Welcome to Breeder Syndicate 2.0, where we explore the history of a clandestine scene. Researching everything from cannabis strain history, old smuggling tales from the first person perspective, to breeding science and news on current subculture. I'm your host, Matthew, and I'll occasionally be joined by my homey, not so dog, Breeder and Grower from Mendocino, to speak on these subjects and sometimes interview other participants. Our goal is to document this history before it's written by corporations and others who just weren't there. Let's start writing some wrongs. Welcome to the Underground. Alright, welcome to Breeder Syndicate. I'm Matthew. This is Not So Dog. Today, we're going to talk about the state of cannabis. We try to do this every now and then to kind of update on what's going on, not only with the legal market, but how that's affecting the traditional market, I believe is the proper term that the youngins are using these days. So yeah, let's kick it off. Not So Dog. Let's talk about some of the legal things going on today in cannabis, and how it's affecting everything from your perspective. Well, I mean, I think it's affecting everything, certainly. I don't think there is a part of the cannabis scene from extracts, the seeds to flower, anything like that that hasn't been affected by it. And I think honestly, it's been primarily negative. Yeah. Maybe you could say, especially for California, because some of these other states, it might be their first time that they got stores. But California has had medical shops and stuff like that, basically full-fledged dispensaries for a long time. Well, now when you say negative, who are we speaking about? Like, who is it affecting negatively? Is it affecting the consumer negatively right this second? I actually think it's affecting everyone negatively. I think so too, but I don't know that everyone will realize the effect. So, I mean, I don't know if you want to start from the consumer and go up. Sure. I think for a lot of consumers, choice has gone down. Quality has certainly dropped significantly, and price has gone up. Bro, I'm getting my cookies. But do you think price has gone up really, though? Like, hasn't the price on the pound dropped? Or has the legal market gone up? First, the consumer? Yeah. You know what I'm saying? So, that's what I said. We'll start with the consumer. Yeah.  Are they paying the same price or more? I think they're paying more. Yeah. I'm just so out of the loop on that part. Well, they're paying more because when you go and, you know, there's all these built-in taxes that there didn't used to be before all the laws. Yeah. There's excise taxes. There's these taxes. There's all these different things. I mean, people sometimes on IG will post these receipts and they'll show, like, it's bought three $70 eighths and then you add up to taxes and the excise and the this and the that and everything else plus the sales. And it's like this crazy component of it, right? Yeah. You know, I also think too that, like, all these mylar's that most, and what I mean by mylar for people listening, I think most people know, but, like, a lot of cannabis these days is sold in opaque mylar bags. Yeah. Which means that you're looking at it and you get to see what the strain name is and you get to see what the packaging and the art they chose is. But very often you don't even get to see the cannabis you're buying until you've left the building. Definitely not smell. So you don't get to smell it. You don't get to touch it. You don't get to view it. Yeah. And so it's sort of like, you know, you just get to see the art and the things that they've done. You know, there's some exceptions. There's people that are, you know, there's some things where they're visible. There's some people that are selling them in jars and stuff like that. But for the most part, you don't get to see it. Sure. You know, and so I think the taxes have made it to where I would bet on average people are paying more at the shop than they are, than they were under 215. Oh yeah, I would bet. There you go. And I don't think the choices are as, you know, as diverse. I wouldn't think so. I just wonder if they won, if they care. I guess as long as the prices are high, they probably do care. I think the more prices drop on the consumer end, the less they would care because the prices are lower and I just don't know that they've been top quality. Well, it's, I mean, you know, you can say that people wouldn't care, you know, but it's like, I mean, I guess you could want, like, you know, to use an alcohol perspective, you could walk into the store and be like, I am glad that the Bud Light is getting cheaper by the case, but I wish that there was maybe some other brands. Sure. Yeah. It makes sense. You know, and so I, you know, I think what happened is personally, is I think that when they made these rules, they looked at like what the black market price or the traditional market price or the medical price or whatever you want to, whatever you want to phrase it as, was, and they based a bunch of taxes and fees off of that price. Yeah. Not realizing that as soon as you expanded supply by a ton, you were going to change the pricing of all that dramatically. So taxes are too high for the consumer, taxes are too high for the distro, taxes are too high for the, you know, for the, for the farmer, right? Yeah.  Not having to pay upfront for all the abilities to surveil you and all that stuff. Yeah. So it's like you start adding in all these, you start adding in all these fees and taxes and revenue boosters into a new industry. And what it's basically done is it's made quality, a lot harder to come by. Oh, for sure. For sure. There, I'm seeing stories, you probably are too, man. I'm seeing stories like in California of just like how many cultivation licenses are not being renewed for the 2023 season. Yeah. And that's got to scare them a little bit. You know, they may not have seen the effect immediately again because they were getting the money from, you know, the, the, the right to be able to grow. What are the licenses and all that shit? Well, you can look at it, you can look at it in a different way. I mean, I think I'm not a very big fan of Proposition 64 for California specifically. And I don't want to get too California specific because I'm sure there's a bunch of people in other states that like have different rules. But one of the things that happened is, you know, when we all voted on this thing that we were supposed to, they were supposed to, for the first five years, you weren't supposed to grow more than an acre or say 43,500 square feet for the first, from 2018 to 2023. Yeah. And that was supposed to allow legacy farmers a toehold to have them have years to establish distro and dispensary and all these different relationships before big companies came in. That's right. Well, Steve D'Angelo and a harborside and very other lobbying groups, they didn't want to wait that long. They wanted to dominate. And so they got to work around where you couldn't have more than an acre. That's still true. Yeah. Because that's part of the law. But you can stack as many 10,000 square foot licenses as your county will allow you or your city will allow you to. Okay. And so what happened there is that what they would have found, in my opinion, if they would have forced it to just be an acre or less, you would have had all these legacy brands. Sure. And you would have discovered that with the amount of stores that they have, the legacy brands were more than capable of filling the current demand. Yeah. And since all these legacy brands would have been a lot smaller and a lot more diverse in size, their quality probably would have been a lot better hitting the shelves. But what they did is they allowed certain counties like in Monterey and Salinas and in Santa Barbara and different areas to blow up and have dozens or hundreds even of 10,000 square foot licenses. Yeah. And when you look at the fees for some of these things, some of these farms are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to over a million dollars a year just in license fees. So the state and the counties, they get all that money up front. Yeah. And then there's way, way too much weed being produced. I have a quick question. Yeah. Tangent, but quick question. How was Harborside producing all of that stuff in Arizona for so long that everybody knew about? That I don't know. Is it somewhere they were moving it in? No. I mean, they, as far as I know, Harborside had a, I think it was like, you know, 10 or 11 acres or something like that. It was a pretty big greenhouse facility. I mean, it's publicly known, right? Somewhere in Salinas. Oh, I thought about the Arizona. Do you remember the Arizona stuff? I do, but I don't have any inside information on that. Yeah, I don't either. I'm just wondering. Yeah. So basically what happened is, is there was any number of rich people and their children, especially. Yeah. Who were like, ooh, this is a new, massively profitable industry and I'm going to help my family dominate it. Yeah.  That's true. Like they thought they were going to burn through all this money, but at the end of the day, they would have a dominant market position and then they would recoup that over time.  Well, the other way you could look at it and I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not even names or whatever, but you could say that there was a industry wide thing and this is not everyone, so don't take offense if you're one of these people or maybe you should. I don't know. It depends on who you are, but when the money first came into cannabis, a lot of traditional cannabis people who had had to hide for a long time and stay low and they didn't really deal with that type of sharky rich person stayed low. Yeah. And a lot of the people that were really interested in rep and getting rich and being flashy, they were the first people to run towards the money. For sure. And so what happened is, is a lot of money made a lot of bad deals with a lot of people that weren't able to actually do what they said they were going to do.  I mean that we saw that nonstop in every single facility we've ever been to. Yeah. And a lot of it when people would hire us to consult, it would be to fix the errors of the knuckleheads that came before us, the chads that came before us that were like, yeah, we know what to do. You know? You saw it so much. And so you have a situation now where it's like a state of the union or whatever, but if you're on IG or you follow like marijuana news or anything like that, you're seeing reports all the time of now of like almost daily or weekly of pissed off investors who all their investment money has been blown and they're wondering what the hell is happening. Uh-huh. You know? Like in my neck of the woods, I mean it was this big thing where like Flo Kana, you know, they raised $250 million or something. Yeah. And then a few months ago they shuttered operations. And so I think those guys, you know, they dealt with some pretty sharky investors. Yeah. You know? Who were probably not the greatest people to deal with. But then the investors are like, okay, well, we're going to kick you out. We're going to take it all over. And then they're like, here. And they're like, oh, what are we taking over? There's no money. Yeah. You know? And what it turns out is, is that as long as we're going to be this situation where we're not federally legal and we're only state legal, then every state, technically, legally, is supposed to be its own little island. Yes. Which means that it can only, you can't send your excess anywhere but these highly regulated channels. Yeah. And nobody ever figured out like how much output or how to like, how to give out the, you know, how to give out licenses. And since licenses had a ton of upfront money and fees and costs involved, they just granted them and took a bunch of the money. Yeah. And they made it really, really hard for most of these peace places to survive. So what you have is you have the people that are best at growing cannabis. Say like the people in my area in Mendo, or, you know, Southern Humboldt, people that have been growing for a long time, outdoor or light depth, or you have people that are really quality indoor farmers or whatever. And they're pushed in all these different directions just to survive. So they can't actually bring their full craft knowledge to bear because they're having to make choices based on surviving, right? Yeah.  And how much do you think the hemp market played into it? The hemp market? The hemp market played into the THC market in the overflow. Oh, well, I mean, I think that... Let's start.  So before we get into hemp, I'll just say this. What happened is, is that there's way too much cannabis being grown in California. Yeah. Way too much. Way too much outdoor. Way too much.  And there's... And what's weird is that, like, you look at Canada and Canada every year destroys large amounts of unsold legal cannabis. Yep. So far in America, all of ours just disappears.  You know, just disappears. So what happens is, is that there's not enough demand to, you know, to... You know, there's way more supply than there is demand. The state doesn't want to admit failure. Yeah. And so, you know, there's a lot of... Let's just say that the line between the legal market and the traditional market is more of a... It's more of a shadow than a line. Yeah. That's a very permanent statement. Yeah. So we got... We had a brief technical difficulty, but wherever I was talking about, the line between legal and traditional is more of a shadow than a firm line. You know? And so no one wants... The state doesn't want to address the fact that they've way-allowed overproduction to proliferate. Right? Yeah. And so what happens is, is that a lot of this stuff is getting diverted. But... It is. Diverted. Diverted into the traditional market. Diverted into the traditional market. It's flooding that and taking out what would be future potential competitors for rich folk. And one of the things that at least to annoy me is like when I'd smoke weed with friends and the DAB revolution was happening, I'm like, you know, this torch thing is really not relaxing. It just took a really nice hit, you know? And I'm like all happy and then it's all It was too...  And I used to hate that. Like it would just be the nasty...  So of course, when we just start bullshitting about nothing in particular, I'm coming through crystal clear. Yeah, of course, yeah. And then I start trying to chat and then we like lose it or whatever. So that's fun. Well, let's go ahead and keep going. Okay. So I don't know exactly where we got cut off, but what I think is happening is I think that the state doesn't want to admit that it's allowed far too much production to occur. And there's nowhere for that production to go within the regulated channels or not enough of it. And they don't really know how to have a system where people have poured in all this money probably without getting sued of how to pick and choose winners and losers of who can continue and who can't. And they probably don't want to admit that they created a system that's failed.  Yeah. Legally, that is. So what happened, huh? Don't you, I mean, from just from my point of view, the way I look at it, and you know I have this really like super nihilistic point of view on everything that's very dark maybe, but like I thought that was like from my point of view all done intentionally with the knowledge like that they it's very easy for them to predict how to crash a market and how to like, how to sink because they can afford to lose money for X amount of years because they're used to doing this business. They is any corporate entity, these major corporate entities that are buying in. No. Like a W, what's the one that UFC and all that stuff, they've got interesting cannabis. I don't believe that's true. I agree with you. Okay. And then I had my suspicions. And I do think that there are some people out there glasshouse that is intending on burning through investor money in the hopes that the market opens up and then their position to service a much wider part of the American people than they currently are. See the way I'm saying it is not necessarily so mysterious. It's in business. Like the idea is the richest people that are going into a business in a new commodity. They know that they can outlast taking losses longer than the other ones. Oh, I get what you're saying. So they drive the price down or they drive the price up. No one can compete or drive it down. No one can compete because they can't afford to sell at that price. Then they drive artificially because it was artificially driven down. That is true. However, the whole market and everybody's gone. What they're discovering is, is that too many different disparate rich people were trying to do that. Yeah, that's what I was trying to get to you. And what they really ended up doing was lighting their money on fire. That's right. They got too greedy. And some of these people like are now tired and like they're, so look at it from like a rich person's perspective, right? They want to put their money into something that gives them a rate of return. Yeah. And they got bamboozled into thinking that like weed was going to be this, oh my God, it's going to be three times the size of alcohol. This is going to be an $80 billion industry. We're going to get into the ground floor. My son who's kind of been a near-duel his whole life, I'm going to be able to like gift him at the ground level this amazing thing.  Right? Yeah. You know, I think, I think a lot of it may be that, sure, but I think a lot of people predicted that there was going to be a lot of that. Well, see here, so here's, maybe we could take, maybe we could take a different step back. Sure. And because this explains a lot of it where, because it's still federally legal, the feds have decided to some degree where, as long as it's within a state, they're not really going to apply it because the state is sovereign and can do what it wants. Yeah. So that, like I said, that makes each state its own little island. Yeah. Which makes it unique in business because there's almost nothing else in America where you're confined by whatever business you're doing to the state that you're in. Fireworks and that's it that you think of.  It can only be in California or it can only be in Wyoming or it can only be in Arizona. Fireworks. Right? So fireworks. So down to, dude, is you have to realize that like rich people want a rate of return on their investment. Mm-hmm. And so far, cannabis has been a terrible investment in which many, many, many big investors are not even getting their principal back. Yeah. Much less profit on their principal. Sure. Right?  Yeah. So they got into it where they thought, oh, I can get into this industry. I can get into this marketplace. We can be in at the ground floor. I can get a big amount of market share and we can get in early and I'm going to make gads of money. And this is where like, I keep saying like, they treated it like any commodity. Right. But it wasn't like any commodity. No, it's unique. It's so unique and so different. It's not federally legal. And so what that means is that like, if it was federally legal, we could ship it to whatever other states we wanted to that wanted to allow it. Yeah. You know, we could send our excess to places, which means every single state that's set that's gotten set up has gotten new investors jumping in, hoping to make a bunch of money before there's competition for them. Yeah. And they're all bumping into the same thing.  You really think those people wanted to light 250 million on fire? Yeah, I can't imagine that. And after you pour that amount of money in, you decide to stop touching cannabis and you shudder most of the operations as you try to retool and figure out what you want to do. Yeah, that's not a good book. Did you see that thing? Like it was on IG and it was in the news where there's investors that are hella angry at Emerald, I think it's Emerald Family Farms from Humboldt, where they got an 18 or a $19 million reinvestment and the guy absconded and changed his number and the investors haven't received a penny of their principal back. Shocking.  You went crypto with it. I'm just, well, you know, I'm not, there's like, not like, I don't know any details of it either, but there's investors that are now suing various executives of Cookie. Aw. Angry, angry at, you know, all kinds of various practices, but probably angriest. I saw that. I saw that. What was the one that they were saying? I mean, they're basically saying that they got deluded and that certain executives, a couple of them were pretty famous. We're getting kickbacks, side deals and all that type of stuff. And obviously, like if you're running on investor money, they don't want you making side deals. Yeah, yeah, no, because it's all, you know, public and, yeah. That's not your money. Yeah. You can't be doing that. Yeah. You know, and so, and so, who knows if it's true or not, but we've entered in, like, that's not what I'm saying. And I don't have any inside information on that.  Much less profit.  Yeah, they thought they were going to take it over. Yeah.  Yeah. Which means, so far, that cannabis businesses have been, cannabis businesses actually have a really hard time even getting banking. You know, I can throw something in here that's very recent that I learned. With seed banks recently, there is Attitude Seed Bank opened up in the USA. A lot of people know about this and they were able to secure credit card processing. However, their competitors were trying to do the same thing and they were told, These are your problems. It's not even a consistent problem. No. Well, I mean, typically what happens too is, you know, like a bank will find out that a cannabis company is a cannabis company because they're not all named like Emerald Farms or something. Some of them are named like the most benign, sounding LLC imaginable. T-shirts. Yeah. You know, in order to get around that. Yeah.  They don't want... Because they're federal insured. They don't want any trouble from the federal government because they're trying to stay compliant. Yes. Right? So what that means is that they're very intent upon not having a bunch of traditional cannabis black market money flow in to the legal system. They wanted it to be above board and they wanted it to be legal. The problem is, is that we don't have really government banks in this country. All these banks are private, which means that like the government of California or whoever can't order the bank to treat this industry like a normal business if it sees liability for itself. Yeah. So you and I can't go into a bank with a business idea and a prospectus and get a loan. Yeah. We can't go to ag credit. We can't go to Chase or Wells Fargo or any of these big companies. You can't go to them and do that, right? But they want you to use banked money. Always. So what does that mean? That means that you're dealing with private individuals or funds that collect rich people's banked money. Right? Which means that... That's why I always go back to you no matter what those people were never going to win because they were never rich enough to compete with the William Morris Company and all these other major organizations. These major organizations, they haven't even really jumped in all that much yet because it's not like they want to jump in when it's when like I honestly think that you can look around at some of these big companies like, you know, whatever cookies or jungle boars or somebody like that, right?  Some big company comes in and just buys them. I'm sure. Yeah. That's what they're hoping for because honestly, so far the super large companies that can really throw their weight around cannabis is too small fry for them yet. It's not international. There's too many barriers to trade. There's too many regulations. There's too many restrictions. It's too new. They don't want to throw math. They might be prepping for what's eventually going to happen. Sure. Yeah. We already know that, but I don't know that they would buy in under their name. They always buy in under subsidiaries anyways. We wouldn't really have a very good idea of who's buying into what because they don't ever do that. Well, I buy in as their name, you know. So far they're also smart, right?   And so they might be waiting for like it to actually go more legal and then they can come in and buy things for pennies that have a lot of infrastructure in place. And I think some of these big people call them MSOs, multi-state organizations. I think a lot of these MSOs, both the executives and the private investors that are involved in them, their whole business model is to get big enough and attractive enough that someone eventually comes along and gobbles them up.  Yeah. I think that's the idea of like a lot of like how I shouldn't say the average person when they start a business, I think that's the mindset is that they hope they get big enough to get bought out by someone bigger. I think that's a lot of the small business mindset. A lot of people don't have the mindset of a long game.  Is this big buyout and everybody gets a certain amount per share. Yeah. And then it comes in a big chunk, you know, and so some of these businesses are always after fresh batches of private investment. And like the most devastating thing for them ever would be the status quo. It reminds me of the internet bubble so much just just the way we're speaking about it like the the the internet bubble of the the two thousands.  And then eventually somebody goes, well, how do they actually make money? Yep. Yeah. And it's like, where's all the money? Where's the revenue? You know, and it's like, you can have certain businesses strangely enough for market share that keep losing money but gaining market share. Like, you know, Amazon would be the primary example. Oh, yeah. Where they grew themselves with losses. But they were actually gobbling up market share and destroying local malls and changing how consumers shopped. Yeah. They changed how business was done in that way. They changed how they changed literally and the internet came along with them and people could all of a sudden shop in their underwear. And, you know, so that model can't that model can work. You know, but it's not working for weed. And so I think now you're in this position where we're in California where five years into legalization and all of a sudden the stuff you start to see a lot of is anger and lawsuits and recriminations and firing of executives and all these different things going on because where's the money? Yeah. Who's making money? No one. Not that I can see. Like, when you talk to people and you and I both talk to a lot of people all up and down, you want to call it the industry on both sides. Yeah.  Is anyone telling you, oh, we're making money hand over fist? Couldn't be happier. No, and it seems like the only people that could be making money are the taxes making money which and I don't see that necessarily. I don't see like public social stuff benefiting widely from taxes aren't making money. Taxes are skimming off other people's money. Well, that's what I'm saying, but it's the only guaranteed money that has come in are the taxes. You know, taxes and fees and all this different stuff. So a lot of times these investors were promised whatever they needed to get promised so that these people could get the money. Yeah. And they'd figure it out later. And then there's some of these people, some of the people that are winning is like some of these executives that borrowed a bunch of money. Had that last test. We've had enough technical difficulties this week that I do feel a little thrown off my my jibber jabber game. Yeah, for sure. So on top of all the legal stuff, there was some news today that kind of hit the scene that that was a little wacky and I the general consensus when I posted the article was not not positive from our community, the traditional market, I would say that generally speaking that responds to what I post. And it was about California giving twenty two million dollars, I believe it was, or their their abouts to it was either six or sixteen universities to conduct research on legacy strings. And the response from pretty much everyone was resoundingly like how what how are they going to do legacy anything when they haven't you know talked to anyone in the community. I know my I'm I'm super biased and opinionated about this. I'm really interested since you hadn't heard about it or seen it yet to hear your thoughts. Well, I don't, you know, I didn't actually hear about it because I was otherwise occupied today until you told me right before we kind of started the show. I do think, you know, it's a needed thing in the sense that they should start taking interest into the genetic history and the diversity and the different types of plants that are out there. Their problem that they're going to face probably is the same problem that they face like with making things legal is like since we don't have any like accreditation and there's no way for them to like vet us. Yeah. How do they choose who should be on the board? Because as you as I as you as I and I know right like without naming any names and getting anybody mad at us or anything like that. You know, there is a lot of popular people that actually aren't that in depth. Yeah. And so you start talking about like well who should be the people talking about history?  Okay let me read this to you real quick so you can get a better idea. Me getting closer because I am blind. The California Department of Cannabis Control the DCC awarded 20 million in research grants to 16 academic institutions. The funds will support scientific research on the impact of cannabis on the mental health of young people novel cannabinoids in Delta 8 and Delta 10 THC and the first of its kind study of California's legacy cannabis genetics intended to preserve the history value and diversity of the communities that steward them. It is the department's aspiration that these studies will advance the body of scientific research further our understanding of cannabis and aid to continue development and refinement of the legal framework said Rasha Salama chief deputy director at DCC coming these studies will provide valuable insights on topics of interest to California's consumers businesses and policy makers and the department looks forward to sharing them once they are completed. Researchers at the University of California San Diego will build on the existing federally funded project to provide California specific data on the impact of cannabinoids on mental health during adolescence. I was more interested in the legacy part but they don't really go much more into that and yeah. After hearing more anything change there? Well it's about as vague as humanly possible except for the fact that they're going to look at effects on children which makes well that makes sense to me because anytime you make rules there's obviously going to be a series of people that are going to try to work their way around rules. And I don't think they anticipated when they passed the farm bill that had the hemp part to it that people were going to extract these things from Delta 8 and Delta 10 because they only had regulations banning Delta 9 THC. So what happens? A specific kind of Delta 9 THC at that. So what happens is is various entrepreneurs discovered that you can pull out these possibly psychoactive chemicals or compounds or whatever from hemp and hemp isn't regulated with compounds and all of a sudden it appears at your local gas station. It's way Delta 8 and Delta 10 probably have way more places that they're sold than cannabis because cannabis so far they've created so many rules and regulations it's like it costs an arm and a leg just to have a store. And there's zero regulations on this stuff right now. And so I'm sure for regulations that's giving kids a lot more access to it I do fear the kid thing specifically because typically kids are very sympathetic and nobody in the legal market or traditional market is really advocating for a bunch of kid use whatsoever.  I agree. But the way that things that could hurt children possibly or could have a negative impact on them don't get regulated as the industry is big and powerful and rich and has a bunch of lobbyists and they make sure they keep their grubby hands because cannabis doesn't have that. Cannabis doesn't actually have big business. But to me the legacy strain part is the part that really grinds my gears because just even looking at the idea of it is like now they want to take a look at the legacy strains. Let's get a hold of some of these stewards over in some of these locations in California.  Matt didn't want me to talk about this because he says we talk about it all the time but I'll bring it up again. Do it, do it. Fine, fine you must. Is that I am quite fearful of legacy strains both in seed and clone form surviving because it was always a small group of people that cared about holding on to things that weren't currently popular. The vast majority of the cannabis industry only wants to grow things that people want in the moment. Most people even within our community don't care very much about legacy unless that legacy makes them money. So it was already a small subset of a small subset and the issue is is that that small subset used to be able to use what was a fairly lucrative industry to fund their little passion project which might be keeping rare clones from back in the day that had a popularity once that aren't very popular right now or rare seed lines or you know I mean Matt can talk about you know like our buddy CSI or him or others where they make things that are commercially viable but then they also have passion projects on the side where they might get some old lines or some rare stuff or some weird sativas that probably aren't commercially viable but they might do an open pollination or they might do a preservation project just to keep those seeds fresh and see what's going on with them. But what that takes is that takes someone caring and having enough time and excess money to be able to fund that little passion project. So if they're going to stretch everybody out and everyone's going to be hanging on by a thread it's going to make those little passion projects it's going to make things that are currently feasible much harder to achieve. I think it sounds like resoundingly after talking to not just our friends but people at other seed banks and around the community it sounds like this 20 was pretty miserable sales wise in the seed market probably the worst one yet in the years that it passed. So yeah definitely like the legacy stuff is going to be growing tighter and tighter and tighter because it was that kind of stuff that was not moving at all. I mean Matt can talk about this more than I can but you know we used to have like a lot of times the Emerald Cup the High Times Cups or these various gatherings not only they were nominally an awards ceremony but really what they kind of were was they were a way to sell hundreds of booths to all kinds of different vendors and those vendors could come with a fee and booth space and whatever else they could hawk their wares whatever those wares might be and that was actually probably the economic driver that pushed most of these events big time for a long time yeah because it was a way for producers of seeds or flowers or topicals or extracts or whatever whatever the case may be to get in front of customers and you could go see and you could maybe even talk to your heroes or you could complain to someone in person or whatever it might be and that fueled a lot of small businesses that had a very wide and very diverse interest range yeah so you could go and talk to Matt and he's interested in blue lines and weird Afghans and different types of stuff like that and you could go talk to somebody else that was interested in mostly in old school Humboldt and Mendo genetics that was mostly interested in purples yeah that one year in Emerald Cut me and CSI were literally booth to booth with NCGA right next to me it was a really weird situation so you could talk to three of the older guys right there and a lot of times it was like people wanted to buy seed and so when the industry had more money sloshing around in it a bunch of people would come to those events with cash in their pocket and tending on talking to people directly which wasn't always easy and then making purchasing decisions after those chats it was a traditionally outlaw market it was like I mean that was a started out as a harvest festival so it was a lot of the outlaw market that would bring their outlaw money you know like this was how it ran and they would buy their seeds for that whole next year that they wanted to run it was something that happened and it fueled a lot of what was the Emerald Triangle at that time yeah and it fueled a lot of individuality it basically made the scene very diffuse I was able to grow some chocolate ties and grow those lines you could all of a sudden and Matt will joke that like we talked about it how 90% of the seed companies probably have sprung up within the last 10 years in that environment that allowed them to do a bunch of shows and IG allowing them to like announce drops and do business through there allowed them to communicate with a lot of various weed people small and large and connect to their customers and it developed a pretty robust thing and the more robust it became the more people got interested in jumping into it right and it's kind of like one of those things where like you get into real estate or something during a boom time and you've never experienced high interest rates or depression so the whole time you've been in business it's just booming and there's a lot of people with seeds like everybody can make seeds it's not hard to make seeds it's hard to do selections and do predictive breeding but it's not hard to make seeds so it's like it is kind of hard to sell a house in that way it's not easy to sell anybody can make seeds anybody can do it their first time it's super easy with the male and the female so it allowed a lot of small people to like dabble in it as an excess stream of income but that also allowed some people to pursue their passions or their interests and then find people well now what's happened with the legality of everything is that all those booths there they all have to be licensed people it's now before the whole thing was sort of like some kind of gray area swap meet now they have little segments of like oh here's the legacy brands here's the little section of people that probably can't afford to be here but it used to be all the people you came to see so we'll like make this little section for them and we'll make them have a space because you're tired of going and seeing all of the big corporate funded brands yeah that have a bunch of money behind them and none of them really have any little passion projects what they want is like market share and money and it's a lot of those legacy brands you would go in there you'd see they'd have like a plant there and you could talk to them there was zero seed cells they were not allowed to do any seed cells if they were licensed by the state so they could be that's it there was times when I would do random stuff I would go to just off the top of my head I went to the swamp boys once and I smelled their mojito and I was like oh that was a cool jar I'll take a pack there was some nose in there that I was like oh okay but it's like unless you have herbs and unless you have herb and unless you have people that can like smell it or smoke it or see it or talk to the person they might not know it exists or might not know it cares and so what happens is is that a lot of the people that started making seeds and started making names and started making companies for themselves are locked out of that so it's like the very people that built those scenes up into making people willing to buy expensive tickets and bring money in their pocket to drop and allow those those you know those you know those high times or emerald cup or whatever to sell expensive booth space right like that all collapses because you need people with money you know the last year the very last year that I went to emerald cup the only way I was allowed to go there was to go there via a seed bank that was registered right like and and had licenses somehow all that crap and I was allowed to interact with the customers but I wasn't allowed to do any direct seed so they'd come to me excited to buy these packs for me and I'd be like hmm gotta go there sorry and it would just set people so much that they couldn't just do that to have that exchange you had to it's almost like you were there to promote but like you had to have a seed bank there all the proper licensing and all the proper hoops and all the proper everything and you know before at some place like that you know Matt or any number of our buddies would show up with a trunk full of seeds and brochures and all kinds of stuff and in the new rules it's like the distributor has to bring it all yeah I used to show up with stuff piles of stuff to give away and I couldn't even do that you know what I mean there was a lot of give stuff away so they created all these new rules and they created all these regulations and they created all these fees and taxes and it made them a good it made revenue and in terms of like you know state fees and taxes that they got but then a few years went by and now who knows what they're gonna think because all of a sudden they're like reaping what they sowed and they're realizing they didn't actually set up an industry that's thriving yeah you can't have an industry that's thriving that the only way it's thriving is you give away more of your business to more investors to stay afloat for longer that's not and so what happens is when that happens you know especially when you get investors in there the problem is since investors don't come from weed all of the cool little side projects all of the neat little stuff all of the ways that you would treat cannabis in order to make it really really high quality they start looking at that as costly and inefficient and they want to return on their investment and then you're not going to make any money at your company unless you give them a return up like you have to pay out all this money and if you want money left over for you people start trying to figure out like it's what happened in Colorado when like everyone was like oh I need to get three or four pounds of light yeah the most important thing is getting three or four pounds of light because that's the only way I'm going to get a paycheck and that's the only way the investors are going to start breathing on you know stop stop hunting me and what that meant is that all these consumers then are going to get all these strains that yield that much and were pumped that much and were grown at super high EC and super high CO2 and super everything to like make them yield like crazy and they're like man this isn't as nice yeah but you know the economic model is like we want we want to return on our investment and the people that took the investment money are like I need to get paid and so what's happened is you took a sort of like I mean what's funny is like Dennis Perron made the made the first you know medical law in the country with 215 in California and it was very loose and it was very gray area and it can we can we just say thank you Dennis Perron like 100% what an awesome dude he made it for the great well a great representative of the gay community for cannabis too he made it for the consumers he made it for the sick patients he made it for people that need you know especially people you know in his community that were you know HIV positive and struggling with all of the various ailments that come along with that especially in an era and you know when he was pushing for it before they really even had effective medicines to treat it like they do today and he made it very loose and sort of gray area ish and out of that came a 20 year boom yeah of economic activity that revolutionized the state and in a large way and spread all across the country I wish I had the picture ready right now maybe I can find it but I have a picture of Dennis Perron in the late 70s and just for the strain nerds that watch this like that really really didn't know this he's sitting there with bulls of like every exotic cannabis strain you could imagine from around the world in 1978 like the biggest G on earth had somehow like he had access to what we have today like somehow back then in 1978 sitting there in his little San Francisco shop you know all the different tie sticks and Afghans that it was wild yeah the man amazes me and I'd like to do an episode on I mean he's definitely and so you take him who basically did this thing that not only helped a bunch of sick people yeah but also began to change America's viewpoint on what they thought was both harmful and dangerous you know into something that people now mostly think is fairly benign and actually positive and kind yeah and then you know we make proposition 64 and five years into it the whole thing is in crisis yeah it's just a weird it's in total crisis there's nobody in any aspect of the of the weed game that's particularly happy yeah you know we even have D'Angelo upset about 64 now which is really ironic well I don't think it's ironic he was like he was one of the to me again I keep going back to this and I know I'm gonna sound like I'm ranting a little bit but I go back to the he was one of the people that thought hey I'm freaking wealthy I'm richer than all these dope heads I'll come here and take this you know a little bit of a culture vulture in my opinion just my opinion allegedly a culture vulture you know he thought he was rich enough and then he found ah shit I'm not rich enough everybody I mean I you know I don't usually talk poorly about people Matt always tries me to get me to do so but even back in the day and the height of the 215 era he wanted the most important part of the cannabis chain to be the stores yeah he wanted the most profitable place to be the stores he was always trying to cut off growers and producers and hash makers at the knees he wanted to buy what he could from them as cheap as possible and he wanted to be the central player and he is not the only person but he is a large reason he pushed Proposition 64 very hard and he was very big on being the father of legal cannabis and all this that and everything else and the reason why he's changed his tune now is because he realizes I think that the thing that he pushed for is a master in a large amount of times and he doesn't want to get blamed for it and he didn't and he even I think he even got pushed out from his own company eventually over time and that wasn't what he was intending on either I think he was intending on ending up being very rich and also getting to do nice time magazine pieces on being the father of modern cannabis he thought he was going to be some combination of Dennis Perron, Bob Marley Willie Nelson Snoop Dogg he was going to be an old well-regarded legend people were going to stand up and clap when he went into the room he was going to weed for warriors he was going to do that same thing when you're a corporate raider where you do a little bit of charity so people can pay to talk good about you and he ended up just killing the goose with the golden egg this is one thing I've noticed in the discord with a lot of the people because we're starting to get a big community in our Patreon discord it started very small and kind of cozy and there are a lot of people really tight it started getting a little bit bigger and bigger and as more people come in we start getting a newer crowd people newer growing a little bit on the outside reach just getting into growing and somehow they're finding out about us and they get really really shocked when they hear that certain people like Steve D'Angelo aren't growing in his basement or Snoop Dogg doesn't have all these grows and tables in his rooms pumping bubblegum cookies right like this isn't happening but it's not common sense to everyone it's common sense to us as growers of course these people that travel around and do all this shit aren't growing and don't have moms, why would they people might think this is funny talk all the time about like what to talk about because some stuff might be like in our mind might be beaten to death by us but might not be well known or understood by the larger populace yet or might just be important enough like the state of the cannabis spot that you kind of periodically just talk about it because you got to keep battering it in and eventually what happens is is that consumers need to force choice and what large companies want to do is they want to give you the illusion of choice while making a ton of money off you yeah and cannabis is very unique in that if we were going to, I use this analogy a lot but if we were going to go into say like the supermarket almost everything you buy in the supermarket if the vegetable or the fruit doesn't meet the production model it doesn't get grown yeah tomatoes aren't rated based on their flavor and their texture they're rated based on weight and color and does their skin split and do they rot and can I pick it green weeks early and ship it across the country and then ripen it and then sell it so like the consumer is way far down the list and cannabis is unique in that no one ever would choose to grow OG Kush in a production model yeah they just wouldn't no one would choose to grow OGKB or cookies in a production model there's lots of strains that have gotten famous that from a production standpoint and from an ease of growth standpoint aren't very desirable whatever their effect or just the customers like them yeah and so as a result of that you know people are getting into this business and they're like well I want to grow we think they want to grow something that just knocks it out of the park they want it to be the biggest they want it to be fastest they want more crops a year they want more yield to take the things that fit within their production model they will and so consumers have to fight for choices right but if consumers aren't educated about their choices in the first place like what's out there then that's how stuff gets lost in my opinion it's super hard to educate to educate people just coming in how do you ever get past the initial a lot of this people's initial point are the Snoop Dogg are the Steve D'Angelo the Jim Belushi show or any of those things what's happened is with Mike Tyson the only person I'm dissing that he just mentioned is probably Steve D'Angelo but the rest of them they're just famous in other aspects of their life maybe you're an actor maybe you're a musician maybe you're a famous boxer maybe you're whatever and you already have people to think well of you and so often what they do is they license their name and their image and they kick them some money and some whatever for doing it and then they're trying to make a brand they're trying to make familiarity with people out there but what most people are realizing is that most of these brands are really just buying from third parties yeah they might be all the same thing I mean I don't know most people probably don't know that for all the cookie stores cookies barely doesn't touch weed they don't they make mylars and they make clothing and almost all of their growing is third party grows that they make contracts with and they get a right of first refusal yeah they can choose whether or not they want to buy it or not based on whatever contract they arrange with that person but people think that like Burner is out there and they've got a team of like excellent growers that have been knocking this stuff out and refining their craft for the last 15 years they really do but they don't they do not have that that's not what they do, that's not their model at all their model is to get third parties to I mean even when it comes to breeding and stuff like that you know they worked with JBZ for a while they worked with Compound they hire out they farm out almost all of their work but let's not confuse people because realistically like that farming out doesn't just stop at the person in many cases like cookies will farm out to someone else to make the seeds and that person might farm out to someone else to make the seeds there's several middle men in the middle of this without naming anyone there's so many middle men in the middle of this it's like they get a contract and they're like hey I'm going to make this amount I'm willing to give you this percentage of my amount for you to do all the work I've got the contract I've got the outlet I've got the sale I don't really want to do the work so how about you do all the work and I'll give you a piece of it but you can't get this deal without me because I have the deal and so he's right there's usually multiple layers at times of farming it out hypothetically like if there was a company named Shmookies and one name impound or outhouse and they're like hey well you make my seeds you're like yeah but yeah I'll make those seeds and then like they don't even let them know and they're like hey I'm down here hey little guy hey can you make the seeds yeah I'll give you x amount kick it up bang I'm a breeder because it's my time and you know it's not even for me to cookies is like a clothing brand and it's stores sure but they want most they don't really have like QC in the way you would think where it's like they don't do all that stuff in house because that affects their ability to become multi-state operators in some way technically they are a seed company though I suppose, but as we know, and we don't have to name names, they farmed out the making of Candy Rain to a third party. Yes, yes. And that third party made them.  Yeah. But like the people growing it aren't on their payroll. Yeah. You know, they contracted it out. So a lot of these big brands don't actually, they're not actually vertical in the sense that they control their own quality. Yeah.  And, you know, I mean, but that's the state of it. And so they don't want people to know that because it, you know, I mean, we used to joke that 10 years ago or whatever, you know, people thought that like their cookies was like hand-watered by Burner. You know, like in the Bay when it was really first coming out that like all the cookies that was there was like from four or five different dudes all carefully curating it and making it happen. Yeah. And they were early on to realize that like the brand was the thing and they could farm out the work and still make a big percentage for being the guy. Yeah. I think they were very early on at figuring out that everything was a brand. Branding was everything. Everything was a brand, yeah. And weed wasn't ready for that, huh? Yeah, that. Have you ever seen one of these things in action? Have you ever seen this real quick? No. This is what they call it, ash it, ash tray. And I don't know. Oh, I heard it. Yeah, yeah. I heard it before we started.  So I'm gonna try it. We'll see, I don't know. Let's see. This is one of the C2 glass ones, but I can't always get it to work. Oh, there we go. I guess it hadn't, take a second. Hold on. It's so loud, isn't it? It's very non-relaxing. Yeah, I don't, maybe I need to love it to get a better suck. I'm not sure. I don't know if you can see, but it sucked around, but the center's still there. Oh well, okay, that was worth a try. I tried it. Yeah, that's a terrible sound. It's not how, that's not the sound I wanna hear when I'm trying to relax and smoke some cannabis, that's for sure. No, I wouldn't mind if it did a good job, but that did not work pretty well. Okay, I had to try it, I don't know. You had to try it. I didn't try it. Okay. Now let's get back to where we were.  That was a little obnoxious. Yeah, I didn't know it was gonna be loud, loud, loud. Yeah, it's like very high RPM. Yeah. And yeah. Right next to the microphone too. Indeed, indeed. So I don't know, I mean, to the state of the affairs, it's kind of like what's happened in a nutshell is there's vast overproduction in almost every state that gets recreational, right? It happens fairly quickly. Yeah. And then the glut leads to price wars, where stores and distributors start purchasing things based on pricing and margins for themselves, which leads to a lack of choice for consumers because they don't get to pick amongst the quality because the distros and the stores are buying things that are most advantageous for them and being like, you know, here's 28 kinds of, you know, boofy to decent and a couple of things that randomly are nice, but they're all in mylar, so you can't see it. So hopefully you guess which one's good and I'll take your money, right? And then what happens is that you hear all this talk, this might be pretty political or whatever, but you hear all this talk about how the black market or the traditional market is affecting the legal market and the legal market would have a lot better sales and be a lot more robust if we just didn't have all of this black market or all of this traditional market or medical market demand going on, which is hamstringing our new legal industry. Yeah, and they mostly blame it on cartel black market specifically and intertwine that propaganda. Well, they just try to intertwine that propaganda is the same thing and it just, yeah. So this might get me in trouble, but I think it's actually reversed. Yes, I do too. So, and what I mean by that is that I think it's very true that the white market people would all like all of the black market producers to stop. Yep. They want the supply of the black market to stop, but that's not because they think that there would be hordes of new people pouring into the stores that would robustly boost up their white market sales. It's so that they can take their excess and dump it into the market share that was formally being supplied by the traditional. Yeah. And I think what happened in California is the first couple of years as this over production problem happened, there was a lot of diversion that people didn't, people don't want to admit that metric is both cumbersome, expensive, and super ineffective. Yeah. Like it's an open secret in the industry how poorly metric work at keeping things where it's supposed to be kept. Poorly porous. We don't need to get into the porous. And it's not, and anyone that wants to can get around it. Sure. And so most large and medium sized companies that aren't legacy and aren't fairly small end up having to divert a decent portion of what they make into the black. Yeah. And it worked for a few years until production and over production got to a point where they started having difficulty doing that.  Yeah. It's about their traditional diversionary sales. Yeah. In my opinion. No, no, it makes sense. Yeah. Because what they want is they want the traditional supply to go away so that the traditional demand is more robust for them to supply. Yeah. Because obviously the smokers will keep being smokers. I mean, there's this thing that like, you know, Matt and I were looking at not long ago where like this past year, Canada, which has gone totally legal, they destroyed like 425 million grams of unsold cannabis that had expired, which was 28% of the yearly crop that had been produced in the past 12 months. And I think that worked out to like, what was it like nine? I don't even, it was like 916 tons or something.  And so they actually, what that means for Canada though, is that means whatever system Canada has, they're actually preventing a large, at least that amount of it from being diverted. And then it's sitting there, and then eventually it gets old and expires, and then they light it on fire and get rid of it. Yeah. I haven't heard, maybe I'm wrong, but I haven't heard of a single recreational state that has had to step in and destroy a bunch of expired cannabis products of any kind. I don't know of any, I hear of a lot of people sitting on a lot of stuff, but I don't know if that's even, I don't know what market that is when I hear that.  You know, and so I'm not even trying to call people out or anything like that, they're just trying to like, they get into business, they set up a 500 lighter, you know, and all of a sudden they realize that, you know, they're growing 7, 800 pounds a rip five times a year, and there's not enough demand with all the other indoors going around for them to off all of their product into the white, there's just not.   But how many people stuck up their hands and said, I can run that?   I know how to run a crew of 70. And like I said, that's a major problem and that almost reaches to the disconnect I've been speaking about with the legacy strains and the universities is that there's still that disconnect. There's that disconnect between the people with the money or financing or the people with the science that are writing the history books and the traditional market that's done this all along because everybody's trying to work everybody, you know, in between the middlemen or all trying to get between and work between the two. And these two have never spoken.  Well, if you wanna take a free market approach, you know, to it, Dennis Perone's version was very lightly regulated, the light touch of government and let, you know, human ingenuity and commerce built. Yeah. The legal situation has been, in my opinion, legal is actually the wrong word. It's more like highly taxed, highly regulated, very controlled. And as a result of that, they've created so many different barriers and so many different inefficiencies that you have these people that are exploiting all these different inefficiencies. And so you go and you can go in states from gluts where nobody can make any money and the price of cannabis falls below the cost of production to, you know, droughts where it spikes briefly, you know, and people are getting crazy dollars for different things because it's all volatile. And then, you know, it's just not open and fair. And so as a result of that, you know, there's like, I think there's like 40 million people in California. I don't even think there's a thousand legal stores. Yeah, I have no clue. And as you know, like you're in a different part of California than I am, there's all kinds of counties, especially in the Eastern part of California that have banned dispensaries anyway. Yeah, I don't think we have any here. It has to be outside of this county. Dispensaries are mostly a coastal county phenomenon. All the way from San Diego up to Humboldt. If your county touches the ocean, you probably have a dispensary. And if your county is along or east of the five, you probably don't. Yeah, that's pretty much it, huh?  So you have a glut and you give a lot of power to the dispensaries and a lot of power to the distros. Yeah. Right, where before distros didn't even need to exist. A farmer could go directly to a dispensary and they could make a deal. Yeah, you're right. Now you have to have another middleman. Now you have to have in California, you have to have a special delivery license. If I'm a farmer and I wanna drive my product to a dispensary, I have to have a delivery license. Otherwise it's not legal for me to have it on the road. That's right. It was grown on my own farm. It's only legal on my property. I can't. I mean, as kids, right, we watched the movie Robin Hood, Disney movie Robin Hood and we all saw King John or, you know, or no, the sheriff in Nottingham.  And even as kids, we knew that doesn't make any sense. That's not that man's money. Give that man his money back. But as adults, we've all made this invisible agreement that this is okay. The shakedown that's going on is cool. Well, maybe it's just my punk rock ethos. Like, That's your punk rock ethos. I think a lot of people Choose what I get shook down by where that money goes. Five years ago, I think there was a lot of people that despite their reservations in 64, we're like, you know, this could suck in a variety of ways, but at least I'll be able to make a living, support my family, put my money in the bank, never get raided, right?    Yeah.  And they were like, okay, well, this deal seems kind of crappy, but at least I'll be able to legally support my family, put my money in the bank and just have a normal business. That's fair. A lot of these people had PTSD, like real genuine PTSD from being raided and having their family's lives upturned.  That's fair. Yeah.  It's occupational hazard.  If you're an office worker, maybe you get carpal tunnel.  You know, if you were a cannabis farmer, even if you were like fully, fully legal and selling all of your product to a dispensary, just like 215 intended and all that, the cops could still hit you and be like, you're going to jail. Yeah, they don't care. You know, it doesn't mean that you might not win in court, but you still got raided and went to jail.  Cut down and they took what they wanted and now you're fighting it out. And so, you know, people thought initially, but what's happened now is it's like, you know, it's gone on long enough where that's the reason why a lot of these, a lot of these, you know, up here in my area, four or five years ago, people used to sell cannabis properties at a premium. Yeah. Like, oh my God, look at this ranch. It's fully developed. It's turnkey. It's got all this grow on it.   Oh my God. Because, you know, a lot of times, it's like it's a losing money proposition. Yeah. They took something that took a ton of Californians and a ton of rural areas and brought them out of poverty and created an enormous amount of economic activity both in the rural areas and in the cities. And they somehow, like I said before, they killed the goose that legged the golden egg. And nobody wants to admit that they made a bunch of mistakes and how they're going to redo it.  And when that investor money stops, right, which it's starting to stop because when you start seeing investors start suing people, it's because they've realized, they've given up hope that they're gonna, now they're worried about their principal investment. Yeah. Right? When they go from like, oh, I'm gonna make a ton of money. Yeah, now they're worried about, I'm gonna try to recoup what I can. I'm gonna try to recoup, you know, I'm gonna try to mitigate my losses. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right? And so as a result of that, if that's the case, then you're gonna see a bunch of contraction, right?  Oh yeah. As far as quality and diversity of what they had access to. Yeah. I mean, just the things you could do, like you could, in 215 era, you could run a breeding project and like your fricking dispensary. Like it didn't, you know what I mean? Well, the other thing that I could say. You could also get popped, like you could get popped that day, but everybody knew like, okay, you get popped.   Everybody knew. Maybe I should make a political statement. Do it. I like the question. In my opinion, like the biggest thing that, you know, you were talking about that article and like studying Delta 8 and Delta 10 and THC and harm to children or whatever and legacy strains, the biggest thing they could do for legacy strains, they don't need some 20 million dollar university study program. They could just make it be like, okay, if you wanna be non-commercial cannabis, right? I don't care if you have a breeding program with 200 plants in your backyard. Yeah.  Yeah. But if you look at like the heirloom vegetables like Baker Creek or any of those people, right?  And without worry about getting their families traded, yeah. No, so if you wanna preserve the legacy, allow all the weed nerds to have whatever plant count they want. Yeah. Like if you're not selling it and you wanna have 500 plants in your garage, let them. If you wanna do a big seed pop and hunt for rare traits you're after and try to create a new strain, let them. You know, you can still make rules where like you're not allowed to send this out of state or we don't want you to sell it or you know, we don't want you to this or that. But you know, failing that, it's like if they want preservation of genetics, they should make rules that allow legally you to do that and it doesn't have to have this super taxed, super regulated commercial only legality. Because that's essentially what they've done is they're like, if you know, it's only legal if you're commercially paying them. Like I think a private farmer right now can have like four or six plants or something. That's called a shakedown. That's not saving moms that you care about. That's not popping a bunch of seeds and doing a phenol hunt. That's not saving things from the phenol hunt. That's not being like, oh, I just popped 50 seeds of riots, whatever hybrid, strawberry switchblade. And there's 10 of them I like that I want to run again and compare them. There's no doing that anymore. That's illegal. Even if you want to do that in a four by eight tent. Yeah. And a two by two space you couldn't do. And you're growing them little popsicles. That's not legal. It's preposterous. So the biggest thing that they could do for legacy is let all the weed nerds and let all the preservationists and let all the people that have all that stuff give them the freedom to play around with weed, non-commercially. Yeah. Which is what every other vegetable and fruit can do. As long as they make it, it's only legal if you want to have this extremely expensive to maintain and set up business. There's a lot of non-commercial cannabis that might have value later on that we don't even know about. There could be cancer curing compounds. There could be ones that are better for glaucoma. There could be ones that are better for nausea or HIV or this or that or whatever. Just don't even think that's anybody's concern except maybe the PhD academics that are looking into it. But I don't think they, again, there's that disconnect of these middlemen that have made this big wall between the two. But if you allow us to preserve legally, then we'll do it. And the PhDs and all the testing and all that, that can happen later because we're already doing it for ourselves. They're just so bad at letting, taking something, the government, taking something and then being like, all right, you're right. Let's give it back. Like that doesn't happen. All right, so if you want me to be like real political, like going back to overgrow, right? Which was overgrowing cannabis world were the first two really big forums where people that didn't know each other could gather and talk about weed, right? Yeah. And the whole overgrow concept was literally if everyone over, if everyone grows, we're gonna overgrow the government's ability to criminalize all of us and they'll have to change it. To police it, yeah. Yeah, like if there's enough civil disobedience going on where we're like, this law sucks, right? And enough people do it, they can't jail the entire population. They can't even jail most of the population. They can only jail a tiny fraction, right? And so, I don't think the fight is over at all.  And now they're like, hey, this thing you got, it's pretty cool. If you want, we'll take it from here. If you wanna give us all your knowledge and all your strains and all your seeds and all that, and let us commercially, you did a good job, you're good, we'll take it from here. Yeah. And so, I think, I don't think the fight is over, I think the fight has changed and that they're losing. And so, they're finally starting to give us medical and recreational at a wide scale.   Right, however, this is what you gotta realize. This is what you gotta realize though. Yeah. Is that when they didn't want us to have it at all, that made it a lot more lucrative. Yes. And as such that it was lucrative, it allowed us to fund our insurgency, if you will. That is true. Yeah. It allowed us to fund seed making, clone saving, clone sharing.  Absolutely. Right, so your fear that you talked about before is that they crash the price so much that the people that are trying to enact change can't sell fund. Correct. Yeah. Like, I mean, take it from like, obviously like the weed fight that we're doing is totally nonviolent, but I often wonder like when the American government was in Afghanistan, like would we have beaten the Taliban if the Taliban didn't have Hashish and opium to fund their operations? Yeah, who knows? You know? Yeah. In the sense that like, they were able to get, at some point, I can't remember when, but it was like, I read this thing where like, you know, we were three, four years into the fight over there and they were like, Afghanistan is producing 90% of the world's heroin. Well, obviously who was making that money? Our government usually. But I just mean that like it allowed those, like you know, like a resistance movement has to have some level of funding. Yeah, as I understood it, it was the Taliban trying to clear it out because they were religious fundamentalists and us protecting it.  I definitely think that, you know, they might, I don't know if they're clearing it out again, but it's like any kind of movement needs something to fund itself. So we, maybe it was a bad analogy or whatever, but they were able to, I mean they were able to use the hash trade and weed or maybe they weren't even all that involved in it and they just took protection money. Yeah, I'm sure that was going on, yeah. From the farmers and the dealers and the people that needed to use the trade routes or whatever else. Yeah. And so, you know, in the 215 era and in the illegal era, it was much smaller, but it was also much more profitable. And so if you stayed hidden, you could kind of do what you wanted. Yeah. Now I think they're trying to trick us by being like, okay, we'll give you what you want, but it's only kind of what you want. And it's basically us taking most of what you want, but we'll take away some of the fear of you getting in trouble. And in return, you'll give up your hope. Yeah. Yeah. And allow us to just, you know, to just take this over from you. Yeah. And so- We've got the growing side, we'll let you smoke, but we got the, we got the, we got the back side, you can smoke. Yeah. And so to me, it's like, until I'm able to grow weed in my backyard, like I'm able to grow cucumbers or tomatoes or whatever, like think about before Whole Foods and before the 20 years ago, when like the organic revolution really like took hold in America and got like more mainstream, like all the people doing all those heirloom vegetables and fruits and stuff were all a bunch of crunchy hippies. Yeah. And back to nature types and weird little farmers and stuff. Most people didn't even know that was going on. And little co-ops. Yeah. There was little co-ops. There was little things going on. There was small groups of enthusiasts that kept all that stuff alive until big companies were like, oh, people want this? Okay, we'll carry some. Yeah. Right, but we, in order for weed to have that happen, they need to allow the enthusiasts. They need to allow the people with passion. They need to be allowed the people with a touch of the tism, you know, who get into it like that deeply and care that deeply about lineage and strains and history and old things to preserve it. How do you see that happening? That's how I, that's what I just said. I think that we need to go from like a, we need to make it actually legal. How, I mean, how do we get lobbyists? I mean, that's how people get things legal. I mean, how do people like us, the strain nerds, how do we assemble? Well, we're in a dark time. We're in a dark time in the moment because they changed all the rules on us by partially giving us what we wanted. Yes. And now everyone's realizing that was a little bit of like fool's gold, right? And where do we go from here? Yeah. And so probably what it's gonna take is what I think is gonna happen is they're not going to, they're not going to really start to look at changing all the rules and regulations until the states start failing and get embarrassed. Yeah, I can see that. Like I've consulted on some pretty big projects here and there and like when I talk to people in big ag, they just can't believe the rules and regulations and bullshit that we have to jump through. Oh yeah. They're used to being able at a large level to cowboy up and kind of do what they want with wide choices and latitude. And it's all based on being efficient and having good production models and this and that but the hand of the government is pretty light. And that's what we need is we need a light hand. Right now we have a heavy hand. And there's people that are trying to steal it from us and there's people in our community that are banding with them hoping to help them steal it from us but to get personally wealthy along the way and make it for them and their family. And all those people need to get mostly screwed. Yeah, it'd be nice if they did, but yeah. A lot of them are. I mean, let's put it this way, right? Like. It is true, yeah.  We don't need to name who, right? Who's you thinking about? Would you want to be sued by Scots? Oh no, no, fear no. Like a massive corporation with endless money and probably lawyers that are $500 an hour. Would you want them to come after you? They win, they win suits where they're, they sound like they're the devil and they win the suits. Yeah. And so some of these rich investors are like, you know what Bernie Madoff's problem was? He stole from other rich people. Yeah. And when they figured it out, they were like, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.   Yeah, yeah. And they found out that a bunch of like non-ethical hustlers were sloshing their money around and not really treating it the right way.  Do you think there's a chance that, that any kind of major corporation predicted that this is what would happen? Because in my opinion, I don't think that this is that out of the realm of logic for all having taken place. Like from watching how alcohol became what it was to now and stuff and how many people ripped it off and got in the middle between the gray areas and stuff. Alcohol is a totally different scenario. It is a totally different scenario, but look at all the dirty middlemen in between and how many people that were like actually outlaws doing it got screwed in the end. That's the whole scenario. And now it's a lot of. Well, and you can kind of say they got screwed, but like, if you want to, I mean, this is getting really off track, but if you want to look at alcohol, the reason why alcohol got made illegal, if you can look it up was because before prohibition, like Americans was the drunkest country on earth, right? There was men drinking gallons upon gallons of whiskey. There was mass like absences on Mondays on the work week, because people were so hungover from the weekend, right? The abolitionists, the prohibitionists, the reason why they were so against it was because the level of public drunkenness, like if you just type into Google, like how much they drank then versus today, it's astronomical, right? And the reason they got rid of it wasn't because they made a big mistake, it was because they were like, oh man, like we fueled these criminal groups to where they've taken over almost every major city and they actually run the cops and they run the mayors and they're electing and they're doing this and they're doing that, and everyone's disobeying us, like everyone, and it's creating this horrific thing and like after they got rid of prohibition, it took them an extra 50 or 60 years to break them up. Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking like Kennedy, like he, I was all the way up into 63 and he was alcohol prohibition, like bootleg, he was not him. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, but he had political effect all the way up until 63 to get his sons elected. Oh, and there's almost no doubt that the, I mean, that the Chicago mob helped Kennedy get elected and helped him win Illinois. And I'm not trying to like divert on a tangent, but like weed has not like, alcohol fueled so much money that it corrupted so many police forces, so much government, so many mayors, so many senators, so many different things that they almost, in order to restore order, they had to stop it. It was like a massive failure. And they didn't stop it.  That's true. No, it wasn't that.  But looking at it just strictly from a business model, it was very easy to predict how it was gonna go. There was gonna be people who thought they were rich enough to play, and then there were gonna be the actual rich people who could take loss that had way more money than the people that thought they were rich here. Some what? And could take losses longer and play the longer game. But honestly, you know, like I've consulted for people that I think are incredibly rich at times. And like in order for those incredibly rich people to, you still have to realize that like they invest their money in so many different things that like cannabis has to be as good or better than other places they could put their money. Oh, sure. And what they're discovering is that cannabis is actually quite a bit worse. Yeah. Than most other places they could put their money. So cannabis might have extracted a ton of investment out of all these different types of people. But eventually there's the situation where like you've been losing money for four or five years and you're like, oh, I thought that, you know, profit would be around the corner. And if it's not, you might just cut bait and start putting that money you were pouring into it into, you know, into something that's gonna make you money right away. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like it's economics. These guys outlast these guys. Right, but I don't think they predict that. I think there's people that are trying to outlast others, but I think that there's a lot of losers that thought they would be in the outlast category. Again, that's economics. The guys that fall out never think they're gonna be the ones that fall out. They always think they're the richest in the house that are gonna be the guys that are the smartest. I mean, I could do it, I could do it. The thing is, is that like looking at like that, there's like, you know, New York just opened up and New York has like five stores open. And they're trying to like build this legal industry and there's all these news reports now of like, you know, hundreds of bodegas illegally selling cannabis that they know is from California. Yeah, that makes sense, yeah.  You know, it's like, they don't get that like, one of the things that alcohol did that was vastly different than cannabis is that alcohol was made legal at the federal level when they repealed the amendment. So all 50 states made it legal, right? And that there were certain counties and there were certain places that are still dry to this day. In Arkansas and, you know, there's Missouri, there's some places in the deep South that are still dry counties and you can't buy alcohol. But right now as long as there's legal counties, not legal counties, legal states, not legal states, it's gonna be chaos and they won't be able to control it. Yeah. They just won't. I mean, look at Oklahoma, right? Oklahoma used to be one of the worst places to get caught with cannabis in the entire United States. Used to be able to read in high times that people got caught with like 12 plants and got 50 years. Yeah. Right? Like he used to be incredibly severe and then they're a pretty Republican. And so they're like, okay, we're just gonna like make it legal and we're gonna have almost no government regulation. Right? Yeah. And then they do that for a few years and then they realize that like most of the grows are cartel or Chinese nationals and they're using and they're using Oklahoma as a base to supply all the illegal states in the southern part of the southeastern part of the United States and Texas and they're like, what the hell? Yeah. Like 4 million people in Oklahoma. Yeah. But they allow like 3,000 acres to supply like 4 million people. Yeah. And then they're shocked at diversion. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? You know? Yeah. I mean, I think the fight right now is the people that care are hurting because the game has changed and it's hard to adapt to change that happens really quickly. And so the parts that Matt and I care about are, I mean, we're for the small guy. You know, we want as much experimentation as possible.  And if you wanna start a small company and you wanna start a small business it shouldn't take millions of dollars of outside capital. Yeah. You get a small one up and running and going. I didn't, I think the first thing that really shocked me when I talked to the very first person that went from, you know, traditional market to legal was how much money it costs just to get the equipment for the government to surveil you via metric. Oh yeah. Yeah.  There's farms in Santa Barbara. They have to pay 800 to a million dollars or more just for their licenses every year. Yeah, it's insane. Just for a 10,000 square foot license, which is the size of a, you know, basically a football field. I go back to my Robin Hood comment. I mean, just it's base logic. It's all bad. We know it as, at our heart, we know we shouldn't be getting shut down like that, you know, as kids. Honestly, what would happen is, if you, what I think would happen is that if they actually made a metric that worked and they drew like a big bright line where legal couldn't get diverted at all, I think 80 to 90, I think 80% of the farms in the state would fail. Yeah. And it would be mostly the big farms. Yeah. Because they would be unsustainable. And it would be the small, smaller farms that are more, that are more nimble, that are better at growing, that could produce a better quality product that would honestly probably survive. You know, I think that it would be a couple of big farms smushing everybody out. I actually don't think without exportation to other states or other areas, that's actually feasible. I think most of those things would fail. You lived, you live in an area where there is a demand for crafts still, where there is a quantity of smokers that do care about quality and no quality in the first place to care about quality. But if you're in one of these many other cities that aren't one of the mechas of cannabis, it wasn't like that. A lot of people have never seen quality in the first place to no quality. Oh, I get it. And I wouldn't get it. I just think that like a small family- Is it just so optimistic? I'm not, I don't think I'm optimistic. I just think- Damn, you're optimistic. I just think that all these big, big farms are surviving on fresh investment and diversion. Yeah. I agree.  And one of their sales guys came to me all panicked and he was like, hey, I just, I just, I got all for all the legal sales for all the dispensaries. And I was like, okay. And he's like, this is really weird. And I'm like, what's weird? He's like, if we hit the numbers you say we can hit, we could supply 90% of the state in sales. He's like, where is it all going? And I was like- Question. You're starting to figure it out, huh? Yeah, good question. You know, and so as a result, it's like, I think without exportation, I think all of these huge farms would implode underneath their own weight. Yeah. You know, I think they would.  That's true. And the small farms- I think it wiped out. And the small farms up in Humboldt and Mendo and these different spots, like the people up here have no other choice. That's what I'm saying. It's- There's no, there's no choice. That's already happening. It's already happened. It's not like- Oh, it's already happening. It's kind of tape. We can't rewind the tape on what we've lost in the families and a lot of stuff. But it also, it also boomed during 215. There was a lot, I don't want to call anybody out again, but there was a lot of rich kids that came up here and bought properties with their family money and then hired one of their buddies to run it after a year or two and then ended up living in Santa Rosa or the Bay or LA or wherever and just taking a percentage because they owned the land that their parents bought them. Yeah. You know? There was a lot of out-of-town people that bought property up here.  It's like, imagine you could set up a scene and you're like, okay, I'll hire you to run my spot, but I get it's a 50-50 split. I'm gonna go get these neck catches while you do all this work. You're gonna do all this work, but I provide this spot. You know? And you can't afford the spot, but I can because my parents bought it. Yeah. Because they have good credit and they put down the down payment. It's very typical though. You know? Yeah. It's very typical. People don't want to admit it, but there was a bunch of people. They're all fleeing the county now because their business model failed.  Yeah. You know? And there was a lot of middlemen too that were making a lot of money, not doing very much. But I'm just saying the people that are actually willing to like work their spot. Yeah. You know? Because I think what would happen is, is like, imagine you have a 40-acre farm. You know, that could be 41-acre farms. Or that could be 160 10,000 square foot farms. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. Like in those little farms, you know, it's just like, what do you think better weed comes out of? A four-liter or a 500-liter? Yeah. I mean, yeah. Smaller is generally better. There's like, there is like a size at which you're not gonna be able to get craft anymore. Nobody wants to agree what that size is because everybody wants to call whatever project they're on craft. Yeah. You know? But let's just face it. It's like, eventually it's too big and you're having hired help that aren't as good as you, care for most of your plants. Yeah. It's the way it works. You know? So I mean, I'm not even trying to be all that hopeful because it's a very stressful time and I worry that even if like I managed to survive or not me, or you know, various people up in my area managed to survive, most won't. I don't think it's possible. Under the current situation. And then as a result of that, my community falls into poverty again. And with that goes legacy strains. And that's why I said like when I saw that article to me like it's just like, you are a year and a half too late to even be trying to, I mean, granted, there are a lot of things left that haven't been lost that are in libraries. There are still people keeping these. Not everything is lost. But there are, so like if they gave any shits about legacy anything, they would have been doing this from the jump. I don't think they realized. And the other part of it too is that even if they do have all this money and even if like these, even if these like various colleges or whatever are gonna start doing it, does that mean that these like small, you know, preservationists or whatever are going to like give over their legacy stuff to these researchers? We already know what's gonna happen because we saw it happen in Thailand. Is it just, is that just a way for wealthy people to collect all the, because the thing is, is that wealthy people have everything that we don't, except for the knowledge of how to do a good job, the connections within the community and the strains and what's real and what's not. Yes. They can get all the permits, they can hire the construction companies, they can get the lawyers, they can get a lot, they can do all that. They just, but when it comes to actually growing it, processing it, trimming it, putting good weed in the bag and then knowing what the differences are, they have no idea. So in a lot of states that have gone legal, they wanna hire people to teach them and they wanna get the strains and then they wanna fire them. Yeah, that's what they did. After they have the strains and after they have the SOPs and after they have the know-how, they're like, oh, I don't need you anymore. So my biggest fear with the legacy study is you could say, oh, it's too little, too late. They should have done this a while ago, but like, what does that money go to? What are they gonna study? That's what I'm trying to tell you. We've already seen what happens with this. Like to me, it's obvious what's going on because they just did this in the Philippines. Is it another phylos? Or Thailand, I'm sorry, Thailand. No, I mean, like over in Thailand, they have a lady there, as I understand it allegedly, not very well tied in by what she's saying in representing as history of Thai strains which are really grown by Laotian communities in Thailand. They now have like four or five like land-race legacy strains that you could come get and get in Thailand only and they use it like a fricking shopping thing, like a marketing ploy. And that's what we know, like in my mind, in my heart, I know where they're going with it, I should say.  Like, we saw people go to Oklahoma and all the same people going to Oklahoma are now in Thailand. It's like, everything mimics each other. They cared about legacy strains in Thailand, it was a big deal, it made international news, real international news, and all of a sudden they wanna fund this thing for legacy strains in here. People got mad at me about Oklahoma or whatever and I have some prejudices against it because someone I knew pretty well got in prison there for a very long time in the Grateful Dead era for weed. But, you know, Matt and I used to joke a little bit that like every disreputable character in cannabis like fell upon Oklahoma as the great new hope, you know? Yeah, yeah. And that's kind of what, like what people are chasing is they're bouncing around to a new state and being like, maybe I can get three to five years out of it before the compression hits and I can make money and I can bounce around.  I just see like this be the opportunity and I'm gonna say this specifically as an example because it's something that couldn't possibly happen because it's going on in Canada, but like an opportunity for someone like the bull rider strain that they really have nothing to do with at all and like, oh, this is a legacy strain. Hey, perfect time to market these two.  And all the real legacy growers that have this stuff are like, cha, cha, cha. Sure, of course. And all the scientists are studying that because they're like, hey, you know, and they're the ones who write the history books. Again, we won't name names, but like some of the same people that like ran towards the money first when, you know, went in 2017 and 2018 when this thing started kicking off, there are probably going to be the people, if there's money involved, there'll probably be the people running towards them and being like, I can help you with legacy. Yeah, of course. I know everybody, I've got the whole deal. Oh yeah, I've got a huge collection. You can hear, you pay me this amount and I'll grab these things for you. And it's like, I don't care, you're going to pay me. So that's fine. And by the time you figure out, I haven't given you what you're supposed to get. Who cares? Yep. And for any of those people like perspective people that are in those positions to be hiring these people, if you see in these people's past resumes, like Colorado, Thailand, like all this movement through the cannabis states as they go, probably double think it. That's my best advice I could give you. Just double think it, do a second interview. Give second interviews, two interviews for that guy.  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a great way to do it. I'd be like, you can't tell, I can tell. Yeah, yeah. I'll be able to tell, you know?  Yes. But you sit down in a room with like me or like not just like I'm not trying to put myself on some pedestal, but I'm just saying you sit down with someone that's been in weed for their entire life and in these various circles and in these various groups and knows a lot. Yeah. You can either talk the talk or you can't. Yeah. And the thing that, again, I emphasize this almost on every episode, like it used to be more clear to everyone that these people that would sell these people on these ideas that they, hey, I've got this rare, rare cut. It was really easy to then for a person to go, hey, there's X amount of people with this cut. Is this guy, does this guy have this cut? He doesn't.  Let's boot him out. It's very hard to do that. And for some reason, like I said, the disconnect's gotten further and further and further. And we need to try to seal that up somehow. And hopefully people will watch. It's one of those things where like, if you, in the normal world, let's say that like you wanna hire an accountant, you can go look at their resume and you can see that they went to school for this. They got accredited by that. They passed this test or this board. They're actually like a bonded or licensed.  Yeah. And a bond where like they have insurance in case they mess up your house or something, right? There's nothing like that trade style or accreditation style yet with candidates because we all come out of the shadows. Yeah, you need to bring your syndicate one. Boom! So everybody can just be like, I'm good at talking and faking it. Yeah. No, for real. Yeah, that's how it goes. You know? And a lot of the times when I've been, you know, when I've tried to consult for people, one of the most frustrating things is you give them good advice and they don't wanna listen to it. No, I mean, yeah. Or they don't know who to listen to where they're getting conflicting advice. And they don't have the intelligence, not the intelligence, that's the wrong word. They don't have the knowledge of the scene they're in to know which advice is better. Yeah, and cannabis is super hard to do research in. Yeah, I almost said intelligence. But intelligence isn't the right word because they could be super intelligent and knowledgeable about other areas. Yeah, exactly.  And that ignorance get used against them because then it goes into like, well, who sounds good? Yeah. You know? Who puts themselves forward the most? Who raises their hands a lot and has the best marketing? You know what I mean? Who has it, you know? Most of the people that ran towards the money first in 2018, 2019, they were like, we wanna get rich. We're gonna go sell our story. Yeah. And a lot of those people ended up bouncing around because it ends up, they sell their story, but then a year, year and a half, two years into it, they get fired because they weren't able to deliver. I mean, I've seen projects that are on like their fifth management group in six years. That's so wild.  And then they hire more people that aren't it because they don't have a framework for how to tell. Yep. Okay, yeah. So that's it for this week. Sorry for such interrupt ending. We have power issues and glitches galore. So yeah, that's it from us. Again, thank you so much. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your time. You can join us and chat with Matt and I more on subjects you may or may not care about when it comes to cannabis. We have a breeder's discord, that breeder syndicate discord that started pretty small and has been gaining steam. That's where a lot of people are chatting about a wide variety of subjects. Matt and I are both pretty active on there and it's a way to connect and with like-minded folks. And that's basically all it is. So if you wanna find a little community to chat about your interests, it's we're a pretty good place. So look us up. Matt does usually does the pitch but it's breeder syndicate 2.0. That works. That works. And again, thank you for your time and we'll see y'all soon. Peace. All right, perfect, dude. That was good. Yeah, I'm down to like 6% on my phone. I could tell you're- Petering out.  You really should admire. I had so much restraint. Wanna sit at the table with the syndicate? Check out our Patreon and our link tree or description below. Our merch site is officially live. We have all sorts of shirts, hoodies and goodies to sort you out and shipping is super fast. And most importantly, the quality is top notch. I've been saving old designs for years for this purpose, so please check it out syndicategear.com. We also have an underground syndicate discord where we get together and solve old strain history together daily. It's an amazing community of learning away from IG and it's an amazing resource for old catalogs and knowledge. We hope you join our union of breeders and growers. Come check it out.