually been really beneficial for just my own personal health. Maybe this is a very specific thing to me. But but I feel like, you know, not having brekkie bongs, so to speak, for me personally has been quite beneficial. And I feel like my respiratory capacity essentially has been better for that. And I would just encourage people to just be mindful of this in the long term because, you know, unfortunately, COPD is a bit of a rough one. And, you know, it'd be better to avoid it if possible. But it is interesting. Yeah, the four four by periodine thing. I'd encourage people to look into it. It's pretty benign. And and yeah, overall, clearly smoking weed is way better than tobacco, right? Like there's just no question about it. Is it the nicotine or tobacco that's causing the the stuff in your lungs to freeze? We don't know yet, probably, because it's vapes are so young. Nicotine and tobacco are always mixed in the same thing, right? Yeah. I mean, I saw this big study and I can't say what it is right now. I apologize. But I did see this thing where it was like they studied a huge amount of non smokers, weed smokers only, weed and tobacco and just tobacco. And the highest rate of lung cancer was tobacco followed by weed and tobacco. But then strangely, the control group, the normal lung cancer was third. And the people that had the least amount of lung cancer were the people that smoked cannabis only. Yeah. But as heavy days says, just because it protects you from one thing doesn't mean it doesn't increase your risk for something else to come along and harm you. And so a lot of times we oversimplify things by being like, see, it prevents this. So it's all good. I've seen that. Or see, it causes this. So it's all bad. I've seen that with CBD in the USA. It's a literal snake oil show here with CBD. Literally it is being sold in every gas station now, at least in my area. Every gas station carries some sort of CBD contraption or CBD flower even. They sell everywhere. And it's being sold. If you talk to my chicks, parents or whoever, they really have this idea that CBD cures everything, every last thing. There's this weird thing that we won't know for probably decades. But since you're in the medical profession, people are going to push it along. But these guys in Israel, we legitimately have a cannabinoid system in our body. And CBD and THC interacts with that cannabinoid system. And it's pretty unstudied. And we don't exactly know what it affects. It's one of the body systems that I think is the most poorly understood. Because they only discovered it in the late 80s, early 90s. And they don't know how cannabis and CBD interacts with your cannabinoid system. Or even what your cannabinoid system totally does in relationship to the rest of your body. So I think people forget that we know a lot. But we only figured out what bacteria was like 130 years ago or something. And we still have a vast amount of things to learn. And we're going to be surprised. When I was a kid, heavy days, they told everyone that margarine was clearly superior to butter. Now they have a much different opinion of trans fatty acids. Things change. New evidence comes in. And it changes people's perspectives. I don't know where it's going to lead. But I do think it's being studied now. More than in any time in our history. So I would imagine over the next 20 or 30 years will probably be a golden era of discovering how cannabis interacts with human beings. Yeah, hugely, hugely. And I totally agree with you. I am 100% on the fence and almost anticipating the worst with these long-term vape studies coming out. Because I agree. We totally do not. I'll be honest. I switched from bongs to vapes a bit over two years ago, thinking I was doing it for my health. And as time goes by, I'm like, man, am I about to get cancer? And they find out, oh, it turns out vaping is way worse. You know what I mean? Like something really concerning. But just to add one little extra little study tibet in there, they did a different study where they tried to assess the lung function of just pure cannabis smokers. And what they basically found was, if you look at lung function, we tend to use these two measures. One's called FEV1, which stands for, how quickly can you push all the air out of your lungs? So forced expiratory volume. And we tend to look at it over one second. So how much can you push out in one second? And then the other one is, how much can you hold in total, which is your forced vital capacity? Basically, what they found was, is that the people who had like older and had smoked cannabis their whole lives, they had slightly smaller overall capacity, which meant like there was some degree of emphysema there. But they actually had a better FEV1, which is sort of the more one you're interested in, actually, because what they basically found was, a lifetime of ripping bongs actually strengthens your lungs. That's fucking hilarious. Makes sense for you. I'm not even kidding. And like they were basically like, they found that a lifetime of ripping cones gave you the same benefits as someone who was like a diver their whole life, who worked holding their breath. And like there's real benefits associated with it. And they basically were like, yeah, like a little bit less total volume, but like your use of the space is superior to someone who hasn't smoked. That might be my favorite part of the whole interview, that I've been training my whole life, just dedicated. I smoke, you know, bongs or what, that's my primary delivery system. It's the one I find the most convenient. Yeah, I like the shape. The shapes of his bongs are very phallic. They tend to be that way. They do. They tend to be phallic, you know, they tend to be a tube with a base, you know, so. Ergonomically fits in the mouth. Ergonomically just slides right in. You'll see it. You'll see it when you come when coming out. You have to know heavy days that once every episode, Matt tries to get me to break by throwing out usually some kind of phallic reference and tries to get me to crack and totally throw me off my train of thought. So he was running out of time and he probably realized he needed to get it in. I love that. I'm trying to be cognizant of the time. We could do. I always remembered when I interviewed Bodie, he did something very different and he was like, I would love to give people some book recommendations. Is there any chance I might be able to do that? Do that. Let's do it. Yes, please. Cool. Cool. So I've always thought if I could recommend a few books to people, like not necessarily kind of a specific, but just things that are good reads. So I think one of the most influential books in my life is definitely one called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vander Cook. It's a book largely speaking about people who have trauma and how you can help them overcome that. And I think that it's very interesting because he speaks about how a lot of psychological problems manifest physically. You hear people talking about tents in the shoulders and anyway, it was a seminal literature when it came out, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Vander Cook, very good book. Likewise, The 48 Laws of Power and The 50th Law by Robert Greene. Absolute. Yeah, gotta check them out. Great books. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, you know, an absolute staple. Yeah. Please consider that one. I've recently really gotten into Ram Dass and I like walking each other home and becoming nobody. Me and Bodie have had some really nice chats about those books, so I think you would vibe those if you like that. Oliver Sacks, the man who mistook his wife for a heart and awakenings, are two very interesting books if you like neurology and how things can go wrong. Yeah, I do have that one. Now, I was trying to remember what that was, yeah. And then The Extreme Ownership and The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink are both very good books if you like that sort of accountability style of things, which I'm pretty into myself. And then finally, my two final ones, Not Gonna Hurt Me by David Goggins is possibly my favorite book ever, so check that out. But likewise, if you want to learn a little bit about Australian history, strongly recommend you to check out a book called Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. I doubt anyone listening has heard of it. It's a book that, largely speaking, when people came and colonized Australia, they very much whitewashed the aboriginal history and said that they were a very primitive people and violent and blah, blah, blah. And this book really outlines how in many aspects of their society, they were far more advanced than us. And so I'd highly recommend check out Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. It's amazing how that happened to the Native American culture here over there, just to any Native culture that were, you know, terrorized by European, into Europeans. I generally think, as far as humans go, to be fair, any group that comes in that's more technologically advanced, especially with weapons, that tends to be bad for the local population. You know, the Mongols weren't European, but you sure probably didn't want them showing up to your city, you know. And, you know, Europeans, we get a wrap because we colonized everywhere and it's a lot more recent and it's very well documented. But it's certainly, it's a human failing, unfortunately, where lots of cultures, I mean, they used, the first thing they used to do when they took over a culture was burn the libraries and burn the knowledge, you know. And so, you know, there's aspects to that, you know, that suck, but it's part of the human experience, I think. If you're going to throw out some book recommendations, I'm going to throw out some book recommendations. Do it. But some of the, I'll start with some like, some, I don't know necessarily, they're not weed based necessarily, but they maybe inform your experience. One of them is called The Natural Mind, right? And it's a book by Andrew Weil. And it's kind of a study on why people like to change their headspace, why people like altered states of consciousness, how normal it is for people to want to alter their consciousness and how many different creative things come out of them putting yourself in a different perspective. And I'll just, I'll move on, but one of the coolest things he says, usually the first time that people get high is he's like little kids spinning around in circles until they get so dizzy, they can't stand up and they fall over. And that's usually the first change in consciousness that people actually experience, and it's almost universal, right? So he got really famous for like writing a bunch of self-help books and stuff like that, but that book came out in the 70s when he was still a researcher, you know, and it's really interesting take on why our mind likes having a change in consciousness, right? Two would be another book by Andrew Weil called From Chocolate to Morphine. And it is a book, it's probably a little dated now, but it is basically every drug that affects humans and the most up-to-date knowledge, good and bad on what it does to you without all the governmental politics, just like he's a, you know, Harvard-trained physician. So he just looked at it like, well, what does the medical say about caffeine or chocolate or heroin or marijuana or, you know, whatever it might be. And so if people want to read about what things do to you without a bunch of bullshit, like we were discussing with weed, it's, you know, it's a little older now but it's probably a pretty good start. Getting onto the metaphysics side of things like he was mentioning with Ram Das, there's a book by the Dalai Lama that really affected me that I read when I was locked up, which was the art of happiness. And I don't think many people think about happiness and what happiness means in their own lives, right? And what feeling good means. People chase all these things that their parents want or their society wants or what they think they want. And they don't think about like what kind of life or what kind of mental state leads to calmness and peace and happiness and enjoying life, right? And so since we all only know that we get this one shot, maybe, maybe not, maybe not, you know, we might as well enjoy it while we're here. And the mind is a funny thing. So books that help you explore your mind and explore why your mind does what it does is pretty cool, you know? And then, you know, speaking to the aborigine side of things, there's a book by Howard Zinn that's kind of controversial. It's called A People's History of the United States. But it was basically written about all the people, you know, mostly we write about like powerful white people that had all these big effects on the world. And they sort of take it from like a native's perspective or a woman's perspective or a black person's perspective or an immigrant's perspective, like what was America like for them, right? And so just, you know, any book that gets you out of your comfort zone a little bit or teaches you something about the world, books are how we pass knowledge down. And so I'm a big fan. So it's super cool that you brought up some of your favorites. And I'll shut up there. Thank you. I'm going to download those to the outer happiness and the People's History of the United States. I'm going to get the audiobook going. I'm about to go for a bike ride. All right, right. Yeah, I'm going to get the trauma one that you mentioned too. That sounds amazing. Yeah, it's a pretty interesting book. There's there's there's a lot of knowledge out there and it's good. So we actually ran this thing about 50 minutes longer than we almost ever do. So for that, you are probably our longest chat, which is pretty awesome. What a blessing. Thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciate it. Am I going to give a quick shout out or two? Yeah, please do. Yeah, 100 percent. And we're going to get your seeds everything nailing all out. Yeah, I guess just off the top of my head, I would say like, you know, shout out to anyone who's ever been on the show. And, you know, everyone who's been on the show has helped steer me in some form or another. And I'm very grateful for that. Hopefully, whether the steering was positive or negative, I've hopefully come out a bit better the other side. And a huge shout out to everyone in the Australian scene who's trying hard to help promote it. I know that things are still very fledgling and it's easy to look at the states and to feel like we're so far behind. But I genuinely believe there's a lot of people in Australia who are both passionate and are really putting their mind to it to try to progress things along. And that's cool. And furthermore, you know, like a shout out to all the people who, you know, we stand on the shoulder of giants, you know, to anyone who's ever given me any work that I've used for everyone who's just been a part of the scene before me. I certainly couldn't be here without all of the knowledge from those who've walked the path before us. And so I try to always be very grateful for that. And my final little thing would be if you're interested in my seeds, you can check out Seeds here now. We have a UK distributor, simply Souvenir's, who's about to have a drop soon. And if you're in Australia, just drop me a message or check out Top Shelf Seed Bank. But yeah, super grateful to have been invited on the show, guys. It's an honour to be with my contemporaries, like yourself, who I view as such high regard. We're happy to have you, dude. I mean, our audiences are pretty similar, I think. I think it's people that are seeking like some kind of path to history and cannabis. So there's no reason that we shouldn't be working together. And I'm glad we finally spoke and like hashed our way through Shix. That's the only way people grow. So I appreciate you for reaching out. And like, you did that big me a culpa, but it wasn't necessary because like, it was just as much me as it was you. And I genuinely feel that. So thank you for coming and being the bigger man and actually emailing me and reaching out like that. Look, I had to make things right. And I'm very grateful that you're willing to be open to my apology. Ah, dude, we're going to hang soon. Super kind, my friend. I'm going to be in the States in December, guys. If you, yeah, drop me a message. I might be in an area near you, but yeah, excited. Yeah, we appreciate it very much. We always, we appreciate anyone's listening's time. Anybody who likes to nerd out on history and culture related to weed, we try to keep it interesting and we try to cover different topics at different times. So yeah, thank you all for your time. Wonderful. We got not so back. How about that guys? Cheers. Cheers.