Welcome to Breeder's Syndicate 2.0, where we explore the history of a clandestine scene. Researching everything from cannabis strain history, old smuggling tales from the first person perspective, to breeding science and news on current subculture. I'm your host, Matthew, and I'll occasionally be joined by my homie, Natsudon, Breeder and grower from Mendicino to speak on these subjects and sometimes interview other participants. Our goal is to document this history before it's written by corporations and others who just weren't there. Let's start writing some wrongs. Welcome to the Underground. Hello everyone, welcome to the Breeder's Syndicate. My name is Thousandfold and I am not your usual host. I'm a Breeder's Syndicate member and collaborator and today I have the unique privilege of welcoming Matt Riot onto his own show. It's an episode that many of the Syndicate members have been requesting and it's going to be all about Matt. I've come up with some questions and I've also collected questions from other Syndicate members. Welcome, Matt, to the show. Thank you. How are you doing today, Matt? All right. Thank you for doing this. It's an awkward one like we've talked about, you know, to have an interview of me on our own show and I've kind of put it off for a long time, like yours, just because I don't like tain the pool with me much. But because people were asking so much, you know, what are you going to do? I think it's a really important show and it's an absolute honor for me. And I also was thinking this, like it's such a Matt punk rock move to be like, let's just get this guy who no one knows with no cloud in the scene to interview me. Are you good? We did one for people that don't know. We did one, not really an interview, but it kind of, you know, you fielded questions in a chat forum on our Patreon Discord and it was really, really good. Like I felt really comfortable. So I thought this is perfect timing. Yeah. Yeah, I almost forgot about that. Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Well, we're going to jump right into it and we're going to begin just with your breeding work. So the first questions, I guess, are how did you get into breeding at all to begin with? So, you know, like my interest in strains, well, first off, my dad was a grower and a dealer.  I was in and out of prison, so I didn't live with him, but, you know, it means my dad. And, you know, I got into plants by him at a young age, but there was no like passion for it at all. Like I got into other kind of drugs as a kid. And much later on, one of my buddies had moved to Alaska. He got in trouble in high school and had to move to Alaska. My buddy Josh, shout out to Josh. And he came back like after high school a few years later and we were all hanging out at my house. And he was the only one that was really like a heavy stoner and not a heavy other drug user. You know, he's just a stoner for the most part of the time. And he bring over this dink and I'm like, what is this? And I was smoking stuff that was just trashing my brain, like just getting these zons. And he had this story that he brought about this strain called Matt Newscavalli Thunderfuck. And when he told it to me, he told it to me as Matt Newscavalli Thunderfuck, which is kind of cool because later on, I realized he actually had his shit together and knew exactly what it was called and where it was from and all that. And he was just a kid at the time. So that's when I started getting an interest in actual strains. And he brought over high times and showed me what white rhino was, white widow. You know, some of that started the bud of what people would call white rhino or white widow would show up in our groups. You know, I'm like, we get to smoke that. And I'm not sure if it really was, you know, but that's kind of how my interest was started. When was this 2000? 2000, it would have been right after high school. So 2000, 2001, somewhere in there when we started getting those strains. And right after that, I mean, it took a few, a few years after medical started in California, it took a few years before in our city. There would be places that would kind of pop up as collectives, right? So it took, I was trying to remember, it would be about 2004, 2003 before they started really popping up in Oildale in like the, what's known as like the ghetto ghetto of Bakersfield, this place called Oildale, predominantly Caucasian and a lot of meth use in that part. And that's where the collectives were though. You had to roll through there to go there because that's where the cops weren't going, right? And it had to be outside of city limits and that place is outside of technical city limits. And I remember going in there and they had, this is the first time I saw the list of medical strains that were in California. They had Sensey Star, Durban Poison, Blueberry, what else was on there? White Rhino, White Widow, and maybe one more. I can't remember what else, Skunk One or, you know, it wasn't OG Kush at the time yet. But yeah, that's what was considered medical strains in California. So for a long time, I just assumed if it wasn't on that list, it probably wasn't medical, right? Because that's like our understanding of medical and California medical at the time was very, very minimal. It wasn't until I moved to San Diego where I had more money because I was working at Sony doing their, their bio help and support web development stuff.  That's, that's mainly when I started getting into strains, but I really didn't know what I was doing. It was like anyone that just jumps into the seed community at first, right? Like you're trying to fill your way through. So I was going to High Times, you know, the typical Skunk magazine and looking at who was in there, what strains are cool. And of course High Times, you, what I didn't know at the time was like you open High Times and it's one long ad, one long, almost paid ad in many cases. Yeah. But a lot of them look like interviews and articles, but a lot of them are paid ads in ways where like people do parties for High Times and High Times will reward them with an article, right? Or interview. But in a way it is an exchange and if you don't do those exchanges, you're not in it. I didn't understand all that. So I thought that these people were the best at it, you know, like they were the ones every time in High Times. And that's when I started like buying seeds from BC Bud Depot, places like that.  It's been a lot of money at first on like EJ short stuff. What else? Dutch passion, DNA, a lot of DNA about us, about so much DNA stuff. So at this point, were you buying these seeds to just to grow with or had you already been thinking about breeding? No, at this point, I was just buying to grow. And I was already, I mean, I wasn't thinking about breeding in the sense of breeding, right? At that point, I was thinking of making more seeds for myself because this is getting very expensive. Yeah, totally. But I was more into keeping clones because in California, that's what I understood was clones. So I was more into popping seeds to get clones to trade clones at that point. Because like that's that was kind of the hit thing to do in California. So Cal was like have clones. You got this rare clone on that, you know, but most of them weren't buying seeds. Most of those guys knew nothing about buying seeds from Amsterdam or England. None of them did. All the guys who had clones, none of them would do that. So I was the one guy in our group that was buying seeds from outside the United States and bringing those like selecting a cut and passing those around. So it was weird for someone to pop up with all these strains. And I was such a noob, I went on Craigslist and posted that I was wanting to trade. Here's my clones want to trade. Like that's pretty new, right? But at the time, like it was such a Wild West of the medical cannabis community that it wasn't as crazy as doing it.  And that's where I met this dude, Doug. And he was the main inspiration for breeding, understanding breeding. But he was like my introduction into who is a man named James Gonzalez, who also is known as James Hot. How did those two crews kind of, you know, work out for you? So when I met James, that was through Doug and Doug and James were doing a partnership in a grow.  Like the Sensey stuff, all the DJ short stuff, which a lot of it didn't pop, but what did was there. And he was willing to trade me for some of the rarest clones in California at the time. And I didn't know that. Like I had no clue how rare these things were at the time, but it's only in retrospect that I understood what he gave me. Like he had like Firo G. He had a very good cut of Apollo 13, which at the time is super rare. What else was there? I mean, he had the hog's breath. He was where I first saw that. Anyways, he had he had a whole library of amazingness. Oh, Kim D. He had Kim D. Like long before anybody else, he had Kim D. Wow. Okay. And like that's super early on for Kim D. That's he would have been right in the the crew that got it via like sub-wobber those guys from Crazy Composer. He would have been right in that line. And so like he was working on a grow with James and that's how I met James and James owned unified collected in San Diego. And after meeting James, I would go in there all the time. Like just, you know, like go in there, kick it, talk breeding, talk about my interests and tassions by clones from him. He had an amazing. He had a big jar of seeds of bubbleberry, just a massive jar sitting up on the front counter. And you could reach in grab it for, you know, it wasn't even that much money he was charging. I think it was like a dollar seed or whatever at the time. You grab it and give him 20. He didn't care. And it was amazing, amazing bubbleberry. We use that in some lines too. And he had clones. What did he have? He had the PEHT, which is the potent evolved hybrid type from Neville early on. It became known as Ed Rosenthal Super Bud later. And he had a really early cut of that. That was just phenomenal. He had Northern Lights, of course. It didn't say five, one, two, none of that just said Northern Lights. Williams Wonder. He had that MLB Williams Wonder Major League, Major League Bud. There was a lot more in that crew, but I would go in and we would talk reading. How old were you? I was probably 25, 26, 27, someone in there. I was older. I wasn't a young man at that time by my idea of life experience. In my mind, I got into this very late because a lot of people around me were older, but there were a lot of people around me that were younger too. And with the Urban Grower Society, that was kind of inspired by James because what we were seeing, and this is something that annoyed him and he kind of passed off onto me. And he worked on his collective with this on his own, and he helped me with mine. And the idea was all these collectives are majorly benefiting from medical patients, like real ones, like terminally ill patients, and charging them full price for it. The people that are opening these collectives are doing this on the basis of medical. The people that were opening these were not terminally ill for the most part, not like any sort of medical anything. They were doing it for recreational, which for me is fine, but if you're doing it off the backs of medical patients and these terminally ill patients, if we really believe what we're doing and we really believe in the passion for this plant and its medical abilities, there is no reason we should be charging them. In my mind, there's no, like, not 10 bucks, not 20 bucks, not 30 bucks. If you care and you can afford it, you should be putting your own livelihood into this. And at the time, because the way it was, it just felt like it needed a big pushback. So that's what that was about. And James and me put together, I think it got up to like 43 people in the community that were all growing, that were all giving away their weed for terminally ill patients. You know, that decision, that moment, I mean, did one of the questions I had for you was, you know, what other influences kind of had an impact on some of these decisions? Oh, yeah. What do you think drove you to this kind of like more communal spirit? Because that's, to me, that seems rare. So part of that was my best friend's mom who raised me died of pancreatic cancer. And that was when I was 20. I was 21. I was 21. And she raised me like that was like my mom as much as my grandma or my mom. That must have been devastating. It was horrible. And he had died a year before that, my best friend. So it was like double. Oh my God. And no one was taken care of her. So she wasn't a pot smoker, but she had when she was young. So she was willing to try cannabis during those brief months, six months till she passed.  So it was like, I was trying to find anything. And I saw that like it would help her get out of bed, come to the table.  So that was part of it. Like that was part of that passion, like that burning feeling in my stomach that something had to be done for these people because I saw it firsthand. It was someone I loved deeply, you know. The other thing was in communal spirit. I moved out when I was like 11 of my parents house, my actual parents house and moved in with my grandma. My grandma was awesome. She raised me great, but like other people raised me too. I was kind of a street kid at that point. I just did whatever I want.  And in doing so, like I would go to punk rock shows and play shows. And in that community where we are at, it was a very small community here. And that's where I got that community spirit. I had older dudes taking care of me.  And we all kind of raised each other in a weird way. And what happened in their lives deeply affected my lives. And I've brought that everywhere with me.  It really is true. Like the power of deep brotherly love. I can see it in the syndicate. Yeah, for sure. Like we care about each other and it's very passionate in like, but we also trust each other very deeply and inherently. And we have reasons to, you know, like we've, the actions built that. But yeah, that's where that, that's where that idea came from. That's cool. That's such an amazing set of stories. So I guess the next, I mean, the next logical thing to go on to is what would you consider your first real breeding project? My first real breeding project where I was breeding, breeding. I was doing a few things at once at two different locations. I had, see the clockwork cut when I was first given it, it wasn't called clockwork orange. It didn't really have a name. Yeah, I got a few different stories from Doug, but the one I believe because I don't even really tell me that one because it's just so ass night. What I believe was that he went to a coffee shop in Amsterdam and he ordered some Alaskan ice bud. And in that bud, there was like two seeds and he brought that home. Grew them and one of the plants looked like a monster. It looked like, like we weren't used to a lot of mutations at the time and seeing crazy leaf mutations and whatnot. And this thing, it had what we called the crinkle leaves. And a lot of people associate that like OGKB or the legend cut. Those weren't big cuts at the time. So we wouldn't associate it with any of that. So we call it the crinkle cut. Well, when I saw that plant, it was, it was super potent. Um, it was, it was just super frosty, super dank, but those leaves bothered me. And I looked at it and I thought no one's going to grow this. This isn't a clone. Anyone's going to want to pass or going to think it's diseased, whatever. So in my mind, I needed to put that into seed and shake out that trait. Cause I knew by this time that it could be done, that you could shake out traits. And I tried for a good year and a half. I did some BX ones and stuff. And I couldn't do it accurately. I could not find a potent version without that crinkle leaf formation. So at the time in my head, I thought it was a link trait as I understood it and stopped. I stopped with the best selection that I had from those seeds of my own. And that's what became the clockwork orange cut. And it was just a crinkle leaf phenol from those seeds. Um, yeah. What else did you do with that cut? Um, let's see. What else do we do with clockwork? We used it over the years. It became our flagship strain. A lot of people assumed it was orangey because of the name, obviously, but like, um, wait, I don't have it up here anymore, but like I'm a big clockwork orange fan. And like it's one of my favorite movies. And in our stuff, there's not a lot of citrus in that movie. No, no, no, no, but there's a lot of ultra violence in that movie. And that's the way that cut made me feel. Like it's super violent.  Um, yeah, it was just super potent. So that's, that's why I named it that, but a lot of people expected that. And it took a long time to explain that. Um, but we used it over the years on almost everything. We did S ones. We did several iterations of S ones that would always sell out every time we had it. Um, the BX one, we sold those, which was the clockwork to the Neville skunk to the clockwork. Um, and the Neville skunk was a Neville's haste skunk one. Um, what else did we do? I don't know. I mean, we even, we did a clockwork Cola that was kind of cool. That was the AK 47 RC Cola cut, which never gets brought up. It was an old cut passed around on scunk magazine. Um, we did clockwork cookies, which was absolutely amazing for its time.  Right. Like of all the other things I've done with it, like he cares about that.  And someone is still taking through generations right now, which was the, um, the, uh, doggie style D 73 PIF, um, from New York city, across to a reverse clockwork orange. Uh, yeah, we, we crossed it to everything we could that we had at the time slammed it to everything like most pollen checkers would, you know, um, yeah, after, after I think it was about 12 years, I decided, I don't even think I decided to let it go. I think what happened was that was with the moms in the tissue culture thing. If I remember correctly. Oh, yes, it was, it was. And, um, a certain company, a certain company, um, killed it. And that's how I lost it. There are S ones out there. Um, but I just decided to kind of move on. Not because of anything about the strain, but I'd worked with it for so long. And one of my best friends, a CSI gave me good advice to never tie yourself to one clone because when you do that, you don't have, if someone, if someone starts working it, you'll feel super passionate about it. And then what do you move to your, you're tied to one thing and you're kind of one trick pony at that point. So it's best to, you know, not just tie yourself to one thing and have that be your whole, try to make it a legacy because legacies aren't created. They're, that's something you have nothing to do with. You know what I mean? Like really your actions, but not how everybody perceives you. You got to be like Voldemort, right? And he's got like these horcruxes. It's distributed in the last. The horcruxes, man. Like that, I use that a lot in life that analogy to a lot of things because like it's a, it's a great analogy. You know, from, it's interesting from a system's perspective, like it, it makes sense to have one big dependency is extremely fragile. It makes for an extremely fragile system. So it totally makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing I was going to say as well as that, like you mentioned, I think you have Brent's who was still working with the S one. Yeah. Yeah. And Bronzo has the clockwork pith. The Nali has the clockwork S one cut and he has a bunch of the old S ones. The S ones are out there in the community. They're getting very old though. I don't know how well they pop for people now. Yeah. But yeah, no, like everybody who smoked a Nali's cut is mind blown that it's as strong as KEMD and you know, has kind of no ceiling high that KEMD has, but it's totally different. Yeah. Yeah. No, very cool. Yeah. Thanks for telling us about that. You mentioned a couple of other projects of viewers from earlier on. I'm not sure like what order to go in precisely, but you know, you have banana OG stuff, strawberry cream, Babakrish work, Giesel work. Yeah. So let's see where did I start in that order? I want to say banana would probably come first. Yeah. So my banana obsession came from a banana OG cut from Doug. That was one of the cuts that he gave me. And I remember growing it and fire OG next to each other and being like, oh, okay, I see, I see the direct relation between these two. They look identical, but I have totally different turf profiles because they're separate parents, whatever the Diablo OG's parent was, there's more spicy peppery, whatever the banana OG's parents was, there's more skunk money. Right. So I was interested in it and banana was super rare at the time. No, like the overgrown days had already passed, right? Because we were about 2008, 2009, by the time we started really working into bananas. So by this, by this point, banana had come gone and left. So it was novel. It was unique and not a lot of people were using it. And yeah.  So I got it, used it and was making beautiful, beautiful banana cuts that were super potent, banana seed lines that were super potent. The most interesting of me was a cut that came via a guy name, his online name was Hugo himself. And he was a very good friend of mine over the years. Like he started off on my forum early and we became like, we're still close to this day, me and him and his wife. And he brought me a platinum banana OG cut. And that was what it was called in his area, platinum banana OG. And this thing was just fire above fire. Banana OG was originally a seed line called OG years kush. And it was from Oregon kid. And that's where people were finding these banana phenos. And over the years, these got called banana OG that would pop up out of these OG years kush packs. And so it wasn't, it wasn't a seed line called banana OG early on. It was actually called OG years kush. But there were many people popping these seeds. And that's how these different banana lines were found, banana cuts. And this one was just so fire. So I was like, oh, I got an S one this. I have got to S one this. So I was very, during these years, I was not as versed on pollen control. And I had previously done a Bubba S one run right before this. And when I made these platinum banana OG S ones, I think the cut that I selected, it was an outlier. And I seen a few other cuts that were like this over the years from the same seed line. And I have a feeling that there was remnant banana OG or I'm sorry Bubba S one reverse pollen in the room. And that was what made the platinum banana OG S ones was the Bubba and not the banana OG. It did reverse, but I think the pollen might have been unviable and there was still pollen floating pollen floating in the room of the Bubba. Because I was just not, I was not versed on that at all what I was doing. And it made for some of the most beautiful like expressions I've still seen to date.  And that line got me a lot of like acclaim because it was really good.  What was like the effects of that like. So all that stuff tended to have the OG Kush high, which is very hard to explain, but it is a full bodied like cerebral high, which what most people consider a super hybrid at the time, like medically would be like considered hybrid type high, but really it's just a full bodied, full complex high that OG Kush has and it's why it's so special. And this carried that on very well. And Bubba Kush when grown well could do the same thing. It has a very similar type high and combining the two just really, really nailed it for its time. I will say for its time. It was special to me and I think it was special to a few people and that's one of the ones that I actually am proud of is that work. But again, like after years and years of doing this, you learn to kind of drop any kind of ego from it and pride in what you have done, but more pride in what those have done before you and that you were able to put out. If that makes sense. Yeah, I can I can understand that at some point it kind of becomes its own thing in the world and has its own life outside. Yeah, right. Like I'm proud that thing exists, but it's not much more than anything that like I kind of went, you know, and that's how operating is in my mind. I mean, okay, in terms of like the timeline, the this this work comes also before the great tissue culture debacle. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, that was fairly recent in my mind like five years or less, maybe four or three or four. I didn't realize. Yeah, that was real recent. Yeah. Okay, okay. So right before that, I had the bubble work and the bubble work was it was just like I got a hold of the bubble cushion clone. I want to say that was from eight at PNC people's nursery care. Shout out to eight. He's a lot of my stuff like the strawberry cream cut came from him. He had a great, great, he had the best, I will say the best clone nursery up until that point I had ever seen with the best provenance and I will say to date it is the best nursery that ever existed with the best provenance because that dude did his research. The cuts that he got like 90% of the time were accurate, which is way hard and during that era way harder, you know, he was legit dude's still around and he's still legit. So yeah, I he's not often talked about by breeders from California. He worked a swerve early on and was an early owner of Cali Connection, if I remember correctly, one of his first partners and was responsible for, you know, a lot of swerves cuts, but he doesn't get name much so I figured I'd bring him up now because like he's even who lumpy sent me down the cookies crew stuff really early on before anyone else had it and that eight is the one who brought it down from lumpy. So I want to give him a lot of thanks for sharing that. So the bubble, the bubble work. Yeah, it was, it was not new for cannabis because a lot of people like Oregon kid and all them had done bubble work before me CSI all of them had done bubble work before me, but it was years later and as we know in cannabis things are cyclical and by that time known was making Bubba S1 CSI had kind of dropped from the scene completely to do his own thing cropping and not really working online not dealing with online business. So that was a time in the market where I could come in and make S1s do FEM work and it was a time when people really really did not like what I was doing the feminizing and still today people don't like it the most part. Okay, we're gonna I have a question specifically on on FEMs and reversals later on, but I did want to ask a tangential question here as an outsider, I find it interesting because why Bubba Cush doesn't get named as much as OG and the 91 you know, is that because it's kind of like under the umbrella of OG or kind of in the shadow of OG Bubba doesn't seem to get its own mention a lot, even though there's a lot of work done with it. You know, I don't know why there's like the OG obsession out the Bubba. Bubba Cush is half OG Cush as it's been told and I would agree you can smell OG Cush in it if you grow it certain ways. I think it's always lived in the shadow of OG. It's a lot. I don't want to say it's harder to grow because it's really easy to grow Bubba. It's very hard to cure and dry Bubba to get it to be right and a lot of people lose Bubba in the cure. A lot of people say Bubba's booth because of it, you know, and it doesn't have the super rounded high that OG Cush has or the THC percentage OG has most importantly. But it is potent and it does have a similar quality of high I should say. Maybe not a skyrocket potent as some of OG's will get you but it does have a similar quality high and yeah, I think probably the THC percentage because that's so important to people in California and collectives is probably what keeps Bubba from kicking up to the top because it's usually like 18 to 20. 21 is usually the boss. It veggies really slowly as well. Yeah, it's it's more squat than OG but it's still depending on how you grow it you can make that thing grow lanky but it is slower to grow than OG. It's not as slow as things like Urkel but it has a reputation for being slow. So, yeah. Okay. No, that's super cool. If you're happy with the, you know, that account of your Bubba work, you can move on to the strawberry cream. Yeah, yeah, so strawberry cream I got from again 8th at PNC and I didn't know much about it for years. Other than first I didn't even know if it was the same one from CBF. Didn't know I by the time I got it, it was right when April's closing up and he had closed shop. We lost contact at the very like I gotten it a month later he was gone and we lost contact. So I didn't know much about it. I spent a lot of years trying to figure it out and I was convinced it was an Urdbeer because it grew exactly like that plant Urdbeer and I started growing these and it smelled like it. But what I found out was that it came from Strawberry Cough, which Strawberry Cough is supposed to be strawberry because of a string called Strawberry Fields and we haven't identified that. So I have some suspicions from breeding stuff in my head what it might be but the story goes that CBF got some S1s of Strawberry Cough from GoldenEye's and GoldenEye's was a female on Overgrow she worked with Black Russian some Shyskaberry stuff and the Strawberry Cough and when he popped him he got some males and females which probably means pollen contamination which makes sense. She was doing a lot at that time in a small space and he crossed those two together and that's what started Strawberry Cream and this line was so resinous so mold resistant so strawberry and it bred so strawberry and everything it touched was just bag of peel to the to the nines, turf wise amazing. The high was a lot less than you would say like an OG Cush or Bubba Cush it wasn't the same kind of high but it was so much more mild I would put it in the silver pearl category of highs. Real quality so it always took away my anxiety which I like it took the edge off but it wouldn't lay me out to where I felt like I was always saying something stupid I didn't get stupid mouth and I like that I hate having stupid mouth and you know what I'm talking about where you perceive yourself as saying something stupid like if everything comes out of your mouth that kind of weed and this is not that kind of weed but yeah, bag of peel to the nines and Cedarbury Farms stepped off the forums for a while so it was really hard to hunt down and during that time I did a lot of work with it I BX1'd it and I crossed it to Johnny Blaze from Legend Seeds Red from Legend Seeds I believe made Johnny Blaze and that was a Neville's Hayes DJ Short Blueberry Mail the reason I did that was because in the room I had Santa Cruz Blue Dream right next to it and I noticed that these two cuts and I used to have side by side pictures of all this stuff and I probably do it somewhere on a hard drive but side by side they looked almost identical it was very hard to tell the difference of them in flower and because of that I was like oh Blue Dream will be the perfect outcross if I want to make a regular seed line and again I go back to BX1 making regular seed lines of this stuff because I had caught so much flak for feminized seeds over the years by this point we're talking 2009 2010 2011 of my strawberry work I always put it about a three year period because that's how long it takes to do serious work on lines for me to go from popping them to testing and running them to a possible BX1 if I'm happy or to finding out that I screwed up so about three years to figure out whether I'm doing good with the line or not to the point where I can sell it and get it out there in mass and the testers have gotten back to me if I use testers where was I at those three years I was doing the strawberry crane fart strawberry crane and you forget what you're doing yeah the strawberry work CBF was gone during those years 2009-2011 so it's not like I could reach out to him and talk to him so I was releasing this work the Johnny Blaze was the out cross in it because of the blue dream stuff and it was phenomenal everybody that got it liked it and I also had during these years I had an east coast sour diesel strawberry crane from CBF in seed that I traded for by this point already during the first two years I had crossed east coast sour diesel the the Chaco cut I called it but it was just east coast sour diesel across that to a strawberry cream BX1 mail and I did not like the results but I popped CBF's east coast sour diesel strawberry cream and immediately everything was fire every last seed from that line was a keeper I used a mail from that line in further work which also made more strawberry work and some of the most famous work that came from the east coast sour diesel strawberry cream the most popular was the strawberry switchblade and again that's in that strawberry vein it is my when people ask about my strawberry work and what I think I liked best I would say the strawberry switchblade only because it had the potency of the sour it had the looks and smell of strawberry cream and it had the color of one of the parents which was double purple doja I'm sorry it was double red doja which was a hybrid of double purple doja and it was just blood red beautiful magenta with blood red leaves it was gorgeous and that trait passed on pretty regularly in the strawberry switchblade so it was like the best of all three parents constantly lining up well but like realistically CBF's line was so good and so true breeding for whatever reason I don't know if he had taken it generations and that's what I got or it just lined up perfectly but for whatever reason his line was so true breeding that anything I touched with it was fire whether it was strawberry switchblade what I call strawberry champagne which was the blockwork cookies cut across to across to the east coast at our diesel strawberry cream there was a there is I didn't hit a lot of stuff during that because I was trying to do more selective breeding and only hitting certain females that I like a lot with it but in doing that I came out with some stuff that I really loved and that strawberry switchblade was for sure one and it still goes around and cuts all over the place yeah I think that the strawberry switchblade has some logical status within the syndicate and it gets talked about quite a bit it was in magazines a lot too which like some of the stuff like clockwork orange and strawberry switchblade my platinum banana OG my bubble work and what we'll talk about with the diesel work we're all featured in skunk magazine heavily so a lot of that can I think contributed to its mythological status more than me or more than the strain necessarily earned on its own because back then in print was like every grower and breeders goal you've got to get in high time you've got to get in skunk that's your goal I mean that's when you made it that was the thing and for me by the time it was like those years 2010-2011 I had already figured out the high times and I had already been told by Danny Danko at this point if you do not work with us you will never make it and I will guarantee it and at that point I was like fuck you, watch me watch me, watch me motherfucker, watch me so I worked with skunk magazine extensively and that was because of the Rev and like we were homies and had I not been homies maybe that wouldn't have happened but thank goodness thank goodness we were it's crazy to think that the era of print media kind of gatekeeping all this stuff wasn't that long ago no, no it wasn't and up until the Marlies bought high times I think it was still the standard that if you did not I mean maybe not as much now but up until fairly recently if you did not advertise in high times you didn't make it and for the most part if you do advertise in high times now as a breeder you still make it so it still looked at as a respectable source and I'm still blacklisted so that's never going to happen and I don't want it to, I wouldn't want it to anyway you know what I mean like at this point yeah I feel like it's definitely lost a lot of it's shine with other people in the community as well so yeah even new people and not to run to it you know you mentioned the Jizzle work maybe that's a good segue into the Jizzle work so the Jizzle I got really early on from Bodie my Fran Bodie and I haven't talked about him as much yet with how much of an influence he was on my clone work but he was a major major major reason I had any of the rare clones from the online community that I did and I guess I could talk about this part now because it is relevant during these years people were locking me out of cuts specifically if people don't know what that means it means in the cut circles because there were still only a few clone circles that really had the cuts the rare cuts and stuff like that when we were trading people would tell Bodie or other breeders yeah you can have this but make sure Matt Wright doesn't get it and it was because I was doing fem work with their clones S1 they thought that if I S1ed their clones the value would drop on their clones the trade value would be worthless and other people would grow it and their cropping would be hurt their money in their pocket would be hurt from cropping so don't give this to Matt Wright and in some respects I get that I get why they thought that way at least in my mind if they understood breeding they would understand how hard it is to get the same representation like that it's asinine but I get why they thought that and a lot of times it would be people that I liked and that were my friends doing it to me and or people I considered friends doing it to me and locking me out of cuts because they wanted to protect their money and then it would be that awkward conversation where like yo bro I get that it's not fair and it's kind of fucked and it looks like I don't like you but I don't want you feminizing my cut and your words not good enough I never ever did it never feminized anyone's anything that had any stipulations on anything but that never mattered it never mattered because the potential was there if it's in my hands for them to be scared and that was a big big problem because it wasn't just like when people locked me out that I would just be like I feel like I should signpost here for everyone that you were one of the I guess pioneers of femwork reverses yeah I mean yeah I guess like in in in American breeding there weren't a lot of us doing it there was OG rascal me CSI had done some work I believe Hyde had done some work Kymyra had done some work and there were others but like as far as doing it big with the big name you know like one of the top 50 breeders that were putting seeds out big there were only a few of us and nobody wanted to mess with rascal because he was a gangster gangster like gangbanger nobody's going to mess with rascal except me like an asshole we're friends now he didn't catch the flak that I did but I caught so much shit and it didn't help because of my attitude because when people would do that to me I'd be like okay fuck you I'm going to go to the source because you're making up rules on a clone that you have no rights to go to I'm going to find out who the source is and I'm going to go get it that's how this works it always works but a lot of times it did and that caused a lot of derision and delusion maybe from my perspective it caused some ego melting and hatred because all of a sudden the cut that they locked me out of locked me out of I got and I could pass freely because I went to the source of the person and I said did you lock people out of this cut in 99% of the time they'd be like I don't care who has that cut 99% of the time when you get to the source that's exactly how the source fills it's more people down the line that have no reason no permission to lock people out of cuts where that pops up yeah yeah I guess at the stage you're becoming an easy target as well unfortunately yeah my mouth didn't help because I'm very people that know me they see me on the reader syndicate now and me and not so talking and I try to be I got a mouth like I'm there but I'm a very reserved version of who I used to be and that's some from growing up an experience right but I was very reactionary and I still can be I don't have much of an edit button but when people challenge me it's not I've always had that in my life I was a short kid in the oil community when it's not acceptable I've always had these challenges when people challenge me I push back hard and that doesn't bode well we do that to a thousand people online over two decades people are going to get super pissed it doesn't do well and Giesel was a cut from ChemDog's crew and it was one of the ones that didn't have any stipulations so I got it from Bode and it was one of these cuts when I got it I realized holy shit this is skunky this is so skunky and during those years people weren't really looking for skunky stuff some people were but it wasn't like all the rage roadkill skunk that people try to die for I wouldn't ask this point as well did it have much of a reputation at this point at all it was in the canna bible so people knew what it was that was the other thing like with clones anything that made it in the canna bible from Jason Keane got legendary status so this was in there as one of the examples of the ChemDog family but for whatever reason because it wasn't called Chem or dog and it wasn't sour something it flew under the radar as Giesel which meant Gies diesel like Gies is ChemDog's name like we call him Gies but it was called Giesel it wasn't a name I think it wasn't a catchy name it just never caught on but it was passed to a few people and those few people were great growers and loved it because they saw all the skunkiness in it and it's a hard grow it's not super frosty it can herm so a lot of people dropped it it's paid no attention to it and over the years that's kind of what happened and so I started working with it we're super resinous and super frosty and super skunky and those got in Skunk magazine some of those got acclaimed we did Giesel cross to a west coast dog Shugnaido GBX-1 we did what else we did Giesel cross to something called ChemDogD, DNL Diesel Norden Lights from JJ New York we did I mean Giesel blue bonnet later on Giesel east coast hour diesel strawberry cream I don't think we ever did a clockwork Giesel unfortunately they were never in the room flowering at the same time to do it but pretty much Giesel has become one of my loves of my life I love the smoke of it I love how it breathes it is what I believe is a great representation of a super skunk from Neville yeah and I mean on that note and I you can cut this out if you don't want people to know this here but there you have been dropping hints that you might be returning to some Giesel work with CSI oh yeah yeah no that's fine yeah CSI I tried convincing him for years so he had the cut in 2006 and totally forgot that he ever had the cut but like it's on his clone list of stuff he had yeah he just forgot what it was like and he remember he ran it didn't care but I kept bugging him for years I'm like dude you have got to try this cut like it's so good and so skunky and you know I mean like he gets told that by hundreds of people all the time about cuts so it took me some years and years and then he finally gave it a whirl and he's like holy shit this thing is great he's not a diesel fan in the first place he doesn't like sour he doesn't like smoking sour really and so the fact that it was more like of a diesel-y type cut then it is biterp-wise more of a diesel-y type cut and looks then it would be considered a chem type cut and in smell it's not kemi necessarily it's skunky but not like burnt tennis ball rubber he just didn't seem to have much but he got it he's like oh my god this is great and so we are doing an S1 and a full reverse line together of diesel to bring it back and to bring some big-time diesel reverse back and crybabies done some work of it as well and like you know I passed the cut to people in our crew to like bitter and crybabies got it now and Denali's got it people are running it I think Pax running it too Santa Cruz Goat Farm so a lot of people are going to be doing a lot of diesel stuff and that's all because of Vody really kept the cut forever and passed it to me and without Vody doing that I never would have had it and all these other people would have had it so shout out to Vody I think it's really cool that you get to return to it again and life is a bit like that I don't know if you feel this way but I feel like life sometimes works in spirals you know you kind of come back but it's not exactly the same but you're still back in the same place it feels like and it makes me feel happy that like a lot of people don't know but me and CSI we've been very good friends for five or six years now I think really close friends but before that we weren't like we weren't enemies but we just didn't really talk much I would try to poke in and this is one of those stories where it's like a almost like a teaching regret story right and it's one that I tell to newcomers when they make similar mistakes and I first heard about CSI and saw what he was doing I was enamored with his rating skill and his knowledge and his ability to hunt down history and even on his old forum post which were around back then to look at watching him just level people that would try to scam that would try to just be corrupt he would level them and he would level them with their own words and let them do it and just ask like two two word questions and let them disassemble themselves in front of everyone it's magic to watch and he can still do it but he does it less because of the the flak that I caught, the flak that he caught people were fucking nuts when you do this to him I would love to go dig through the forum archives for some of those and most of them aren't even there anymore which sucks all those forums are gone most of them so I was enamored with his work so I sent him a message early on and I was like hey I am good friends with blank and it was someone I thought that he was super close with and that I knew had gotten clones of CSI stuff so I assumed that they must be super close I know that this dude's gone to his house he says they're good friends so I'm like okay I'm gonna name drop this person that's a good friend of mine that I've done money I've given it like his truck was getting impounded so I fucking let him stick his name on a collab and sell seeds to a seed bank and gave him all the seeds for free to keep the money you know like things like this big things and I assume this was a very good friend of mine so I said this is a mutual friend I would love to speak to you more dude I'm really really into what you do well this is where that moral of the story comes in always be careful how you introduce yourself to people because you never know what their real impression is of the person you're name dropping if you name drop a person and you only have one chance to make a first impression and if you name drop someone that is bad and a scammer and all that shit no one's gonna talk to you and for 10 years he stayed away from me because of that because he's super careful like he doesn't want to invite chaos in his life and I don't blame him like he's an easy man you know like yeah he doesn't do the form drama stuff anymore all like it's just not in his life so he was very hesitant to talk to me so several years ago emerald cup we had a booth next to each other I was working with NCGA and splitting a booth and I noticed CSI was next to me at the booth so and he never really responded to my message and I knew he had seen it and through other people I had heard that he didn't like what I had to say about like males and fem seeds and stuff like that which in the end he was correct he was absolutely correct and I was a noob so he had all these other notions about me so I went up and I shook his hand said hi I'm at the right seeds really appreciate you and your work and what you do for cannabis nice to meet you and that was it walked away sat down because I knew he was busy like I was busy people are coming up grabbing seeds and take too much of people's time from there this is where they make the most money in the year and so after that he messaged me or emailed me or no it was on Instagram he messaged me and he was like hey here's my number hit me up and so we talked and he explained some of the preconceived notions and he said he really respected that despite all of that that I still came up shook his hand and walked and didn't like say hey why didn't you do this why didn't you email me back you know like any petty shit it was just like man hey dude I respect you and that's that and he appreciated that and then we started talking and quickly became best of friends we're very close friends our group's big we're all best friends in our group but yeah I mean like we're very close and he's one of the people I would do anything for and it was weird because I went from going from someone who is an absolute fanboy fanboy extreme like in my mind still there's no one better in cannabis that's ever done it not Rob Clark not anyone no offense to Rob because I think he's a god of cannabis but as far as breeding work showing it having all of it and the amount of real breeding work that's gone in and the years of it no one's done it more does it better no one's done it more precise and to go from that to being someone's close friend and he mentors me in ways like teaches me things and I get to learn from him that is a mind-blowing process that's happened to me a few times over the years and despite all of the opinions online about me and the magnitude of fucking discuss that it seems like people have I've been fortunate to work with who I have yeah and we will come back to some of those events as well but yeah that your friendship with CSI sounds really special and the same goes for Bodhi too because I hold Bodhi in the same esteem and he was probably the main inspiration for what I made and what I worked with early on even before we were close friends I just saw what he was doing and I thought cool he's doing something no one else is doing what like purple kush double purple doja this isn't what the Dutch people are working with this is freaking cool you know it's beautiful and so he was a major inspiration for my early work and it was the same kind of deal we became friends and slowly became very close and over the years definitely a mentor in my life a hundred thousand percent a mentor in my life not just with breeding but in life how to deal with people how things how we should look at things this perspective is so unique he's a beautiful human so yeah no really cool and yeah those two figures especially definitely strike me even as someone who's this far away as being really special spirits and you know community and it's crazy but also you know they both recognize you and what you're doing so that's that's a trip and it's an honor and to this day I still have trouble wondering why you better believe in that you better believe it dude yeah I just it's hard to understand why you know what I mean but it's I nonetheless I respect them and I thank them you know like it's not like a something I've ever overlooked very sweet alright so we've got a big one coming up which is about all your blueberry work and how you encountered it to begin with and why you decided to keep going with it we did talk about the fact that you might still want to have a dedicated blueberry episode later on so maybe this can be like a miniaturized version oh yeah yeah so blueberry the first blueberry I ever smoked was from this I won't say his name because this is like we were doing a lot of other dirt this dude in town and it was after the medical clubs it all opened up so this is like 2003 or four and he was bringing in kilos and kilos and kilos of fucking blueberry and it was phenomenal blueberry it wasn't it had a blueberry flavor that was zinging the tip of your tongue so hard to describe but it wasn't as blueberry smelling as what I love in blueberry but the fact that it was zinging the tip of your tongue and had a little bit of blueberry taste was just phenomenal and it had a great high so it was one of the ones that I smoked very early on that I was chasing so when I started buying seeds and learning that you could import seeds from Amsterdam and actually the beginning of that Seed Buying Experience the UK became very big it was the end of importing seeds from Amsterdam Direct and when the UK Seed Bank started popping up and one of those early ones was like Seed Madness UK SeedMadness.co.uk not sure if they're still around and if they are not sure that that's the same URL but that's what it was during those years they were great people nice people not scammers and maybe a few years after that like the attitude popped up but during the years these years a lot of the Seed Banks were on forums and they were small British forums where people bought their seeds and they're not around anymore to look at none of them Pot Pimp, Kanazon, Kinetics, Cali, something rather it was a bunch of little tiny Seed Banks like that and that's where I went to SeedMadness.co.uk and that's where I bought all of my DJ Short stuff and I remember I had gotten a big bonus at Sony and I spent a large chunk all at once on Blueberry Flow Flow F13 Cocoa Cush Bannaluna I think those are the main four there might be an oh great crush those are the big five that I bought early on those five and Dougie had a clone of Blue Velvet Blue Heaven and Blue Moonshine so I got to run all this stuff and after spending a ridiculous amount of money so much money on Blueberry I didn't find much that I liked Can I get you to pause there I just wanted to ask you why were you interested in those lines to begin with? Because of that that zing on my tongue that was literally it it was unique I never had that and it was like wow that's what Blueberry is I'd like to check that out again and that was literally it I didn't know in Cannabis that I had quite experienced yet that it like then like oh my god I'm obsessed but the other thing was DJ Short's books and pictures they were the most beautiful plants I had ever seen in my life they were beautiful purple the leaves were purple purple how they grew was real unique they were just so unique looking that it was just stood out in Cannabis so much during this era there was really a lot of purples you were seeing there was not a lot of purple oracle work online some but there was a purples are kind of rare so things like double purple dojo popping up and Sputnik one and two those kind of purples and blackberry stuff were rare hard to get and people were chasing it and it was being kind of gate kept DJ Short's work was another way to get purples but we all knew it would take selection because we had heard you know that maybe you won't find stuff you like in every packet DJ Short's the major problem I had was the seed germination rate was very very very low like we're talking four or five packs of one thing didn't pop at all and my germ rate by this time my germ skills at this time were really good and Hogg was helping me pop these and his were excellent so it was like I can look back and say probably not my fault this time and later on there was that normal to have that kind of germ rate even for that time fairly yeah like the seeds that were the seeds you would get in packs dude during that time probably even now I don't know I don't buy other breeders packs there were a lot of immature seeds in here like not just small because small seeds can be mature right small seeds come from all plants some plants have only small seeds small black ones with no tiger stripes some are big fat gray and modeled with no tiger stripes tiger stripe for people that don't know are is a thin layer of sheath that can come off the skin like the husk if people don't know that so like it's not necessarily a descriptor of maturity but it's a great way to tell you know it looks better when they're all like that but the seeds you would get in these packs were just totally immature no weight or heft to them you could squish them pop them in your fingers with no problem no things like that so that was common but five packs that was not common and what ended up happening later on was they had to replace every single DJ short pack that they sold during this era for every customer because everyone was having these germ rates so it wasn't just me at this time it ended up being a big deal for the UK buyers let's see what else was there so we went through those I found two flow clones that I kept and I had an F-13 that I really liked I thought was beautiful but no blueberries there was nothing that was hardcore blueberry nothing that was berry berry berry smelling and that was disappointing to me it's not like if you go through enough of this stuff you're going to find berry berry berry I was excited I spent a lot of money and when I got a few beautiful plants I got some that smelled like floral incense floral incense and slight berry like the slightest but by this time I had already smelled the Dabney blue cut a little bit which was blueberry muffins a little bit and I thought this is phenomenal I know there's better and shortly after this a guy named Astartes from a form called Poppimp gave me DJ's mom cut of blueberry and this one had more berry to it and was purple and beautiful and it can breed berry plants not often but it can right so yeah that's when I started the berry obsession and the berry work eventually I was working at a place called DC as their master grower that's what the title they gave me master grower at their collective to grow and they were letting me breed at the time and someone brought in a a jar of bud and when I got this bud I smelled it and it smelled like peanut butter it was amazing like jiffy sweet creamy peanut butter and I was like oh my god and it had seeds in it and I was like we let me pick these seeds out and he was like yeah just be careful to pick them out and I was like okay cool so I uncarefully picked them out destroyed the bud because that's what you have to do to get all the good seeds to destroy the shit out of the bud and I asked and I was like hey dude what is this and he said because it was being sold as strawberry cough and I knew that he changed that shit all the time like I'll collect this and so what is this and he said well we have a strawberry cough but they brought it in as blueberry but it doesn't smell like blueberry I was like okay so I made a mental note about the taste of the peanut butter this is great so I took those seeds home popped them and out came the most purple blueberry smelling tasting plant I have ever seen by this up to this point it looked like what DJ Short had shown is Oregon purple tie back in the day and it was purple blueberry zero peanut butter in it and it was like an Afghani type plant this one had more what people would consider narrow leaf traits and just purple blueberry and this is the cut that I originally named riot berry and that I used for all of my earliest blueberry work so this was like in a way the very first moment of actually having what you were looking for this is the moment where I was like this is the one with the taste and smell of blueberry in the looks but what it didn't have was any sort of potency but what it did have was medical relevance what I noticed so when I realized this I was out of all my weed and I had a tooth abscess at the time and I was like in tears and pain right I didn't have dental insurance nothing I was in pain it was my very first tooth abscess I didn't know what was going on but I felt like I was dying like ibuprofen wasn't helping nothing so I smoked some riot berry because it was all I had and I expected nothing to happen it was just what I had and immediately the nerve pain went away from that tooth and I wasn't in pain and I was like holy shit this is magical amazing so I started giving it to other people in the crew that had back pains, nerve pains and they were experiencing the same thing they were getting anti-anxiety effects and complete relief from nerve pain but they didn't they didn't get high at all so they could go to work, do stuff my goal was to make some potency with this so I crossed it into an OG Kush Pakistani chatrally regular sea lion that I had for a male side and I made what became called riot berry OG and from there I selected actually I didn't even select this one a dude named Jeremiah selected a clone from that and he gave it back to me and that's what I used in my lines is riot berry OG and almost every line from from 2008 on or no I'm sorry 2010 on would be with the riot berry OG strictly would this be like your first generation I guess of blueberry work because I did release the riot berry seeds originally as riot berry true and I think I even gave out a bunch of the bag seeds that I had left because there were shit load of seeds in that jar so I even gave those seeds out but I made F2s of original riot berry so what I thought would be a blueberry version of that clone in male form which I who knows to this day if it was correct but it made a nice berry line so the riot berry was the first one the riot berry OG was where I was like fucking slam it out of the park it wasn't enough to be relevant cross it to everything see how it breeds and it was true reading for the blueberry trait this is where I made things like blueberry cookies which we called cookie berry and which is probably my most knocked off line today like renamed we made something called cookie berry diesel which was during my when we were doing the day record diesel BX1 for the male side when we were crossing that to everything that's when I made the cookie berry diesel and that was crossing cookie berry a best selection of the cookie berry which was the riot berry OG berry dominant Pino cross to Girl Scout cookies form cut reversed in 2011 made those and then cross that to the original diesel BX1 which is the project following the cookies reversal am I right in thinking as well that you are one of the earlier people to work with cookies yeah in 2010 cookies kind of popped up and by 2011 it was almost a race to some people to get it put out I it became a race when people found out that I got the cut from lumpy and was making S1s because like there weren't many people feminizing at that point and and that and they knew I was going to put it out pure right so first person to put out anything cookies that I recall was a company called can adventure and they put out a cookies crossed to some sort of train wreck hybrid right so I think they called it cookie wreck well not even two months later my reversal is done and we're testing it like we're already in the middle of testing by that point and I have train wreck crossed to cookies and I have cookies crossed to pretty much everything in my room at that point because I want to see how this unique weird plant that people are obsessing over braids and be the first person to see how braids reversed so I put out the cookies pure and then not even a week later swerve from Callie Connection put out his version of cookies fems which when people actually and people were buying his versus mine when people grew his out it was just OG Kush and we're super pissed and BC Bud Depot within a week like the same week as mine came out put out their version of cookies and animal cookies because I did cookies and I almost put out the animal cookies s ones but I but at the last minute after I made them someone said that I'm not allowed to so I didn't nor can I see Mac thank you for that one because he said I wasn't allowed to so I didn't but yeah BC Bud Depot released a fake version of animal cookies which ruined that line and name and then they also put out a fake version of cookies too but like I said when this happens people just jump to the cheapest or who has the biggest name but that doesn't necessarily mean any of those people have the clone because they're the ones who are advertising in high times and get the first sales doesn't mean that they have the ability to get the clone or the morals to do it correctly and that's what people saw but it took for people to grow these things out and see who actually had the legit shit and by that time in that year other people had gotten it and were starting to make crosses and release them with a real cut and what I had done with it meant nothing you know and by that time when I when everybody got the cut I didn't want my name to be associated with it anymore so it's like I'm going to sink back into the shadows that I even used you know like instead of trying to be like no man I was the first that I was just like like nah y'all have it I'm good it was the same way with like working with gelato 33 you know I was the first one of the first with that cut and the first to make s1s the first to make gelato 33 with with Skittles and shit and which became runs and I'm like you know I don't want anything to do with this stuff but the reason I say that now is because in retrospect it just became hype stuff when I was doing it I wanted to see what was in it because nobody else was working with it it was unique yeah of course yeah and so okay coming coming back then to your blueberry journey after cookie berry so after cookie berry and the right berry og stuff I lost my my right berry og mom the blueberry one in a play I got this plague of something which probably was HPLV looking back but a plague of something killed every mom in my room including that from taking clones in from outside clones and not being just enough and using the same razor blade shit like that just being not being fastidious because most people weren't the time if you're from being real like we didn't know about HPLV and all that shit so that took out the mom and I was like okay I've made the best blueberry shit I could ever make I'm done I can move on and that's when I moved on to strawberry work right but I sold out of all of these seeds people bought all of my seeds and during these years I wasn't making a lot of money so like I was literally selling every last pack of everything I had and because I'm not a shitbag like I like to think I'm not I didn't continue to pretend I had these cuts for seed lines just to keep making sales yeah so the lines were discontinued I no longer had the cut and I was done but I felt like I had done everything I could with blueberry at that point so we jumped to what I told you about was when all of my clones got lost with the tissue culture person who will remain nameless because he doesn't deserve to be named when that happened I lost every clone in my room and I was like oh my god I need to do something new and I had always had this long affinity for blueberry and during those years I hadn't smoked any and because I sold every last seed of everything I had of my right very OG stuff I was like hmm I wonder and I remember during my blueberry years on breed bay there was a student named Lone Star and people would talk his blueberry up all the time like this is the most blueberry thing I've ever had and of course my ego during those years didn't let me like oh really let me check out your blueberry mine was already like fuck your blueberry I got the best one right I don't need his shit they just don't know so when I lost everything I looked in my seed collection and realized that I had a massive massive selection of all the blueberry lines that I could find over the years like I just collected all my precious leaves collecting all these things so I was looking at my seed stash and I was like huh I really love blueberry and I'd like to jump back into that and I popped everything that I had not every seed of everything but every line seeds of every line and a good amount I could name it but it's just pretty much think of every old DJ short line you could possibly think of and every hybrid that would like you know the BC hybrids and what not I really wasn't finding anything and one of the lines that I had been given was Lone Stars Blue Bonnet from Bode had kept them over the years and in this line there was a female in it that was just phenomenally blueberry phenomenally blueberry and there was this male and I don't usually go by stem rubs but he over the years of running blueberry even from my first experience I learned selecting with blueberry even in females there's a purple stripe that runs down some of these stocks and there's certain traits you can look for that will show you some of the more blueberry turped expressions if you're lucky it doesn't always denote it but it denotes it enough to where it's a good place to start and we all need a starting point in my mind that was a starting point and there was this male in the room that would raise it's families 85-80 degrees from top to bottom he grew pretty big, he grew fast his families instead, when I say crane, some people think about the top leaves praying, the top little sets praying when they're happy this was every family from the bottom angled like this it's raising it's fucking hands straight up and I was like wow he has the purple stripe stocks, his stem rub smells insanely like blueberry I'm gonna give this dude a shot I'm gonna try this and see what this male does and so I became more hyper focused on the male with my females because at this time I had masked some of my favorite females in my collection ever because of all the clones getting wiped out I had to go back and resource so during the time I'm popping all these seeds I'm also resourcing my whole library from people I got it back there's a dude that I haven't named yet I absolutely love that I have to bring in at this point because he helped me amass my library back and this is Matt Elite from Elite Cannabis one of my best friends on earth he's one of those dudes that like really wants to remain nameless in Cannabis so he's probably gonna be annoyed that I even mention him you know but he's a beautiful human being and his sourcing on cuts and him and Dave from Elite Cannabis their sourcing on cuts was phenomenal as good as me or CSI or anyone and he held a lot of the rare chems and day records and stuff and so I was able to get day record back things that I worked with earlier all the OG cuts triangle all that shit I got back and the chems and Bodie wrote came he's like he wrote me a message and he's like I heard you lost your whole library I'll be up in a week that's literally all he said I'll be up in a week and he came up and he dropped off all these plants he drove them up to me or drove them down I should say to me what a fucking angel I mean like this dude is a rock star in our community and just like he is so busy and he drove me down clones bro and CSI we had one of our meetups for the Cannaluminati which we'll talk about later maybe and we met up and he brought me clones too like really rare clones so during this blueberry work I have a mass one of my best collections ever just be I mean and it was only because the community and my friends stepped up and saw what I had lost and knew how tragic that would be for them and gave me those so I was like oh my god a male let's see what he does you know with this F with this female some of the other selections from DJ stuff were real interesting this round including one from his blueberry line that came from seeds resin long had from one of the lectures DJ gave in California at a collective so he had kept these old seeds of flow and this and I pop those the flow really didn't do much the there was one blueberry that was semi blueberry smelling with a little bit of shitty backwater but it was blue and it looked like every single cut from his book that I would have ever wanted so I had the looks and I was wondering if this male ejecting this male in that line would pull those blueberry dominant genes out further that blueberry scent and we would have a line that looked like DJ's but smelled like possibly like the blue bonnet right so all this was done on remembering the stories about loan stars the trait of the purple stocks the stem rub and a wing and a prayer so I went into this with that had all the clones from my buddies re-amassed I had the selections from all the different blueberries and we did our first bonnet run and that male ended up being so good by my perspective and by a lot of other people to be honest like and in saying that I had very little to do with it like the selection was pure luck and a little bit of experience but the work was done by loan star and the guy we got it from and the blueberries he got from him and people before him DJ short even so when I inherited this line it did the work and I was just lucky enough that I paid attention to the traits of him raising his hand even you know like it was kind of like I felt like the dude spoke to me in a weird fucked up way pick me that's how I felt from the jump I genuinely felt that pick me was that word for word that's what I thought he was saying pick me and it ended up being producing the best lines expressions of lines that I have ever seen to date consistently it consistently puts these out so it became the community is just reinforcing that yeah yeah right like and it became this thing where like I don't know that I ever want to move on from it and it's it's hard because when you find a male that is true breeding cannabis like this and can make consistent stuff that is so rare because it's so hard to select male traits in cannabis because they look different from females and their expressions look different from the same expression in a female that picking is such a shotgun method that when you find it's like you won the lottery right it is a lottery ticket it really is and it doesn't it's not a lottery ticket in the sense of this is going to make me money it's a genetic lottery ticket in the sense of how it breeds yeah and that's me the most valuable tool right so I tried to back him up and not only that the place that I gave him to I said you can share this mail with anyone anyone who wants it can use it because I feel like it's a valuable breeding tool not just for injecting blueberry into lines but it has a similar like anxiety effect and a similar pain effect to the original riot berry that I had found so this is not just a breeding tool it's a medical tool so I felt like it would be very selfish of me to sit on this and to not share it so I gave it to a major nursery but there it contracted HPLV and was put to sleep so the work that exists with that mail exists and the mail is gone the mail is gone unfortunately it guts me but I do have more seeds of the F1 the original seeds and I think that I'm hoping that he pops up enough that he will show up again in the amount of seeds I have the F2s I have the BX1s and what I've noticed is in these lines even in the hybrids whether it's blooper skunk, resin kush any of them there is a mail and the punchy bluster as well which is how the punchy bluster stuff for our news work all the mails do this and every single one of those mails breeds blue traits and blue turps so it is looking like it's a link trait at least it may the blueberry turps come through even when that trait doesn't show up but it for sure shows up when I see that trait and it breeds true when I see that trait so you've got like a strong correspondence causation and correlation type thing and it seems to be true across all lines which means it's true breeding across all lines and that's special so I'm not as upset as I was about losing the mail because I really think you can go through any of these hybrids and select that trait and find something that will breed just as similar as the mail did for those turps maybe not look but turps affect and potency and all that and that's the other thing that the blue bonnet line had that mine never did was extreme recreational potency one of the cuts yesterday or yeah someone had the blooper skunk tested yesterday now Giesel does not test high ever it's like 15 16 consistently in from places that are more reliable for testing consistent with their testing so he hit me back and he's like this line is testing so thank you and I'm like wow a blueberry that injects that kind of potency and everything is so phenomenal I mean we're getting results back on the blue resin kush that has 7.5 percent total turps 5 percent mercy 5.5 percent mercy in that one and some are 3.5 percent mercy and some are 5 percent mercy in small pops like six seed pops so yeah it's bringing true for a lot of wild extreme traits so it's almost like even if I wanted to move on because I feel so strong about its potency its medical relevance I find it very hard to move on I feel a responsibility with it even if people don't care even if it never makes me any money you know because trying to resell blueberry like I've talked about is hard people have had experiences with dg shorts positive or negative so if it's positive they're like I've already found a good one if it's negative I've already run blueberry why would I want to run one that shits boo you know that's a lot of the attitude I get so it and it's I respect it because I had that same attitude for a long time I think I do want to ask you about you know what the future holds but this is also a good time for me to ask one of the questions I got from one of our syndicate members absolutely and it's a hard question go ahead it's from jet I don't I've never known how to say this guy's name jabs zix jabs yx okay jabs x asks if you have one what's your favorite to have ever popped out of the barn at work so I have to say maybe a top two or top three I'll give you a top three three all for different reasons the silver pearl blue bonnet which we called the cream one because it lets the silver pearl come through so well with all of the other bonnet traits except for the berry my favorite expressions in that line are the strictly silver pearl traits with bonnet potency and bonnet type high which is pretty close to the the silver pearl type high real quality anti anxiety not a ton of cerebral like the dumb mouth stuff that I talk about but everything else so that's one of because I love the smell of silver pearl it's one of my favorites a second one would be punchy bluster and that's because I've always really enjoyed the grape combination with blueberry like the blueberry jam when you tape like the picture taking great jam and smelling it like smuckers like insane mouth watering delicious smell and grape amplifies the blueberry and blueberry amplifies the grape so that's one of those ones that is just so extreme and it's so loud across the board when you have a room full of popped punchy bluster seeds it's mostly all your smelling in a room even if you have like other strong neuro G's in there that are putting off dink smells this stuff so loud great blueberry with no skunky smells that it's just wild wild wild yeah would cut through it cuts through yeah it's crazy so that's one for that reason and I love the smell and taste and the potency is screaming you know it's way up there has THC percents that everybody loves and the third out of the hybrids would be the fish because after seeing the test results of the amount of mercy which is a is something we know has as major medical effects and the THC percentage with the extracts I know it's going to be probably one of the most medically relevant plants that I've ever ever had the pleasure of releasing and because it was a project between me and my boy resin long who I love a lot that's my boy so there's a few few levels of love for that and the medical part I really do think it's going to be the most medically important plant that I've ever touched and I don't know if that means that it will be in the future and like people will take hold of it I just know that the potential is there for it to be that great well I had a few questions to kind of round out this section on your breeding work okay and I guess these are more like narrow questions or more focused questions okay first one I have is what was some notable you know quote unquote failures or quote unquote dead ends in some of your work so the first one was a lot of people don't know this but like I did auto flower breeding feminized auto flower breeding really early I had no idea yeah one of my main mentors in feminized seeds who taught me well there's a few Shanti Baba was one you taught me how to make femme seeds and he was resistant to it he did not like them at the time and he let me know that but he was also willing to teach me which was unreal like you have one of the best breeders on earth teaching you that was phenomenal also Ernesto from Buddha seeds Spain who most people don't know his name or his company they think of big Buddha seeds Milo the Buddha seeds was from Spain and a lot of people don't know they are one of the biggest seed companies on earth but it's not because they're auto flower work they are one of the resellers of seeds meaning not resellers they're one of the major retailers of seeds in Spain bulk retailers the only competition they had for a long time was like a dinofem Mamota but they were one of the first doing it for that and they were retailing like greenhouse seeds they were actually buying seeds from Ernesto during those eras or Nirvana or any of those places and he taught me how to make feminine seeds and he taught me how he was doing it and how he was breeding for auto trades so I started with his work called white dwarf and it was a white widow crossed to I believe a lowrider number two is what he chose or maybe his lowrider number one and he bred that in and made a very what we considered auto flower and so I brought this to America I feminized I reversed some of his auto flower females and we made um what did we combine it with I think we combined it with lowrider one ourselves if I remember correctly that was what we popped it was lowrider one or two ourselves to make our line white rider I believe we called it which I hate the name now it's the name it's like sounds naziish or something like white rider it really does and that's the name of a nazi album like punk rock album that I didn't even know about so like yeah it's not my favorite anyways it was a great line for an auto line but with this at the same time I was also popping white or purple widow from Deshaman seeds this is Ingamar Deshaman's company who made white widow so I thought like for sure I was going to get the best purple widow ever what I got was an auto flowering herm that was totally purple from birth but because it was totally purple like from the jump and it wasn't like environmentally purple and it didn't turn purple later on which is what most purples were would turn purple later on it was a true breeding purple I tried breeding it into the white rider because it already had the auto flower trait which wasn't advertised on the package ever because it had that I wanted to see if I could outcross the or like incross that without bringing in the hermit trait and I had the line purple rider and it was all herms it was all herms it was fucking all auto flowering but it was all herms and I took it to F3 and released it like wasted time on this shit and yeah so that was that was my worst line ever without any doubts I made an auto flowering true breeding herm without any doubts that was the worst line but there's other lines like I have a green crack BX1 that I made using the Platinum Banana OG BX1 is the outcross and with green crack crossed in twice and it was so far away from green crack by the BX1 that I just stopped just cut the line killed it I gave it out to friends but yeah I just didn't release it because it was so bad it wasn't bad it was a great line but like people would have liked it it was Platinum Banana OG though like it was not green crack so the name was a total misnomer I probably could have changed the name and sold it but I was so mad that it was so far away from where I wanted it to be that I was just like screw it bird seed gave it to the bird realistically I found some of the packs left but Chacha I got a lot of them there are so many times like that though a lot of times it was the BX1s because I would try to make a BX1 line and not go BX2 or BX3 because to me there's no point in taking stuff that far you should be able to take it to BX1 and go trade and that's that if you do it correctly and have a male breeding line and I always wanted to make a male breeding line as opposed to the S1s during a long period because I just got so much shit for feminized seeds and everybody fucking hated me it was locking me out of cuts because I'm making fem seeds so I started doing the BX1 thing well that's a good segue because the next question is actually from Shawnee and it is about fems it is about reversals as you've alluded to it was quite a controversial thing for you to be doing at the time so the question I guess from Shawnee is kind of like taking a slightly different stance and it's like looking back from where we are now how did reversals eventually become the norm and if you could go back how would you explain to someone that had that more conservative mentality of why reversals are useful wow okay so how did it become the norm you know I think because I know about this is that I know that there are a couple of myths that float around that kind of like trigger slash tickle you so at the beginning I guess I got to talk about the beginning and the myths to start this so at the beginning there was a myth that feminized seeds because it's missing a male chromosome would ruin cannabis the genome the genetics as a whole like that was a real concern like that I was doing GMO work and that I was going to ruin cannabis because of feminized seeds Americans tended to have this attitude the Dutch had I didn't notice this attitude over there except with a few companies like Mr. Nice and stuff and he wouldn't be considered Dutch because by this time he'd moved to Switzerland but he wasn't you know Amsterdam for a long time he carried the attitude of that a lot of people also carry this weird I don't want to say I shouldn't say weird this very religious Christian mindset that if God God didn't feminize seeds therefore it's unnatural breeding and I want nothing to do with it sometimes God doesn't come into play when they say that they just say this is unnatural and I want nothing to do with it this is not organic and I don't want anything to do with it so those are the two main mindsets that were going around I can't think of many others Femmes oh all Femmes Herm that was the other one right because of my experience with Ingemar the Shamans which a lot of people had that experience they were buying from Amsterdam and they were popping feminized seeds and they were getting Herms but what they didn't really take into account was that they were popping regular seeds and getting Herms too at the same rate and it wasn't specific to Femmes yeah but the myth was set anyways because it was like oh Femmes are new I'm getting Herms Femmes cost more so I bought Femmes expecting better this sucks right fuck these things and it was a lot of that basically my main argument to like the God community or the organic community was that in nature cannabis is an intersex plant that's right and it wants to be intersex and only because of humans human intervention and breeding we have pushed this plant to try to choose between male or female that's not natural to push it and to make it and to breed it towards that direction that was only done by man and man's intervention using their mindset technically we are restoring cannabis back to where it was as an intersex plant onto the missing chromosomes destroying cannabis all it takes is crossing in a male to a feminized plant you're back to regular yep there are also things called autosomes that control that are not the sexual chromosomes of the X's and Y's that also control sexual expression in cannabis and trying to explain that to people is really hard because they don't even understand chromosomes and autosomes in the first place but it just shits all over that argument because there's already autosomes controlling this which is why in feminized seeds you can have a plant that expresses fully male with no female traits that fully male no female traits send it in to be tested and it will test all female because that's how cannabis is it can express yeah it can express all female without any female chromosomes because the autosomes are telling hey we need balls here so that's an issue that people don't take into account because it's way beyond their comprehension level of cannabis all fems harm it's really shit in, shit out which a lot of people do understand you put in shit, you're going to get out shit so if you have two plants that are naturally intersex and want to remain intersex and you feminize one or you feminize that plant and pollinate itself the likelihood is that it's progeny will have those same traits and it's not because it's feminized it's because it already had those leanings yeah and actually because it's feminized it actually takes it two generations not two generations what would be several generations of regular inbreeding further in and so you're getting more of the recessive traits including the intersex traits so technically because it was shit it amplifies the shit but if it wasn't shit it wouldn't be amplified if that makes sense so fem seeds can contribute to more of the herms but because it was shit you were always going to get the herms yeah totally so yeah so it's a weird kind of like self-defeatist type model like it's your setup to fail in the first place by what they chose and the genetics you wanted anyways um how it became popular I really just think that it was over the years of me selling fem spray um they started their attitudes changed and what was funny I noticed the big change was when breeders that were shit talking feminized seeds majorly started buying the fem spray off me behind the scenes and started doing it and started playing with it and realized oh it wasn't that hard I can make fem seeds and I can charge more for this these things are fire you know and then there were breeders like Kanarado who didn't buy my spray saw the advantages of it and he was a well known figure who was really well liked and in the community already and so by him doing fem and eye seeds kind of okay yes I popped up he's super respected he popped back up I should say and he was releasing fem and eye seeds now too he's respected so that's okay you know Ojiirask will never caught me flak really for it that I remember because he was scary and intimidating so you know it just slowly the attitude changed to where they weren't people that you could shit talk fem seeds and more people were buying the spray and doing it behind the scenes and realizing I can do this if I don't have to mix these chemicals and do all this hard shit I can do this you know you basically provided a platform for people to actually start doing it and it's funny thing I think about that product of yours and the thing about is that it's almost too good like once someone has a bottle of that stuff they don't really have to come back to you for years yeah that became an issue like I'm creating competitors too in the market and that also became an issue of contention for a lot of the fucking shit talk after the fact one of my main people that hates my guts and shit talks me everywhere hates me on the premise that I created competitors for him he said you are arming the enemy literally word for word so yeah I didn't look at it that way no and I mean that's the thing right like you're playing a different game like for a lot of these people it's like a zero sum game whereas for you you're just thinking about how to better equip the community I'm thinking we're on a level playing field and if they do this for these clones that they have maybe they're clones that I don't have and I can get those S1s and I can look to that line finally because they used my spray and they did it right like that's my mindset it's gonna be more dank out there for all of us yeah and another charitable paraphrase of that is that you thought it would be mutually beneficial it is yeah for sure it's mutually beneficial absolutely and like groups the way groups work and the way they thrive best is when everything's mutually beneficial because everybody's working for each other and it doesn't have to be a one to one type thing like people think all the time sometimes mutually beneficial means 100 people buy that spray or I give away 100 bottles of that spray which is also the case to other breeders and I say you know like you know if you like it if it works for you just drop me a little ad or like say you liked it make a post with it I really loved it and you get to see very quickly how many people respect that or don't there's all kinds of things that are like it was mutually beneficial for me to see that they weren't good people or that they didn't respect me like I'd hope so that's mutually beneficial for me even though it cost me money it wasn't so much that I lost the outweighing of losing that money for shipping and stuff because this particular person isn't worth doing business with in the future so there's that mutual beneficial too like benefits come in losses oddly enough yeah for sure because information is still a benefit all data is a benefit to me if you're a nerd and you pay attention to shit all data is a benefit even bad data even erroneous data it's still data no very cool really great response and a great question from Shawnee as well I'm glad that he got that in there so okay zooming out a little bit more and just thinking now about this is the last question for the breeding work the future and I know probably again quite a hard and like very open question but what do you think the future holds for your breeding work right now because I'm so focused on the syndicate be it this podcast be it the discord the patreon discord or or a close friend group I've been focusing more on that in community building than I have on plants because it takes a lot I mean realistically it takes a lot of time like people don't know how much behind the scenes stuff goes on but like it isn't even just me like guys like thousand Shawnee crybaby not so we are working on this shit way more than we probably should that's helping so like breeding for the future a lot of it is going to be collaborative stuff because I feel like this was built to not only just I didn't want to ever prop myself up with this shit because that just looks like a used car salesman that's why like I was so hesitant to do the episode in the first place but friends who maybe are way better than me what they do or at least I feel that way and haven't gotten a shine because they're quiet or because they don't want to deal with sales they don't want to deal with the drama of sales because drama comes with sales and having to see a company every time people start hating you um they don't want to deal with that so in doing this I spent a lot of time on that and my future like I have the projects collaborations with CSI there's going to be a lot of those um there's going to be a big one coming with not so dog CSI and the syndicate that I'm going to help with that one's going to be big like people have been waiting for not so release this is the feminized not so release coming it's coming soon very soon so you know I'm stoked on that one um we have I mean the punchy project I just did here locally I'm getting to teach someone as I you know teach someone the blue bonnet traits that come through in the punchy stuff and like getting to teach on hand which I I've always been the student like it's fun you know um I think that that does sum up in a way like uh what you're just saying right that like you're kind of leaning now towards other people and kind of like um equipping other people yeah and I mean like where I realize like this is my livelihood too as a seed company it's always it's it's been my livelihood and I'm pretty open about that like making money off cannabis some people denounce them to cry it but like I really feel like if you're good to it in the plant and advancing it like there's not there's not a lot of disrespect going on there you know um but I also feel like in doing so we owe it to build the community forward and saying that is one thing the actions are way fucking bigger and I watched and waited and waited and I've never felt like I'm the right person to do this for many reasons and we haven't gotten to it and it's already like far in on the controversies but like we're going to head there next so okay and I mean this is a good way to segue then like I don't I didn't even know if I was the right person to do this but no one was doing it and if they were they were doing it I feel with selfish agendas yeah and even though I may I am not even the right person to do this because of my breath whether deserved or not I did it and I hope someone does it better even like I'm it's not even like it's not like this is the only one that can happen I want everyone to do this it would be so much better if everybody had syndicates out there I will say this as like again a relative outsider you know just home-growing hobbyist sure as someone who's kind of explored quite a few of these different communities and of course I'm biased now you know I'm kind of a transgender syndicate but it is by far the most genuine community like cannabis community that I've found where you can have actual genuine interactions with other people that are meaningful and that don't have just this like constant backdrop of marketing and sales which is what you do find in many of the other discords and communities sales pumping hard hard and all the discords are structured like shops basically yeah yeah that's what they are they're structured to be a little cult shops if we're being real like little mini cult shops like here's me on a pedestal I'm the man let me tell you what to buy and that's something that not only me but Shawnee and other moderators like people that aren't breeders remind people daily in our and ours because yeah we want to kick over every statue in cannabis like not to disrespect but to for people to realize anyone can pop a pack of seeds from anyone not from me from anyone even idiots you know like you can buy seeds from idiots and pop a pack of seeds and find something that is as good as any elite cut out there it's anybody can do that you can educate yourself better to have better chances at finding a good breeder who does actual work that has the real clone that you want that increases your odds and probably a better way of spending money and your investments but anybody can pop anything anytime that's equally as good as anything that I found and that's what we want to reinforce pedestals they lead to nothing but disappointed you know because no one's perfect most people are assholes most breeders that like flex like they're rich and like you want to be like them they're not like that's a smoke of mirrors these aren't those days of rich breeders no okay cool well that's a really nice kind of statement about you know at least part of your mission with the syndicate and we'll come back to it again for right now you know I didn't want to ask you you did mention it already sure do you think you know you are such a divisive figure you know what's happened you know I'm not I don't know any of the specific events but do you want to speak to any of the controversies set the way for people so all my life I can't she didn't say all my life after second grade probably is when I became a little bit of a I don't say a monster right but maybe maybe some people might apply that I I the word polarizing has been used to describe me my whole life especially through high school um adults used it a lot in high school in regards to me because I would push every button and push every boundary um I would fight a lot you know I was a short kid so I like had a big mouth to fight a lot like I didn't really like fighting I didn't want to get into fights but because of my mouth I had to and it's just it's one of the things like some people are on different spectrums and my spectrum is very little filter and I blame it on a head injury but but yeah I know like I've always had that title of being a polarizing figure and when I came into cannabis it was no different I mean I was a basically punk rock guy trying to bring those ideals into the grateful dead type community or in some cases the hip hop rap dab type community um and I was seeing a lot wrong on forums I was seeing people say things that work true I was seeing people openly lie to each other and stab each other in the back just do nasty shit and so I'd say something and early on I realized the most common responses oh man bad vibes bro why are you bringing bad vibes here we're good you know like hey man we know all that bad vibes you know that was that was really what I got and this and these forums I mean people again I talk about this all the time but people nowadays trying to back read the forums camp unless you're really good at using the playback machine and some of these like client desk and forums are gone like not even on that site they weren't big enough for that you know they weren't being indexed on these sites they were mostly seed banks and seed bank owners as we were talking about how to gender so like like on the discords if you spoke out against anyone or said anything about anyone including them on their forum you're gone well I seem to think that I was going to be immune to this or something or maybe I didn't care I really genuinely don't remember what I was thinking at the time or why I think it was just emotional reactions to like this isn't fair why is this person getting fucked over or why'd you keep my money when I sent it to you I'm going to tell people this so that they don't have the same thing happen to them you kept my money where is it or any number of things you know like this breeder fucked over my friend I have proof like why are you selling their seeds are you a scumbag too so I was pretty much removed from every forum one of the biggest I think things that is stuck that drives me the nettiest is a story about the blood rose so my buddies I had a buddy named skunko from Florida wonderful wonderful dude biggest heart his sister was going through chemotherapy at the time and I had given him a bunch of seeds that I had made early on and it helped her a lot tremendously he said and I didn't ask her anything for it you know just whatever or friend so about three years later he had gotten a bunch of seeds of this line called black or I had gotten him from a dude named Heath Robinson called black rose and I had given him to him tons of them I think I had 80 seeds and he made a bunch of crosses with it and he's like dude I want to get these to you because what you did and I was like no like people that know me like anybody that knows me especially now that is a friend I'll say no I'm not going to keep your seeds you get money for them I will not you're getting half because that's how it works like half is what I don't work any other way and not not only because I feel like I'm a generous dude I feel like I feel like that leads to resentment if people aren't if everything's not 100% or like even it will always lead to resentment or potentially and I don't like losing friends like I want everybody to feel like we're all on the same page if I'm making money you're making as much as me right yeah so he sent me the pictures for it I put them up and this is when I just started working with the attitude just started working with the attitude they got the seeds put up the pictures which I should say that was a big deal at the time oh yeah I was I was the second American ever on the attitude when you're on the attitude it was like making it in high times me and sub cool so I had to hit up the attitude when so I'm sorry Heath Robinson went on the attitude saw those pictures like there's my picture and I was like and he emailed me and I was like oh stunko and he's like well it looked like the mom the best and I'm like oh brother he didn't know like he's not he didn't know and I wasn't f***ing all over Heath Robinson's pictures I didn't know every single picture of his and every single one of these plants it was an F8 very uniform and magenta they all look the same so like I was like okay take it down now and put up a thing saying this is Robinsons this picture blah blah blah we will have pictures when it comes so that was all done Heath is pissed Heath is nine shades of pissed and he goes on f***ing rants and raves on forums and to this day Matt is a picture thief Matt is a clone thief oh Jesus that's that like and it was up for probably three hours max f*** but for that three hours it's been 15 years of Matt is a picture thief and clone thief and like I'm not going to blame it on skunko I should have done the work because I knew Heath I guess I should have asked him are these pictures yours but I never would have assumed that like no but that's like an unknown you didn't know you didn't know that I didn't know that skunko didn't even know that wasn't what you do because and the thing is in fairness to skunko that's what people f***ing did they put up pictures of their mom plants as the seed plant saying this is the mom expect to get something like this that's what people did so I figured that's what he was doing but yeah anyways that's the Heath Robinson controversy um early on when I got the seeds um I gave him I'm sorry I gave his buddy and this is where it gets kooky real kooky I gave his buddy this guy Nutella on the can of Kavana I gave his buddy a bunch of it was the very last of my Apollo 13 seeds I think he got is something like that and he won it was something very rare that he wanted brothers Grimm was gone there was no Apollo 13 sub cool hadn't made Apollo 13 BX one it was all there was and he wanted him so bad and I was like I don't know and he's like hey I'm friends with Heath Robinson I know you like purples I need you a bunch of those seeds dude I was like alright well fine here take him and he sent me the seeds but Heath had the idea that he had gifted me these and I had done nothing with them like I had not sent him anything my mind I had traded his friend for those seeds right so he's mine I love fucking thief who did all this so I didn't reciprocate yeah and didn't reciprocate and then used his picture I say perspective is everything I get his perspective is because he wasn't informed and we never spoke after because he lost his shit and because I'm the person I am I was like you don't have a story you right so that's how that goes it was bad on my part because I didn't do my due diligence which I mean it was a granted it was it would have been a lot of due diligence secondly I didn't react the way I should have because I mean it was a very easy explanation but I felt at the time if I explain that I'm gonna be throwing skunko under the bus who's a very sweet person not a breeder who has no drama in his life and doesn't deserve that or and also placate someone who has been an asshole to me and actually his crew got something and maybe his best friends lying to him and telling him I didn't get anything but that's not the case so I'm thinking you're asshole and you roll with assholes yeah so that's that's literally the whole basis for every clone thief clone this that he stole this from me he's not is it in that shell and when I talk about me and res dog having the dark mark it's true like I really really truly believe that there is no one else who has the shit stain on cannabis like when you mention their name except for me and res dog and res dog actually snitched on people and this is my dark mark is the Heath Robinson black rose fiasco and you know it's bizarre to me because you know I've never heard that story before but it just seemed like these really in the end quite I know they're not small but you know kind of small things that just ended up in quite a way yep things that lasted like three hours like and I didn't even know attitude and me so that was the first step with the attitude where I was like I gotta tell him take these pictures down second thing that happened was sub cool went to them because me and sub cool were not super friendly but we didn't like fight yet we weren't friendly but he did not like that another American was on the attitude if anybody knows Monty or knew Monty this was Monty so he went to what's your name is Natalia that owned the attitude I think she still owns it at the time and said Matthew riot is a bad fucking person and you shouldn't do business with them and she actually showed me that at the email and she said you know we go to parties with sub cool he's our biggest money maker and I believe him if he says you're a piece of shit then I trust this man and we're not going to do any more business with you thank you wow at this time I was making this is when I was making serious money once he's like that was the first time I made serious money we make it to the attitude you can make serious money and and I thought that was awesome you know that I was doing that and I felt like I had finally made it you know and we were helping my grandma with her her nursing home bills at the time she had been in a in a like a really nice one she didn't want me taking care of her growing weed she didn't want to be house where weed is growing she's an old Mexican lady so yeah so what was I sorry we were talking about the controversies um I bring brought me in some and I was like what is this and then I got all distracted my ADHD now that's okay you still you were essentially telling us about the attitude oh the attitude okay drama yeah um so he said you know oh so I was helping take care of my grandma at her nursing home with money at that time and it was really secure I thought because I had this great relationship they were buying seeds and that came to a fucking sudden halt so it caused a lot like livelihood wise like I had to sell her house to pay for her medical bills she wasn't living there but this is the family's house now that had to get sold and the whole time I had to hear her cry about wanting to go home and there was no home to go to oh my god so that which for me like that rage that I had for sub cool and it was just like compounding shit like that like that must have been traumatic it was it was hard it's hard but and I shit you not after I got released from the attitude it was going from making like 10,000 a week to holy shit I made $75 over the period of the next four months because me getting removed from the attitude meant everybody saw it and it confirmed everyone thought that I was a shit that because it was public you know like then seeing that happen my god and yeah and I was like it was it was devastating because this is not even this is during the Heath Robinson thing too so it was like just compounded compounded and that's probably when I became the most hateful and the most mean possible yeah and I was like dude all these people think I'm an asshole all of them think I'm a bad heal they all think I'm a bad person fuck them I'll be the worst heal they can fucking imagine you know like and I'm gonna make the best stuff I can while I'm doing it I will be the worst fucking heal every con artist I'm gonna figure out everything everyone's fucking done every dirty fucking deed all these assholes you know that are pulling shit on me I'm gonna figure out everything they've ever done genetically and fucking press them up against the wall and make them fucking pay and that's what I did like the the origin of the like anti-hero slash villain yeah this is this is the origin of Matt right proper granted I had that name or since I was a little kid and punk bands yeah like like my best friend's sister who is a riot girl back on the day and that's like a feminist punk rock organization that's right I'm political I would be real like a chauvinist little pig doer and so she'd call me a riot boy because I was being a chauvinist pig was the opposite of a riot girl you know so she'd call me a right boy so that's why that name stopped right this is the the genesis of that name in cannabis and why like keel is associated with that name that those months and granted at first I was getting kicked off forums and pushing back but this is when I was like no like I'm gonna get the best at this I possibly can to where my I'm not throwing breaks from a glass house I'm never gonna make these mistakes like this again ever yeah and I'm gonna fucking nail all them to the wall every last one including sub cool I felt like it was done to me it was a little bit of victim mentality which is stupid because reality like there are things I could have done to probably have a better reputation I could have kissed his ass I could have been nice sub cool despite not liking him and everything would have been probably hunky dory but I mean hindsight right yeah and I didn't need to be me I didn't need to question everyone at the beginning like that's sure other people successful because they didn't do that and it probably would have been successful and so it's not the way I was thinking at the time was you did this to me right yeah so that had to change in my mind and it took a while took a while to change and yeah because that I don't want to ask you about that next which was like what was that period like of like recovering getting back on your feet after this it took all the way up until probably instagram came right and people fucking hated my guts I'm not even kidding you like it just every every day I would have email saying like hey I heard you're an asshole can you tell me why you're not and my first response is fuck you I'm not going to politic for your likes if you weren't around during that time and the first words to me are I heard you're an asshole you're not going to get a response and this was daily everyone just so I didn't make a lot of money yeah I never made a lot of money in cannabis seeds I just didn't yeah that's that that was the last time I made great money in cannabis um and I don't care like I got to breed anyways and I managed but once instagram came around and live streaming happened I was able to go on live streams and people were able to ask me questions directly and see my face see my mannerisms hear my words and for some reason that changed a lot not everything it's been very slow but it changed it did change something and I don't know why I think it's still happening I think it's still happening as well probably I mean like and to me that's a very slow change but you know I don't know why I guess be and the way I looked at it was I'm gonna do this because I don't see any other breeders doing this they're confident at this and if I do this and I speak confidently hopefully people will learn enough to be able to then ask breeders the right questions to get them to put them a few to the fire like essentially I think yeah another another take I have on this is that your strategy kind of shifted to just being like look I'm just gonna like do the work yeah that's it like and and that was the part of the heel thing too is like I'm just gonna work as hard as I can fuck you and I'll let the work you know you're gonna let the work yeah exactly let the work do the talking exactly and I mean that's the best I could do is this a good point to segue then because I was gonna ask you next you know the next section is gonna be about returning to that sense of community spirit and I think one thing that I is obvious to me in talking to you today is that your ties to the community are pervasive like you you know whether for good or bad you've always been interested and invested in community relationships yeah and the furniture cannabis I don't go away bad furniture but someone's lazy boy but you've built this thing called breeders syndicate and you know you didn't mention you didn't name drop this thing which I'm not I don't know if it's a meme or not can illuminati but how did you come up with the idea for the syndicate when did you meet not so like how you know what were these events like um I'll probably skip one part and then we'll go straight into the syndicate so um how did I meet not so he was he was good friends with CSI and CSI knew him as the Mendo perps guy for years like going to old parties and Mendo and back to back to the NCGA parties a lot of people don't know about um and events he met not so dog there Mendo and not so dog was of course known as the Kim 91 fucking Mendo first guy and one day I get a message on Instagram from a dude he's like hey I heard you got this Afghani clone that's skunky tell me about it so we start talking and the guy super nice and super confident I'm like who is this guy so I asked Caleb have you ever understood he's like yeah it's my buddy as my boy that's a Mendo perps guy and of course not so hadn't mentioned it he's the Mendo perps guy that he's had anything to do with Kim he's just some normal dude asking questions about Afghani you know it's not in the forefront he doesn't put that in the forefront back then and um so I start having more deep conversations with him and the guy is just an amazing talker and only that like he's got amazing things to say and amazing history and during this time discord popped up and I was on one from someone else who created and I brought I was like hey I have a friend named Natsudog and I think everybody should hear him talk let's do a voice chat for the first time and let's see how people react to him because I think he's got an interesting story and that was the first time I interviewed Natsudog unrecorded for three hours on discord called the Northwest 47 back then I don't know what it's called today or if it's even existing but um yeah that was the first time I interviewed Natsudog and that's when I realized me and this guy have chemistry and maybe we should do this more often and talk about other things yeah you start dating we started dating we became boyfriends and he was a good kisser and it was just the way he held me so tight at night that the chemistry body chemistry and maybe it's his pheromones something about it um drove me to him yeah yeah and like yeah okay so you met Natsudog and when did the syndicate concept arise um the syndicate concept kind of arise early on when I realized that me, Natsudog, CSI everyone's not going to have retirement um there were people above me that were getting sick older people were getting sick and had nothing and I'm like we need a union guys something like thinking like totally out of the box like impossibly maybe but that was the first idea of the syndicate was just like this has to happen and then slowly our friend group started getting bigger and bigger and there was more interest and it's just like we all started talking about strains and history and bringing what we had to the table and it became a 24-7 thing on our own little area and this group formed and we all decided that it was time to try to take this bigger and that's when we started doing and that was it like we just kind of fumbled our way through this and made it here after I don't even know how long it's been a few years maybe yeah how long has it been yeah I've never known that actually I assume it's like three to four years something like that yeah yeah okay yeah because that was you know you mentioned thinking about the livelihoods and the sustainability of the breeders and breeding yeah and because my next question was going to be you know what is your hope for this group of people what is your hope for the syndicate the ultimate goal for the syndicate would be for everybody the legacy farmers to be taken care of with some kind of union I don't even know how that works I don't know how it happens I want everyone to have healthcare I want everyone to have the same thing that everybody else should have yeah I want I like there to be a place where people can go where they know people have at least done their due diligence to find the history right and have that accessible and not be just agenda filled history and that's been that's hard that's hard because yeah when you're when you make money in cannabis everyone's going to assume that you're doing it for selfish reasons because a lot of those people are selfish and would do it for selfish reasons so they don't understand why they can't but maybe part of that spectrum side is what brought a lot of us together too because we were all so narrowly focused in ADHD I'm making sure we get this history right that that's the one thing a lot of us gel on you know yes our overall love for getting this right and misinformation just absolutely makes my stomach hurt so it's like it's some of that it's some of my OCD that just inherently makes me want to push a lot of it is that I love these people my friends I absolutely love them and I want them to do well and I see a lot of shit bags progressing cannabis and I don't understand I understand why and how that's happened I don't understand how to fix that and I didn't see anybody else really giving it a try and this was my best attempt at it I mean I still don't get people trying this at all no no no he's trying but the people that have stepped up whether it be you Shawnee Notso Goat Farm High and Lonesome Bitter Denali everybody CB like it's been necessary for everybody to be a part of for it to get where it's at and so like I don't like talking about me starting anything because it wasn't me that started it it formed and became it I just came up with the name we'll say that it emerged it emerged yeah definitely emerged Very cool and that's really special to hear because I don't I'm sure you've alluded and implied a lot of these things when we talk when you know in other podcast and in our chats and stuff but I think like hear you talk about what your hopes are I appreciate that Was there anything else you wanted to mention about the syndicate because otherwise I think we can kind of move towards wrapping up with a few like lighter quicker questions I mean the syndicate it's probably the thing when I have a pride of anything it may not be breeding but the fact that this is forming and that when I'm gone I'm hoping it will still be here and people will take the reins or if I retire or whatever I'm hoping people take the reins of it because these are such beautiful people that have assembled like it's just amazing and if I have any pride or anything it's going to be with that the people that have all come together and that I had any part in that whether it's just choosing the name and that you know or doing the show and if I had a part in that that's going to be my pride like I love the bonnet work and I love I love cannabis and I love what I've done in it I love this a lot and I'm more proud of this because in cannabis everybody I just consider everything I've done everybody else's You should be proud it's really special I appreciate it Yeah I'm you know I know again like I'm no one in cannabis world and don't have any aspirations of being anyone but again even as like just an enthusiast at home like it's been such a special experience and yeah such a special place You know the Discord Patreon is one of the things that were like early on I was like I don't want to charge people that was the one thing I did not want to do is charge people for info and part of getting into the Discord Patreon is paying $5 to get in and I was really resistant to it I hated the idea absolutely hated the idea but when I realized like if we do this in order for it to succeed it has to get bigger right it can't just be us and in order to do that I'd have to ring in new people and if I felt like if I open the floodgates $5 would be enough of a barrier to keep out people who come in just to fight stuff like that and it was very effective at it very very effective at it so while I regret having to charge anyone for anything on that level at the same time because of that it seems like everybody's happy to pay that to keep the idiots out you know what I mean like so it did work it's effective as far as keeping trolls out people going there just to cause problems and for a while we opened it up for free to see how it went right and that was fun it was interesting and we gained a lot of new people by doing that too they're really passionate so the discord has been a great place for everyone to kind of like commune find each other and really start digging into history in ways that I think they probably never have and I really feel in ways that have never been offered to cannabis community ever and I've been a part of most of it yeah and for me you know in this conversation today what I love is that in many ways we've come full circle like you started with the community spirit and we're still there with this indigate you've carried that on really strongly and of course it was great of course to hear about all your breeding work but it's so cool to hear about this side of things the community side because I don't know if I've encountered another figure in this scene who is as community minded as you and it makes it so ironic makes those controversies so ironic in that context and you know what's funny is like there are a lot of people who have joined over the years and I've learned like when these people like hit me up in DMs and are like nasty and ugly to me I just usually say I'll see you in three years bro if you're still around I'll see you in three years and without without fail dude I've gotten so many messages like bro I am sorry you're right like because usually if I say that I go through the shit and I see they're working with the scammer and I'm like hey man I'll tell you what in three years you're going to find out this dude's a scammer you're going to know it and when you do will you come back to me you're in a station like that almost without fail it works every time so a lot of people get it over time what the with the propaganda pushback was and why it happened and you know like realistically like my mission in life isn't just to make the syndicate it was to get misinformation out of cannabis and the only way to do that is to hold people's feet to the fire and by doing that I did that to individual people over a period of 17 years now and I've amassed an army of people that fucking hate my guts and this is true and like people in the syndicate have actually watched this happen many times over now cycle these people pop up make shit up and fight you know and I've learned to deal with it a lot better I think you know because it helps when there's more people than just me to witness the craziness just for a long time there wasn't anybody but more than me becaus