Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
Also, one thing I wanted to ask you, is it Marcus, do you prefer Marcus or Mark?
Marcus, okay.
Thanks for joining us today, Marcus, on the podcast.
Let's just start off with a little hi, I'm Marcus and this is what I do.
Take it away.
Sure, yeah.
Hey, I'm Marcus Richardson, aka The Bubble Man, and I've been involved in cannabis,cannabis activism, hash making, and the promotion of all things cannabis for pretty much
(00:27):
the last 35 years of my life, and I don't see it stopping anytime soon.
I can relate to that buddy.
Yup.
Today, so the focus of our discussion is concentrates.
So we wanted to talk to obviously someone like yourself who's all about the hash.
(00:49):
So let's start off with, do you remember the first time you fell in love with hash?
Well, you know, I thought about that question and because it has been asked to me beforein the past and I think because of the way it's worded, you know, the first time I smoked
(01:10):
hash and the first time I fell in love with hash were definitely two different times.
And I would say the first time I fell in love with hash would have been later than somemay think, probably around 98.
or 99.
I might've even had a taste of it in 95, but it was, I didn't know what I had seen.
(01:30):
So I wasn't able to quite have that relationship with it quite yet.
But I had been smoking so much cannabis in the, in the mid to late nineties, just monsterjoints, three, four gram joints, you know, 10 of them a day, just burning constantly.
Felt bad for my wife.
She was literally living in a cloud of smoke.
(01:51):
And when I got turned on to water hash and made water hash and took the first little puffin a pipe of that.
I had blown through this ceiling that I had been sort of pushed up against for maybe thelast several years.
I can see why people might eventually grow weary of using cannabis a lot if they smoked itthe way I smoked it for so long.
(02:16):
Cause it was just like, I don't know what I was trying to prove.
I was just smoking and smoking and smoking and smoking.
And so when I first hit that little dab of bubble and got as high as I did, like just blewthrough the ceiling.
And then later I would learn that each time I hit more, I would go up and up and up.
And there was no ceiling.
It was a ceiling-less high, which was something that I was keen on because I really likedto be high.
(02:42):
That's probably why I was smoking so much.
Also, cannabis was pretty much free at that point in time because I was brokering andselling it.
And it was very easy to just get like lots of free cannabis.
So that would be 98, 99 when I really first.
you know, kind of was like, wow, this is something different.
And also I would add the best part about it would also turn out to be that there was nosmoke, that I could vaporize it and that like no one else had to live in a cloud of smoke
(03:14):
because I wanted to get high.
Nice.
And by, you know, using the term ceiling, you're, you're obviously referring to, know,your, the tolerance that you had for cannabis and how using the bubble hash, abled you to
like, you know, push that tolerance even higher and, and feel the effects even, even more.
(03:38):
Yeah, I've never tapped it out with bubble.
Like I've never found the spot where I was like, I'm not getting higher anymore.
It was always, I know.
a few dab hits where it's just like, is this actually happening right now?
Like, you know, a couple of years ago at the, the four 20 days down at English Bay there.
(04:00):
I had a, bong, display for my Ross Gold stuff.
And I did a dab at one of these vendors and he lined me up with a big one and I was readyfor it too.
I was looking forward to it.
And holy for the next two hours, I thought I needed to like swim out to the buoy and
decompress, get away from the thousands of people.
(04:20):
But yeah, sorry for that interlude.
I just had to like, there is no ceiling when it comes to, you know, solventless hash and,and the live rosin and all that stuff.
It's, it's, it's nice to manage it though.
It's a great way to like, you know, get where you need to get.
Can I interrupt for one second?
(04:41):
hearing, I don't know if it's someone's mic or table that's making kind of a thumpingnoise or someone like maybe touching their mic while they're talking.
I don't know.
I don't hear it right now, but I was hearing it for a second there.
feel like I'm solid.
Okay, okay, all good.
(05:01):
Thank you.
on the table and not being touched and then...
Okay.
All right, good.
Continue, please.
Yeah, no, I was just saying like to, to, you know, find that, that perfect, you know,state, you know, by using bubble hash, uh, you can get there and it takes some time.
(05:21):
It takes some practice, you know, you have to, you know, get good at it, but, uh, yeah,it's definitely the way to go.
It's also nice, what took me a long time to learn is that if you really want to benefit,like if I saw such a reduction in smoke around my being, imagine someone that is gonna
(05:41):
smoke 1 50th or dab 1 50th of what I'm gonna dab because you can give out micro dabs topeople who barely smoke cannabis.
I would kind of give a little PSA warning, like if you're turning someone on tosolventless,
Please give them way less than you think they need and then give them even less than thatbecause you can always give them many small dabs, but you can never take back even half of
(06:10):
one big dab.
It just makes me laugh because I've been there multiple times and as screwed as it is whenyou're there, know, you're like, this is the last time I'm going to do this much.
It keeps you coming back though.
Like it, it does take practice.
so we applaud you for forging the way.
(06:32):
what that is, is your reaction to intensity.
And if you can, because that's what it is, the majority of people, they'll take the dab,they'll be like, whoa, I'm super stoned.
And then they'll react to that thought in an instant.
And that's when their heart gets starts beating fast.
That's when they kind of want to move.
You know, they just, they do that what's natural, which is kind of like to run out of yourskin, like a fight or flight kind of feeling.
(06:58):
But in reality, if you can train your mind to, in a much calmer way, experience that andsit with that and don't try to run away from it and don't try to be afraid of it, it
sounds strange, but there's a life lesson in that, in how you deal with all intensity thatcomes upon you in your life.
(07:21):
And the introspectiveness of cannabis, especially when you're dabbing live rosin and otherextracts like that, you know, it is intense and I tend to always be in a public situation
whenever I'm doing big dab hits.
And so that adds to the intensity and I've gotten good at it over the years, butdefinitely finding a nice peaceful, you know, surrounding with, you know, familiar faces
(07:47):
or even solo, you know, is.
preferable in my books.
That's just for me.
you know, whenever I'm on the road, I always get like 10 times higher than when I'm athome.
Everything just is intensified.
that's the fun of weed, you know?
It keeps you on your toes.
(08:08):
Absolutely, yeah, there's levels to it, that's for sure.
I remember my first time smoking hash and it was with BTs on the hot knives.
Ooh, okay, thank God.
Thank God you set off the hot knives.
Where are you from, like east of Ontario?
Well this would have been in, gosh, I don't know, I've been between BC and Ontario formost of my life, so yeah.
(08:35):
I can't remember where that was.
It was probably in BC, but no.
In Ontario, you were far away from Manitoba, closer to Quebec.
Yes.
Because the Quebec Quas, do BTs off of cigarettes, and the Manitobans, Saskatchewans,Albertans, they do BTs off of hot knives.
(08:56):
Okay, I think the hot knives was in BC now that I think of it.
But yeah.
knife burn on my lip, you know, back in the 80s.
But yeah, so that's completely different than like bubble hash, correct?
It is, but I will say it's probably for me the most intense hit I'd ever had up until Ismoked Bubble Hash, which was just like a tap tap.
(09:23):
We didn't mess around with like bottles and ice and cooling.
We just like went right to the, I just can't even believe that we were doing that.
Red hot knives dude, 1100 degree dabs.
hot.
Marcus, just before we dive into some more questions, I have one just to clarify for ourlisteners, the difference between a black hash and bubble hash.
(09:51):
Cause I think back in the day, was mostly black hash, know, Afghan, you know, stuff fromthe middle East that was getting over, you know, here and,
And then bubble.
So like, could you just run through the difference between black hash and, and bubblehash.
Yeah, absolutely.
So those are traditional hash methods.
Those are generally single screen.
(10:15):
So what I would call farmers grade hash.
If you've ever seen the Moroccans like beating it with the sticks, you realize like, ooh,like that is going to be contaminated up the yin yang, which is why Moroccan hash was
probably around, you know, maybe 20 to 30 % THCA instead of like 70 to 80.
(10:38):
Double doesn't sound like much, but it is substantial.
Double in the world of extraction and purity is exponential and the graph goes like verymuch upward at a 90 degree angle.
so traditional hash is a single sieve.
Depending on where you are, it can also be a hand rub, but we'll talk about, you know,black hash, which is basically like, you know, brick hash, Afghan hash.
(11:04):
This,
this style of hash right here with the gold seal and the big thick, creamy goodness.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a pretty big one.
So that stuff is made very traditionally.
They go through a bunch of processes to make it, which is very unique and very unlike whatwe do at all.
(11:28):
Once they get this single, you know, the seed, there's a whole variety of ways inAfghanistan they use these,
machines that are just like hammering the hash in a sort of concrete bowl where the thingsjust coming down over and over and the hash is spilling out and then the guy's just really
quickly flipping it back in.
There's YouTube videos that you can watch of this.
(11:50):
There's a whole series of processes, some involving heat.
Very different from what we're doing.
What we're doing is we're isolating just the glandular trichome head.
So we kind of figured out through science that the glandular trichome head is where themedicinal components, i.e.
(12:12):
the cannabinoids and the aromatic volatile compounds like the terpenes and thiols andthiolates and esters and all of those wonderful things.
So...
We just figured out ways to isolate them in a way that had really never been done beforeto the purity that we were doing them to, which was 99.9999 % if you were doing it right.
(12:41):
Pure heads, that's all you see.
Maybe I can even show you guys real quick, because it's always one thing to say pureheads, but when you show what it is, and I literally just took like a thousand pictures in
Barcelona.
When you show what it is,
It's so damn beautiful that you're just like, what the heck is that?
(13:03):
That's purity.
And if you were lucky enough to practice or to execute purity on someone who producedquality, well, then you're in for a real treat.
and like the exact right maturity level too, right, of the trichome head.
(13:23):
I mean, yes and no.
That is very subjective of what that would be.
For some, it would be earlier.
For some, it might be later.
For some, could be in the middle.
There's so many of us.
We all have so many different opinions that, there'd probably generally be a sweet spot.
If you did enough people, 100 people, and asked them all, you might find one that was morepopular, but I couldn't tell you where.
(13:47):
For me, all that matters is that it's expressed itself to the maximum of its geneticcapabilities.
that everything's been expressed to as close to 100 % as possible.
And when people ask me, what's your favorite cultivar?
I always say the one that was grown and expressed perfectly.
That's my favorite.
(14:09):
Now I know from using your, your bags, Marcus, you know, there's the different levels of,you know, there's different screens that they get smaller and smaller and you're isolating
the heads, as you know, the purity goes up with the smaller and smaller screen.
What, what's the, what's your view on take down and when you would want it.
(14:34):
Cause
You know, the, continues to ripen after you take down the plant, the live plant.
And you know, when you do a live rosin or a bubble hash, you know, we it's fresh frozen,frozen a lot of times and you're kind of like, you know, taking a freeze frame of it in
time, and then you take it out of the freezer and you run it through the ice water and youget your, is there a amount of like, what's the color that you're looking for in the
(15:02):
trichomes on the live plant before you take it down?
if you're gonna be doing ice water extraction.
Well, that's a good question.
It's a very loaded question because...
First of all, you'd have to be single source in the sense that you'd have to be growingall your own flower and able to control when you would kind of wanted it to be taken down.
(15:26):
For me, I'm really mostly, I've grown many cannabis plants, but I think of myself as ahash maker and a processor.
And then in that sense, just like I have full faith and trust in my partner, in mymarriage, I do the same thing with the grower.
I have faith in you.
You're going to do the best that you can when you give it, when you pass the baton over tome, I'm going to run it home the best that I can.
(15:53):
So the color is, if you ask anyone that's in the commercial market and you ask them,what's the best color that you want those heads to look, the majority of them are going to
say, well, it's not my personal opinion, what I would want.
But what the market wants is they want premature
(16:14):
as light of a color as possible.
And that's why they also want, and that's why it's such a difficult, it's so difficult toget like products like Full Melt Bubble Hash to market because they're so volatile.
There's no cold supply chain and they butter out and they change enough that it freaks animmature market out, even though they're still going to be as potent and as melty.
(16:41):
They just,
It's a very difficult product to get to market, less so in the US where it seems to bethriving.
But yeah, for me, I would like to allow the plant to go.
Generally, if I had enough time with each plant, I would try a little bit early, try alittle bit in the middle, try a little bit later.
(17:04):
The ones that I found were my more favorites, I would lean into those and go back andforth from that point.
you know, even further and maybe a little more back.
That's a lot of time and energy and work.
But when you have a lot of labs, those are the kind of fun jobs that you can kind of do tosift through the data and find, keep in mind, that's also subjective to what I would like.
(17:28):
The majority of the market is different than if you have an expert, you know, mastergrower or a master processor,
that person's gonna be the anomaly and the things that they like the most will probablynot be the things that the mass of population like the most.
(17:51):
And that's what I've been having a very hard time wrapping my head around.
Let me have a quick sip of water.
No, that's an interesting Marcus, because that's the sort of thing.
We did a round of outdoor last year for ice water extraction.
We had a hundred plants and, you know, we didn't have as much flexibility as we wanted.
We did have some, but there was a lot of talk about when to take it down.
(18:15):
You know, what color we wanted our end product to be for the commercial market.
Like what are the masses, you know, as a business, you know, a lot of times we cater to,you know, what's popular and what's selling.
And, we ended up letting it go a little bit longer instead of, doing a premature harvest.
And, obviously the flavor changes one way or the other, the earlier you take it down, thelater you take it down.
(18:40):
You have a different turf profile and you, know, different flavor and smoothness has a lotto do with it.
But what's your favorite grade as far as, you know, you have the multiple bags that siftout the trichomes based on, on, you know, their maturity and size and so forth.
What's your favorite grade?
My favorite micron was really from the beginning, the 73.
(19:05):
And if you look at my bags, they're 220 and they go, these are all microns, 220 to 190,190 to 160.
160 can be good, 190 is generally contaminant, still probably 50 plus percent THC, Thatgoes into 160, then 120, then 90, then 73, 45 and 25.
(19:28):
And if you look at all those numbers, look 73, that's an odd year.
I wonder why he did an off number like that instead of 75 or 70.
And so that was the year I was born.
And that's, that was always my favorite micron because it was just so bomb.
But then years later, as I added the last eighth bag to the kit, which was the 90 micron,and it took all of this deliciousness that used to fall into the 73 so much so.
(19:57):
that there was a group of dudes in California that were like refused to use the 90 micronbag and they called their 73 the real 73.
Because people in California would be like, oh, yo, dude, I got some 73 micron.
And they'd be like, is it that real 73 micron or did you scoop that 90 out of there beforeit dropped?
So the 90, when it was added, it's really a tie between the 90 and 73.
(20:22):
Although what I could say is my favorite micron
is the real 73.
Interesting.
Yeah, well, I'm going to sign up for the 73.
Give it a go.
Can't wait.
One question I had, because you were talking about how it's such a subjective experienceand what you prefer.
(20:45):
It's actually funny that you mentioned the color because you're generally saying that thepublic views darker color as not as good.
Is that the kind of...
It depends on the public.
So the public that loved that black hash, no, they love the darker hash.
The sort of younger generation of hash makers.
(21:08):
And I think maybe because it was just such a novelty, the first time you pulled hash outthat was, and you know, maybe freeze dried it and didn't air dry it and it just maintained
this like super light, light color.
It was kind of neat.
I don't understand what the psychology of it is, but it's definitely real.
The lighter the rosin, the lighter the hash, people seem to be stoked on it.
(21:30):
I personally love like a nice texture to my hash.
I don't mind ambers and colors and whatnot, but I do have to admit the majority of thesevery light colored hashes, because they are like Ross mentioned, I believe, taking a
snapshot out of time, they preserve an enormous amount of like volatile compounds that wenever used to
(21:56):
use or inhale.
They were always dried off, but we're like flash freezing these things off the plant.
Then we're running them into cold ice water and then we're lyophilizing them in a freezedryer and then we're cold chaining it.
Like I literally have a small makeup fridge sitting next to my computer here with my damsbecause they need to be 30 degrees Fahrenheit.
(22:22):
ha.
Love it.
That's how much they change.
I also wanted to ask if you can you remember the best experience you ever had or the mostlike the tastiest dab you ever had?
Where was it?
What was it?
And like, do you remember anything about it?
(22:43):
Oh, I remember everything about it, in fact, because I would say the best experience I'veever had smoking hash was when I was finally, and I can't really remember the timeline,
but I'll give you a brief sort of history.
In 94, I was at a hemp symposium in Vancouver, and I saw this gentleman by the name ofDavid Watson speak on hemp, and people were whispering about him, and he was very elusive,
(23:11):
and he was very sort of,
unattainable.
He was very much the tenured professor that you would be lucky to be able to talk to himback then.
He was just moving at an accelerated rate in the world of cannabis and really didn't havetime for anything other than forward motion always.
And so by 99, I would start the bubble bag company and I would use this little motto thatwas if it don't bubble, it ain't worth the trouble.
(23:40):
And that's because real six-star bubble hash, when you light it with a flame or avaporizer, it would boil and bubble these big, beautiful clear domes.
And so that was something I had heard from Robert Connell Clark, the author of MarijuanaBotany and the book Hashish, who I got to meet from 95 on, and he became a friend, I, you
(24:00):
know, inspired by him, a mentor of sorts.
And he had been...
really best friends and working very closely with this David Watson, who I would get toknow as Sam the Skunk Man, who was the breeder of Skunk Number One, who had become a dear,
dear friend and mentor to me for the last 25 years.
(24:21):
And it's great to be able to tell this story because he passed away recently in Californiaon January 27th.
he was a...
big part of my life for the last 25 years.
Super awesome, amazing man.
And he shared so much knowledge when it comes to cannabis that we're better off for it,that's for sure.
So the first time he invited me to his house, now everyone knew Sam's hash was different.
(24:47):
And of course it was different because Sam had some magical way of isolating pure resinheads into just pure resin heads, nothing else.
He didn't use water.
Nobody knew what he was doing.
He'd been doing it for 15 plus years by the time I met him.
And I knew him for 25 after that.
And so I went to his house and he was a very particular character, hard to describe, butwhat he wanted to do was run me through the gauntlet and see.
(25:15):
Because basically how he invited me to his house was when I used that motto, if it don'tbubble, it ain't worth the trouble, I got an email from skunkmansam at yahoo.com.
And I was like, this is interesting.
And the email just said, if it don't bubble, it ain't worth the trouble.
Do you know who saying that is?
And I knew who he was and I knew how particular he was.
So I wrote him back and I just said, I know who you are.
(25:38):
I heard it from Rob.
I know it's yours.
I'll stop using it.
I'll pay you.
I'll do whatever you want.
Just tell me how you want me to proceed.
And that was the right way to respond to him.
we sort of created, he emailed back.
No, that's fine.
I just wanted to make sure you knew who said that.
He was very much like that, you know?
So I always gave him his credit and his credit was vast.
(26:00):
It was an unbelievable amount of credit that you could give this man.
So anyway, I ended up at his house.
And of course, what he's trying to do is kill me because this guy smokes like nothingyou've ever seen.
Like I'm telling you, he had to have smoked 60 plus bong rips in the few hours that I wassitting with him.
Like literally just every two minutes, the bong was in his mouth taking a giant bong rip.
(26:24):
And I matched them.
So his dry sift was skunk number one.
It was, you know, his product, you know, grown in his greenhouse, bred by him.
And it was the strongest shit I'd ever heard.
And I remember Rob Clark's telling me years ago, said, I left David's house the other day.
(26:45):
I was so fucking stoned.
I was like, how stoned could you be?
Like how stoned?
He's like, maybe one day you'll see.
Anyway, I left this guy's house that night and my left leg was literally not working.
was having to like lift it to make it walk.
I looked like I was like the hunchback of Notre Dame walking down his street late at nightin Amsterdam.
(27:10):
And then I understood there was nothing like it.
was psychedelic.
It was so incredibly powerful.
The first rip that I took got me so uncomfortably high.
that after that I just thought, how much higher could I get?
Even higher.
Yeah, 49 times higher.
(27:33):
Holy sh-
learned there was no ceiling and how to be mindful about your...
No, that's when I learned there are levels to this and I'm not at the top.
That's what I learned.
Humble pie.
There's nothing like the steep staircases in Amsterdam and the cool little hangouts forsmoking, that's for sure.
(27:54):
Yeah, while you're smoking David Watson's pure 99.999 % gland heads that are so potent andridiculous that after the first one, all I could think of was like,
As long as I don't throw up, shit myself, piss myself, or pass out, I'm good.
(28:16):
I'm fine.
I should be fine.
And then I was like, I could, I've never had it happen.
And in fact, it's so funny because the next day at the Cannabis Cup, we were at my boothat the Milk Veg, and this guy was letting us share my booth.
He had these self-hemploid t-shirts, right?
Self-employed, he wrote a little H in there with a sort of spray paint style.
(28:39):
self-employed, and so this guy was a big puffer, hardcore smoker, and Dave was visiting meand we were smoking some hash.
Actually, we hadn't started smoking hash.
He had taken a rip.
The guy from self-employed said, that smells good.
Dave just like filled him one up and passed it over to him.
And this guy took a hit of this and passed out unconscious on the floor right in front ofus.
(29:03):
And then got up like 10 seconds later, like it was a short one.
really short, maybe shorter than 10 seconds.
It was fine.
And right away he goes, he points to me, he's like, I want you to give him one of those.
And I want to see him fall or something.
And Dave was like, yeah, he doesn't fall.
man, that's happened to me a couple of times at least that I can remember.
(29:28):
man, you get right before you totally pass out, you cannot believe how high you are.
Like you start losing your sight, your hearing goes, you're just like reaching forsomething solid.
And then the next thing you know, you're trying to get up again.
It's, yeah.
A couple of times coming back from Europe.
Cause was on the world cup tour and so I wouldn't smoke weed for weeks at a time.
(29:51):
And then would come back to Whistler.
And tolerance was gone.
But I was used to smoking the gagger.
And by the end of the gagger, I'd feel fine.
But then 10 seconds later, I'm like, fuck, I forgot.
It's a thing, tolerance.
Yeah.
I was up on Whistler Mountain yesterday.
My son's been skiing on that mountain for maybe like eight years now.
(30:12):
He's 10 years old now.
And he's at the end of ski school now, at the end of level six or whatever it is goinginto maps.
And he's like, dad, I wanna try to snowboard.
So I took him yesterday to the Magic Chair on Blackcomb and he basically taught himselfhow to snowboard, dude.
He was doing S turns like an hour.
(30:33):
It blew my mind how quickly children can learn these incredible, just to learn a totallynew thing that you've never done.
Couple of good scorpion face smashes, wha-bam, wha-bam.
It was awesome.
Yeah.
chair is great for that.
Love it.
That's definitely good times in Whistler.
(30:55):
Absolutely.
Alright, so on this episode we're going to sort of talk about a bunch of different typesof concentrates.
So I wanted to get your opinion on solventless extraction versus the other kind ofextraction.
Yeah, well, I used to be very much thinking that only one side should exist.
(31:23):
When I was younger, I was just like, why would you do that if you could do this?
But as I met people who specialized in those processes and created very, you know, I wouldnever engage in them because I just didn't like the whole frequency of it all.
So I...
But I would now definitely fight for the right for both to exist.
(31:44):
That being said, obviously I fall on the solventless side.
I'm not sure why we call it the solventless side.
I mean, I do know and shout out to Nickatee for coining the term solventless.
I have it on the banner right above my, it's the solventless quiver right there,solventless quiver.
But the majority of the volatile aromatic compounds
(32:09):
like the terpenes and terpenoids and sesquiterpenoids, a lot of them are solvents.
They're hydrocarbons, which is funny because not only are they hydrocarbons, but you knowwhat else is a hydrocarbon?
Like propane and butane are also hydrocarbons.
So you have this sort of connection that the plant itself can almost not be solventless,but the process itself,
(32:36):
I suppose can be, now it's a double misnomer because not only are there solvents presentin the plant itself, but we're using water, which is the universal solvent.
And as now we're not using it to extract things from the plant, we're using it as acarrier.
That being said, if anyone has ever made water hash, please tell me at the end of theprocess if your water was clear or if it had
(33:06):
melted things out of the plant into the water, smell the water and tell me if there areany aromatic volatiles in that water that perhaps might have been water soluble as well.
I think you will find the answer to both those latter questions to be yes.
So I do appreciate the solvent lists or water, if you just want to call it the water andice process or the mechanical screen separation, the static tech, which of course was how
(33:35):
Skunk Man Sam was making the pure resin heads.
He had discovered this accidentally in Africa years prior when a friend of his was sittingdown and he was rubbing cannabis over a silk screen.
And when he held his hands up, his hands were full of like black resin, like he had beenrubbing charis from a plant.
And so when Dave saw this, he was like, whoa, I know what's going on there.
(34:00):
He went home, got a screen, threw some resin on it, did this with his hand and all theheads
stuck to his hand while all the contaminant was pushed through the tighter hole of thescreen.
It was really an incredible revelation that even the guy doing it didn't know what he wasdoing.
He didn't put two and two together.
(34:21):
And because Dave did, Dave had like the strongest hash in the world for like 25 years.
Amazing.
I know from washing my own cannabis with the ice water extraction and using your bags thatour water is sometimes like a vibrant purple at the end.
(34:41):
so there you go.
That's anthocyanin and that is a antioxidant.
It's what makes the purple in the blueberry and quite a few flower petals and other purplethings in nature.
it's called anthocyanin.
It can be kind of reddish.
It can be pinkish.
It can be dark purple, but it is water soluble.
(35:04):
So when you wash it, you can pull it out into the water and then I guess you could kindof, you know,
break that water down to a point where you could actually collect the anthocyanin as akind of a crystalline sort of powdery dry structure.
soon.
it sounds like I had a value added there.
You
(35:25):
Yeah, my buddy Tony did it years ago.
I just remember it being really weird.
It looked like a crystal under my macro lens, but when I touched it, it just really brokeinto a dust.
Cool.
Can we talk a bit about when you were officially crowned bubble man and your journeydeveloping the bubble bags extraction kit?
(35:50):
Sure.
I guess around 98, I was helping the BC Compassion Club.
My friend, Hilary Black, who was really the only person I knew when I moved to BC fromManitoba in 96.
And right around then she was kind of like, I'm going to move to California.
I'm kind of in love with this guy, Todd McCormack.
(36:12):
I'm going go live in this mansion in like Laurel Heights in California.
I was like, that's weird.
And then she was like, actually, I'm coming back.
And she came back.
And then when she was here, she was like, should I go back and live with Todd or should Istay and do my own project here in Canada?
(36:33):
And that project ended up being the BC Compassion Club.
And I was just lucky enough to watch her sort of start manifesting it and do whatever Icould to facilitate it.
So I would help her.
get cannabis for the BC Compassion Club back in the day and one time I had gotten somecannabis.
Well, actually what had happened was she had created such this, I mean anyone that knowswhat the BC Compassion Club is or Hillary knows that she's just an angel and what she
(37:00):
created was the greatest thing that Canadians have ever seen when it comes to cannabisanything.
And legendary, I just felt blessed to be a part of it in the sense of just procuring andfinding them cannabis and you know,
getting it to them at a loss, know, forget about profit.
was like, let's swallow a couple hundred bucks a pound and get it to the club or let'sdonate it to the club and we'll just figure out a way to pay for it.
(37:26):
It was really that important, the work she was doing.
She chose the most vulnerable people, the terminally ill, the mentally ill, the homelessand the drug addicted.
And all four of those were usually one person.
So really, really, really vulnerable component of society that she was just engaged inwanting to help in such a beautiful way that anything we could do, we were doing.
(37:51):
So someone one day drives their car through the front window of the BC Compassion Club andthey try to steal the safe and they even break it open a little bit.
And so the Renee flower that was in there was like reeking up the whole block.
It was so stinky.
I suspect those were thials and not terpenes.
Very funky.
Anyway, the police came, they guarded the safe because Hillary was just an angel, so shenever seemed to get in trouble.
(38:16):
So they guarded the safe with the reeking marijuana smell coming out of it and got itmoved back in and they fixed the front window.
But she called me and said, listen, I have like, you know, a bunch of weed in my safe thatI don't feel safe leaving here.
Would you mind just taking it home?
And I was like, yeah, no problem.
And so I took it home and I got caught at a roadblock.
(38:40):
with it and became the first BC Compassion Club court case in Canada.
And so that was really what led me to the bubble man, bubble bag, bubble hash thing.
And just to shorten it up, I went through all that whole court thing, but in the meantime,I was like, I guess I'm not selling weed anymore.
(39:01):
Like gotta figure something else out to do.
Long story short, I ended up making these bags with my wife.
I called, we called them bubble bags and I called it bubble hash because when I made thebest hash, it would bubble and boil.
So I was like, well, this is the bubble hash and that's the bubble.
I didn't want to call it hash because hash like that brick I just held up is not whatbubble hash is at all.
(39:25):
I mean, if you look at that brick and then you look at something like, like this,
They don't look any...
One makes your mouth water, and one you could use as the doorstop to your office.
(39:47):
nice bookend.
You
So in 99, a little bit after I got into that trouble in 98, my wife and I started FreshHeddies and I coined the term bubble hash and I called the bags bubble bags.
And then I was like, shit, what?
I need to create a name for myself so I can go on Overgrow and cannabisculture.com andcannabisworld.com and engage and sell these bags.
(40:11):
And so I just chose bubble man.
Clearly not having any idea that like 20 years later I would be like,
in Kingston, Jamaica at this like this, all these medical doctors and the chief medicalofficer of the island is like on the podium and he's like, okay, everybody, I would like
to introduce this young man from Canada.
(40:33):
Please welcome the bubble man.
And I was just like, my God.
And then later that day, you know, if you speak at a conference, people will be like, RossRoss, could I have a word with you after you've spoken?
People were like, Mr.
Bubble Man.
Mr.
Bubble Man, with the Caribbean accent, it was just awesome.
I was like, my God, this is like a, like a weird LSD movie I've created for myself.
(40:58):
And just Bubble Man, what a stupid name to choose.
Like who would know 26 years later, I'm still rocking this moniker.
Be careful what you, you know, choose.
Be careful.
to say, Marcus, we all love Bubble Man and what you represent.
(41:19):
I personally think it's a perfect moniker for you.
I used to meet people and they'd be like, I thought you would be heavier.
I thought you'd be a little chubbier.
I'm like, what, like a bubble man?
He's like, yeah.
Like,
That's hilarious.
No, it fits perfect.
hall artist as well.
True, true, it could be, that would be Bubblemon.
(41:41):
Bubble man.
Bubble man.
funny, oh my God, that's such a good story.
Yeah, also, I just saw that you are on season 11 of Hash Church.
That's incredible, so many episodes.
And I saw that they usually go for like four hours of just kind of chatting with people inindustry.
(42:01):
Yeah, they're completely insane.
Also, I never planned to do it.
How about that?
I just one day, like 11 years ago, I got this email from YouTube and the email said, youcan now go live.
And 11 years ago, like going live, like I had been into Kik, Q-I-K, which was a livestreaming device that I managed to rack up $6,000 Rogers cell phone bill when I was in
(42:24):
Amsterdam in Germany one time doing it years ago.
But I was on early with the figuring out how to stream live off of a phone, jailbreakphones that could do it.
This was kind of the first real live streaming, like YouTube, the biggest audience.
was like, whoa, it was Sunday morning.
(42:44):
It was like 8.30 in the morning.
was like, okay, Sunday morning.
I was like, okay, well, I'll call it Hash Church.
It's like it's Sunday morning.
We're going to church.
I grew up Catholic, I had to go to church on Sunday.
So we'll call it Church.
I'm a hash guy, we'll call it Hash Church.
Total spur of the moment.
(43:05):
I do this show, I don't even know how long it is.
You could go back and watch Hash Church one.
I invite people that I don't even know from my social media.
I'm just putting the link out to the actual Zoom or the YouTube chat panel link.
I almost lost my train of thought.
Give me one second.
(43:28):
And within two episodes, do it every Sunday.
like, I do it the first Sunday, then I'm like, I'm gonna do that next Sunday.
And by the third Sunday, I have a panel.
Like I actually have a panel of people who are now gonna come on every Sunday.
I think for at least the next hundred episodes, we end up inviting a ton of cool peoplefrom like Freeway Ricky Ross to like Dr.
(43:49):
Lester Grinspoon who ran all the like Harvard Medical to, geez, there was just some realcharacters, Ross Ulbricht's mom.
came on and talked about his like three life sentences for starting the Silk Road.
Like it was just a really cool show that just was like, I did it for 167 Sundays in a row.
(44:11):
I remembered 150, my wife pulling me aside and going, honestly, what are you doing here?
Like, what is this?
Like, I don't understand why you're doing this.
Like, what are you doing this for?
I was like, I don't even know.
And if you look back at Hash Church and some of the conversations that happened on that
I don't even wanna call it a podcast, because it's really quite something different.
But some of the things that happened on that panel, some of the discussions and moments intime, literally drove the direction of part of our industry.
(44:42):
Like the whole live hash rosin process, my buddy had released that on his small Instagramaccount.
He came on HashChurch and like 30,000 people saw him talking about how to make hash rosinand flower rosin.
And there were companies a week later after that show that popped up with rosin pressesthat you could buy.
It moved fast.
(45:03):
And when we realized that our conversation was doing that, Terpings, right?
Kay from Tri-Comb Technologies hits me up one day.
He's like, I'm sitting here with Sasha Shulgin.
Sasha Shulgin, Alexander Shulgin, the famous chemist who discovered MDA and MDMA and wrotePCAL, phenethylamines I have known and loved, wrote T-CAL, tryptamines I have known and
(45:24):
loved.
incredible epic chemist.
And he says, listen, we're doing some terpene extractions over here with Sasha in his lab,in his lab that he discovered MDA in, like what?
And he says, you gotta get the terpenes out of the water.
You gotta get the flavor profiles, those aromatics out of the water and back into thehash.
(45:45):
And I'm kinda like, I don't really have time to do that right now.
I'm pretty busy, but I've got Hash Church going and I got this Tony Verzura guy.
and I got this Horatio Delbert guy and I tell both of them and they both have terpenesvery shortly after.
That was the introduction to our community to terpenes.
Before that, nobody had terpenes.
(46:06):
Nobody had terpenes.
There was no true terpenes.
It was very, very rare.
Okay, Skunkman Sam had terpenes.
Of course Skunkman Sam had terpenes.
You're gonna get an email.
That's really cool.
And also, so you just got back from Spanibus in Barcelona.
(46:30):
What were your favorite parts of, what were your highlights and big takeaways from there?
Renting a motorcycle for the five days that I was there and being smart enough to bring myrain gear and boots and be properly full-faced helmeted out.
I drove everywhere on a motorcycle.
went in very few cabs.
It's the only way to see Barcelona if you have a strong foundation of riding a motorcycle.
(46:55):
It was spectacular and amazing.
was definitely my favorite part by miles.
Also, of course, the last spannibus.
I've been going for 21 years since 2004.
So it was bittersweet that La Ferreira Cornelia is gonna be smashed down.
They're gonna just destroy that entire building.
The last ICBC, International Cannabis Business Corporation event that my buddy Alex Rogersputs on, I spoke at that right before Spannabis and it was awesome as always, just a one
(47:22):
day event, but really like he filters out all tire kickers from a business perspective.
Everyone's like 450 Euro into their ticket.
It's a much smaller condensed business conference, you can really like the people that arethere, they're there to get business done.
That's what they're there to do.
They're not just looking for any particular thing.
They're looking for very, very particular things.
(47:45):
And you can cut out a lot of the, you know, the, the, the fun to have that right beforeICB, right before spandibus is really nice.
Cause you can get, know, three or four amazing contacts, put that in the bank and then gohave this very sort of fun last experience at spandibus, which was,
Yeah, bittersweet, right?
You have a tear in one eye and a glimmer of hope in the other eye for Bilbao in the north,in Basque Country, where Spanibus will be next year.
(48:16):
So I'll go, I'll check it out.
It won't be Barcelona, it'll be different, but Basque Country is beautiful.
I'm sure it'll still be a special event, maybe just less people.
I'm looking forward to getting to my first one.
I have to ask what motorcycle did you have?
I got the BMW 300 GS.
Nice, that's what I was hoping you were gonna say.
(48:37):
Yeah, I didn't get, no, I got a little scooter, man.
I was putting around on a little, no, I like how it feels.
No, I could have rented a 700, but that's unnecessary.
300 is more than enough power.
I just wanna get from A to B and I don't want to come home in a box.
(48:59):
No, no, that's a, that would, that's an amazing trip there.
Spanavis, the last one in Barcelona on a, on a motorcycle.
Yeah.
Sign me up.
I saw that you tried a bunch of different products while you were there.
Any highlights?
Like how does the European hash compare to what we've got over here?
(49:21):
Well, mean, listen, Barcelona's on another level.
First of all, everything over here is over there, as well as in Cali and many other spots,because it's just there.
That being said, there's also incredible local work.
The nicest dab I had out of the 487 dabs I had while I was at Spanibus, I think that'swhat my little machine here said.
(49:45):
My Puffco.
Yeah, this guy from LA.
was like, I brought this little jar and I was like, what is it?
And he's like, you tell me.
And he put it under my nose and I was like, my God, it was like live hash rosin from sweetskunk.
And I don't mean the sweet skunk cross.
I mean the real sweet skunk, this like super vibrant narrow leaf drug cultivar, sativa,whatever you wanna call it.
(50:11):
A lot of people are not attracted to sativas because A,
It's terpenolene dominant and that dominance of terpenolene is sharp and sort of pissy inthe flavor.
And it also seems to be responsible for anxiety attacks in people that are sensitive toterpenolene.
But with sweet skunk, there's osmine and I'm pretty sure sweet skunk, osmine andterpenolene are one to one in the sweet skunk.
(50:38):
And it rounds off that sharp flavor of terpenolene and it takes away the anxiety.
I know that for a fact because my wife, who is not a cannabis user at all, always lovedhaving a little bit of sweet scum to vaporize.
She was just like, that one's special for some reason.
I'm like, yes, I think it's because of the osmine and terpenaline relationship.
(50:58):
But there could be many other things going on below that that we are not perceiving thatare as responsible for the experience.
That's cool.
I know that terpenaline is one of the most rare terpenes.
Well, terpenolene, it's prevalent in sativas.
So if you've got a Where is My Bike or a Lemon Haze or a Super Silver Haze or any of theGhost Train Haze, it'll be high in terpenolene.
(51:28):
Nice, yeah, my.
a lot of sativas, right?
Because the grow cycle is not as, or it takes longer to, is that right?
It does.
It's definitely got a much longer flowering period.
you know, first of all, you can grow these sativa, narrow leaf drug cultivars, whateveryou want to call them.
You can grow them anywhere, grow them indoors and control.
(51:50):
can grow them in a greenhouse and control your variables to a degree.
But if you're living near the equator, you can just plant them in the ground and theyjust, that one time of year, that long part of the first part of the season, that when you
get six months out of it or whatever, or more, you can
you can grow beautiful, beautiful sativas.
(52:10):
That's kind of my favorite place to grow them.
I have an affinity for hazes.
I do quite love them.
That being said, you know, I love gas and I love fruit and I love all the other flavorprofiles too.
Haze is just probably a notch above the rest.
If I had to choose one, might be the haze.
I love the super lemon haze.
(52:34):
That's one of my faves.
Yeah.
my buddy just bought a bunch.
Go ahead.
I was going to say the reason why Ross Terpinalin probably seems like it's rare is becausethere just aren't as many sativas on the market, So, or sativa leaning, whatever you want
to say.
Yeah, it's, could be that.
(52:55):
it could be that just, it's not prevalent.
Um, we have a, a strain called, uh, organic mango gold that, our last round came out with2 % terpenaline and rounds before that previously were only at 1%.
And, uh, that was good.
And so 2 % is, you know, we're kind of like playing off the terpenaline in our mango gold,um, a lot.
(53:21):
I tend to like it and I'd love for you to try it Marcus and see what you think about itafter talking about the balance between the terpenaline and what was it that offsets it?
Awesome in.
Osemine.
Yeah, interesting.
I'm going to look more into that and see what our CRA say about osemine in our mango goldthere.
(53:46):
It's interesting.
And we're coming to the end of our hour here.
Thank you so much for being here with us.
Do you want to do a little plug for a Bubble Man brand?
What's going on with that?
bubble man brand is operating in a bunch of States right now.
We're in like Maryland.
We're in Missouri.
We're in Oklahoma.
We're in Illinois.
(54:07):
We're in Michigan.
we're in Colorado and we're in New Mexico.
some of those States are further ahead than others.
Some are just kind of coming along right now, but you can always check me out at BC bubbleman on Instagram.
And that links to all my sort of bubble man brands, projects.
(54:28):
Sadly, we can't get it in Canada though, right?
Just the, yeah.
Canada, but Canada's market is a tough one if you want to say, just pay your mortgage.
Yeah.
Hahaha
Yeah, yeah, we definitely talk a lot about the difficulties of it on this podcast.
(54:52):
Yeah, it's a lot.
Yeah, yeah, there is a fake account.
If you accidentally only put one B in bubble, which is actually two B's instead of three,but in the middle where it should be BB, if you write B-U-B-L-E-M-A-N, it's the same
picture, but it's a totally fake account.
I remember hitting up Instagram and being like, hey, this guy's pretending to be me.
(55:15):
And they're like, all right, we'll do an investigation.
Then they get back to me and they're like.
No, his account is fine.
I'm like, it's all my pictures and pictures of me and my name minus a B.
Like, what are you talking about?
I'm like, yeah, made me laugh.
Is there anything else you want to chat about before that we didn't touch on, any soap boxyou want to get on?
(55:40):
I would let everyone know that if they want to reach out to me at bcbubbleman atiCloud.com, I am offering sponsorships on my show, Church, for really the first time in 10
years.
We never did it, now we're doing it.
We're pretty picky, so we don't say yes to every company, but feel free to reach out ifyou want to engage with the Hash Church audience.
(56:03):
That sounds awesome.
Marcus, hey man, it's been a pleasure.
You're a legend in the industry and in Canada and around the world.
you know, having you on the show is amazing and yeah, let's get together in the nearfuture.
(56:23):
Oh, give thanks, man.
Appreciate the kind words.
You're a legend, of course, in your own way, man.
Like, holy shit.
I'll never forget that whole experience going down.
I was just like, wow, look at that.
That was like the best thing you could do for snowboarding.
Like, even though I know at the time it didn't feel like it, was so, it was just sogangster.
It was a balance.
(56:43):
I knew it was good on one level and maybe not so much on the other side, but I just wentto the good side, man.
I just went to the good side.
at it now, know, snowboarding has never been bigger.
Snowboarding is huge, cannabis is getting bigger and bigger every day and we're gonna workon those regulations to bring them down, bring the taxes down, make it work so that you
(57:06):
can do your thing.
Absolutely.
I can't wait to see those things come together.
And I'm sure you can't either when cannabis and snowboarding can come together in a real,I'll never forget being in the back country up on the Pemberton ice caps on my sled.
And there was like, my buddy recognized the guy and they were filming like some nightcommercial or something.
(57:27):
And the dude was like, going to go do this like double back flip off like an 80 footcliff.
And he was at the bottom and he took a rip out of a vape pen right before they pulled himup.
And I was like, I was like, did he just take a
rip of cannabis and he was like, yeah, I think so.
What do you think it is?
Like DMT?
No, probably.
Yeah.
I was like, oh, okay.
Well, that's what's up.
(57:47):
And then I remember asking the kid later, like, you know, would you ever consider doingthat?
Like he went and stomped a double backflip off of 80 foot cliff and just like ski skieddown like dude, like eight minutes later, you know what I mean?
Like he hit that vape pant.
He got zipped up and then like, wham, wham, whoosh.
(58:08):
was like, would you ever consider doing that after like, you know, a can of beer?
I was just like, fuck no, dude.
Are you kidding me?
I'd die.
Yes, yes.
Awesome.
Thank you so much.
I'm gonna hit stop here and then it's gonna upload and then we are.