Marcus "bubbleman" Richardson on Hash, Hemp & Building Cannabis Culture | Digging Deeper Ep. 6

Austin: Welcome back to another episode of Digging Deeper by Dialed In Gummies. I am here with the Canadian legend all the way from Canada, Marcus Richardson, aka Bubble Man. The man that brought us bubble bags and all things to help Solventless move in the right direction. Marcus, welcome to Digging Deeper. Thank you, dude. Thank you for having me. I will say that I am the legend of nothing, but I am the humble servant of Ja. And I am here to serve. We love that. We love that. Well, thank you for coming, Marcus. We really appreciate it. Let's start at the beginning. You know, when you first pulled into cannabis culture, what what brought you into it? You were a a very early onset leader in cannabis. You know, I believe you even helped start the first medical dispensary in British Columbia back in the nineties, if that's correct. I was a little part of it, absolutely. We'll get to that for sure. So for me, I was fourteen years old when I first I smoked my first joint. And I was a hockey player at 14. So I was very like just playing double-A hockey. That was my life. I was like certainly none of us were really doing anything of drinking or drugs or any sort of partying. We were like hockey nerds and young, 14, we were still like quite didn't quite, you know, transition to ⁓ we just didn't quite have enough testosterone to like push us into the problematic things that we would soon be engaging in. And so I smoked a joint with my friend Steve McAvoy one night. And I'll never forget it, it was behind like a t a 7-Eleven type store, but it was just like a you know, your your neighborhood store. It was a block away from my house, and we went to the back and there was a big old blue BFI bin, right? The garbage can. In case you needed to toss it. Well, you know, we we got in behind that because that's that's where weed was, right? Like even at 14, we knew if you're gonna smoke weed, you have to do it behind a building next to a garbage can. That was the metaphoric safe place to smoke weed. So we smoked this joint and we ended up getting on a bus and going to a skate park and we giggled and we laughed and we were silly and we were just like we were just like it was no one did a better job of ex showing my first cannabis experience than Dave Chappelle in half baked. Yep. That was me and Steve walking in Abazaba. You my only friends. Absolutely. He's hugging the Abba Zaba bar. Yep. Yep. This was the this was the feeling. Look. The hair on my arms just started. You're getting the chills. This was the feeling of my first high. Him and his 14-year-old buddies getting high, being idiots, going and buying candy. Yep. And really just being like, you know, years later as a parent, I look at that and I think, holy f like, how did we push our kids towards alcohol? Like, can you imagine it's like, ⁓ I don't know, you could play with this loaded gun or you could play with this Rubik's Cube. You know, like they're both kind of tools, they both do different things, but like one is going to hurt you eventually, and one will just like probably make you smarter. And and I didn't realize that. I very much thought you get cancer if you smoke cannabis. ⁓ you know, that you're ⁓ blowing up brain cells, you're gonna get you're gonna get dumber and dumber. And that was a very strange energy to go into cannabis because cannabis was kind of like there behind the looking glass, and I'm looking at it, and she's like. Things they're saying about me. And I wanna believe her, but I'm a brainwashed kid. Yeah. Right? From about the negative truths that they put in. Family. Yeah, of course, man. All the propaganda, billions at that time had been spent. And billion dollar, you know, had barely ever been used in an economic statement to 1980. I think 1932 was the first time they ever used it on the popular mechanics article when they talked about hemp, actually, the billion dollar crop, which was one of the first pages in Jack Harris' book, ⁓ The Emperor Wears No Clothes. So Smoke the first joint and it moves fast, dude. I'm like, I'm buying weed, I'm buying a gram, then I'm buying a quarter, now I'm trying to get a couple of ounces. By the time I'm 15, I'm fully selling weed. Like just like buying half pounds and pounds. I'm meeting people. It happened really quick and it kept happening. Yeah. By the time I was 20 something, I'm selling hundreds of pounds. Like it was ⁓ man, it was an escalation. But ⁓ the joint I smoked was probably around, 89 or 90 when I was 14. ⁓ 80, 88, 88, actually, maybe 88. I'm 73, so you can do the math. ⁓ by 90, because of this powerful olfactory, my ability to scent out the dank, right? My friends didn't have it. They wanted to smoke it and they were like, dude, how do you always find this weed? But they did not have the capabilities on doing that. And so in my little circle, eventually I would I would climb and I'd meet more and more people like me that were at this level of the business where it's like, yeah, you have to like, you have to have you have to understand. It's the same thing with hash making. It's not about knowing the recipes and how long something washes for and how long. It's like, can you recognize how that material should be washed in the first place? Absolutely. Right? Like what grade is this material? Is it gonna melt in the bags when I pull it out of the water? So I should be recovering them in a walk in freezer. Or is it a more commercial batch that I can like squeeze the water out so when I put it into the freeze dryer, it dries in 16 hours instead of 48. Right. ⁓ these are all different things. So back to 14. By 9091, I'm selling quite a bit of herb. I've linked up with this incredible man by the name of Ron Hickey. And Ron Hickey will become my cannabis mentor. Really? My first cannabis mentor. Yes, Ron Hickey spent 11 years in prison in Manitoba for cannabis. Yeah, like a true like crime against humanity. This guy should have been given medals. Instead, ⁓ he was given ⁓ jail terms of six and five years, ⁓ f fairly close to one another. So I would meet Ron after his first six year jail term, okay, where he was caught with seven hundred and fifty pounds and the DEA was involved, ⁓ and they really wanted to nail him. He ended up doing ⁓ six full years in a federal penitentiary called Stony Mountain Penitentiary. It's very bad, bad penitentiary. Very, very, very, very, very bad. So, this is the guy I meet as like a 17-year-old kid. ⁓ man. And this is the guy that's gonna start mentoring me. ⁓ man. You know, and the other thing is in the city, he's he owns the hydroponic store and he's showing everyone how to grow weed. And the main people he's showing are all of the bikers, all of the organized criminals. He's like, I'll show you how to make money and grow weed. And so now he's like just dealing with the most like insane people. And I am his student. I'm 17. I look 11. And he's taking me into these places. All these super secret places in the Bible belt that you'd go to jail for eight years if you got caught. ⁓ and people talk and rat and all these things. And he's bringing me to these places. But thousands. And telling everyone, don't worry about it. He's with me. And I'm just like, holy shit, like this is getting crazy. You know, like at 17. At 17, yeah. I was starting to see like hundreds of grows in my city. I knew. I could drive down the street and just be like that's a Cause I've been in it. You have to understand, this is at a time where nobody, none of their friends have been in their grows. Some of their partners don't know they have grows, their kids don't know they have grows. And I'm just this like 17-year-old kid that Hickey is bringing to the grow room, you know. So I learned an incredible amount with Ron. Ron was an incredible grower. He was OCD, his awareness is through the roof. ⁓ and he's just a super amazing. I mean, honestly, like I wouldn't be with who I am today, really, without my father, without Ron, ⁓ and without Skunkman Sam, who would later become my mentor. ⁓ maybe about 10 years after I would I I met Ron Hickey. No kidding. Yeah. That's that's insane. so you did that at 17 and at some point, you know, you were mentioning this was all in the early nineties. It was then you launched Bubble bags in nineteen ninety nine. That's ninety-nine. Let's get to that. So let's get to that. So I'm in ninety-one now, nine ninety-one, ninety-two, and I'm smoking tons of weed and I'm with Ron all the time. And I'm also linking up with these sort of activist people. This guy, Martin Morovchek, he kind of becomes a mentor to me as well. He's about 10 years older than me. And I really like Martin. He's got a he's got a sh a store called Las Manos, which is the hands. And it's like a Central American store, Guatemalan, Costa Rica, Nicaragua. He's bringing in their wares from the indigenous people. And he's made a cool store in a bougie, like rich, you know, white neighborhood in Winnipeg or whatever. It's Charleswood, right? He's selling to all the their kids kind of thing. It's funny how the world works. ⁓ and so I link up with him, and he's got a younger kid who's younger than me, kind of mentoring under him, who I link up with, John Gio. And then his brother in law, his wife, Tara, an amazing woman. This woman birthed eight children. Martin has eight children. And the the Morovchik family is like, you can't, you just a picture of them, they're just like, who are these people and how how did you make them? kind of thing. Like, so he was a real inspiration. I knew him before he had children. His first child was named Gaia, who's like 33 now and a good friend of mine. That's okay. He's also in the cannabis industry. Okay. And with his sister Mary, who's in as well, and her ⁓ boyfriend Max. They have a company called Low Cloud. They CO2 pens and stuff in Manitoba. And so it's a neat sort of generational thing. But anyway, Martin and I, we start really like Martin and I are dreamers. We're reading Robert Anton Wilson. We're reading the Illuminatus trilogy. We're reading Cosmic Trigger. We're reading we're reading Schrdinger's Cat. We're reading ⁓ the Coincidence. And that kind of leads us into this real maniac guy. From years ago named David Icke. Okay. And David Icke was the ultimate. If you ever heard the lizard people, the shape shifting reptilians, this was David Icke. He was the one that really brought it into the writing. But he was, you know, for me, I just loved all this crazy shit that he was writing, not as a person who believed it fervently or even at all, but as a person who would be willing to consider anything. Just curious. Yeah, I'm on the fence with everything. Yeah. You know what I mean? Everything. Just like if I jump over to that side, well, Terrence McKenna always said that belief system is the anchor of mankind. And the more fervently you believe, the deeper the anchor sets. And generally, if you have very staunch belief systems, by common sense, you could not believe their oppositions to exist or to be true. Yeah. Which is to limit yourself to a very small fraction of what reality is is offering at any given time. Of course. So Martin and I, and John and his brother-in-law, Neil, we get into this hemp act. When we open a store called the Hemp Exchange. The hemp exchange. And we're all like, we're not gonna sell any high times. We're not selling pipes. We're just gonna like sell hemp. And we start bringing in hemp from Thailand. That's for sure not even hemp, right? At the time. ⁓ yeah. We're bringing in Mama Indica's hemp seed treats, which is completely sterilized hemp seeds from China. So there's no ⁓ value of food value in the like, know, the ⁓ it has all the essential amino acids your body needs but can't produce, including the three required for children for bone and organ development. Yeah, no, none of those were in there. No. They were esteemed dead. No. So this was the hemp industry at the beginning, right? But we started, you know, like clawing and p finding, and we ended up in an old warehouse in Manitoba, finding boxes, just like this up against the wall, old boxes, and we opened them up, and they were hemp spools, like hundreds of them of Hemp fiber spools from 1932. What? So then we started doing research on our province and we realized, like, ⁓ shit, back in the 30s, people grew hemp in Manitoba. And then we met Jack in 94 and 95 in Amsterdam. We had a booth right next to him, Jack Hare. We get his book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes. We're reading all this shit and we're like, we could probably grow hemp in Manitoba. And in Amsterdam in 95, we meet this expat American named John Stahl. And he's living in Kiev, Ukraine, with ⁓ this guy Goroborodko, who runs the Institute of Bass Fibers in the Ukraine, and his farmer Sasha, they're so broke they can't put fucking fuel in their tractors. So what do we do? We find out they have this low THC cultivar called Zolotonosha 11, 13, and 15. The Goroborotko bread at the Institute of Bass Fibers, because the DEA came to the Ukraine 25 years ago and said, You get rid of THC or you get rid of hemp. So he figured out this way. Just a very simple way using ⁓ gosh, what is it? ⁓ the little strips that you check your hot tub with. The little pH stress strips. Exactly. He figured out a a pH stress strip method of finding high THC plants that would turn purple on the pH. And he would just pull them. And he did it for twenty years and his plants got down to not the legal limit signed by all the countries of point three percent, but in fact his were point zero three. percent. ⁓ wow. So they were so low. It was like, and if you look at Kiev and the Ukraine and where it is, longitude and latitude, it very much is a similar place to Manitoba. We have the same grow cycles. We have the same a lot of our terroir is similar. Okay. And so we meet this American expat and I'm like, well, you know what? Why don't we buy twenty five thousand dollars worth of your seed and we'll bring it to Manitoba and we will approach our ministers of finance and ⁓ The Minister of Finance and ⁓ Agriculture and see if we can't convince these guys to let us grow hemp because we found in Jack's book if it was point three percent or lower, it's hemp and it's not illegal. Right. And so we approach our minister, I'll never forget his name was Harry Enns, and he yeah, that's kind of a funny end name. Harry Enns, and we're in his office and we've created a little deck and we're like stinky, weed, dready, hippie freaks, like completely. Like, but but but Martin is highly intelligent, like off the fucking chains, right? But he's got dreads and he's wearing a big fucking alpaca hoodie from Peru and like just ridiculous shit. And we're pr we're we're like, we're all excited because we've made this deck. And the first page of our deck is the the front page of Popular Mechanics, and it says the ⁓ billion dollar crop. And it was the first time billion and dollar had ever been used in an economic statement. And then the next page was 20 you know, two or nineteen ninety-five, nineteen ninety-four, whatever the year was, and the trillion dollar crop. And I he opened it, he looked at it, and he's like, he put he pushed it forward, he says, Come on, guys, I don't have the time today to waste on stuff like this. Like he just thought it was ridiculous. And then we explained Martin was like very articulately said, you know, that front page was it's real. It was the first time billion and dollar had ever been used in an economic statement, and it's referring to hemp. And basically we explained, we he gave us about 40 minutes. ⁓ and about nine months later, we got the first license in Manitoba to grow hemp experimentally in over 73 years. No kidding. Yeah, and we grew a five acre field and we brought my mentor, Ron Hickey, to the center of that field in my Volkswagen van, and he just cried. ⁓ man. Yeah. That's beautiful. It was fucking amazing. That's beautiful. Ron was crying. He's like, I don't know how you guys did it. He's just like, This is amazing. Tear up. I was like, we're all tearing up. We're in my van. Smoking joints in the hemp field. I have pictures. After the hemp activism, you know, we start some hemp seed companies, we start a few things. I kind of Martin says to me, he says, why don't you go move out west? Like pioneer it for us, get out there, we'll come out behind you. Okay. I said, Yeah, I'll go look out west, you know. So by 96, I'm I've I'm gonna move now to Vancouver. They're still growing experimentally in in can in Manitoba. Yeah. In fact, experimentally stayed on the on the books till 98. In nineteen ninety eight, Canada relieved that and said you can now grow commercially instead of experimentally, which really just meant you could make profit. And that's when ⁓ the Bobby brothers ⁓ started a de-hauling seed business, which you know, the Manit Martin and the partners started a company called Manitoba Harvest, which I'm sure if you guys go to the grocery store anywhere here in Colorado, you'll be able to buy the hemp seed oil and the hemp seeds, all from the project we started as young, heady dudes. So They they built that company up over some years. They sold it for $175 million to a US company. ⁓ and then just about six or seven years ago, Tilray paid $419 million for it. So for those of you listening ⁓ to this podcast and you're involved in the hemp scene, ⁓ CBD wasn't the path. You've you made a mistake. ⁓ grain is the path. The entire world uses it and needs it, and cheap protein ⁓ proteins. Full protein like hemp that contains all of the essential amino acids that your body needs but can't produce is absolutely a rarity, especially in the three to one GLNA to GLA ratio. ⁓ this is how what our bodies require to process ⁓ these amino acids. Okay. So for instance, if you take flaxseed for a long time, like consistently, the three to one is one to three, and you'll actually ha you'll have health problems eventually if you if you eat that ratio. So hemp has this. Perfect ratio. How I always like to explain the magic of the cannabis plant is if you think of like the greatest thing on earth, it's the female. The female birth is the entire population of every race and species. Yep. So obviously they're at the top. ⁓ the female produces in her breast when she is pregnant, all mammalian females produce all of the essential amino acids that your body needs but can't produce. And endogenously produced cannabinoids. There's only one plant in the entire world that produces both of those things. Now they're not endogenous, they're phyto, but they are cannabinoids. So the cannabis plant is creating the exact same thing that lactating female mammalian mothers are producing. You cannot ignore that connection of importance of this plant. Yeah, lots of people don't know that. Yeah. But it is a connection that I made probably about 35 years ago. And thought, ⁓ my God, like, especially because Martin's wife Tara got pregnant so early on. Another thing I didn't really mention is that at the very same time we were doing all of our activism, it was being fueled by this mushroom that I had ordered ⁓ online. Actually, my roommate ordered it. Shout out to Noctigal, Jason Noctical, Microwave, as we called him. We were looking at these psychedelic magazines and he found spore prints for sale. This was around 89 or 90. ⁓ so we we ordered ⁓ this spore print. It was called the syzygy. We didn't really know at the time, but we got it from this woman, Kat McKenna, and her husband was Terence McKenna, and his brother was Dennis McKenna. And Terence and Dennis McKenna in the 70s would go to the Amazon and they would meet ⁓ shamans, but they saw this priest who had cut down some of the jungle t for cows. And when the cows shit, these these mushrooms were growing out of their shit, these stropheriocubenses. In fact, it's The the the strain, which is an actual terminology for mushrooms, it's not for cannabis. Cannabis are cultivars, strains are rice and and mushrooms, right? There's no strains in cannabis. That's just a misnomer that we all use as the the link. Guilty of as well. We all are, of course. Million million times myself over. But so we we we get this spore. We buy this book by OES and Ulrich, which we don't realize at the time are the pen names of Dennis and Terrence McKenna, the first mushroom growers guide from nineteen seventy-six. No way. Yeah, way. And we start growing and inoculating agar with this spore, and then taking the agar and inoculating pressure cooked jars full of grain, and we're growing mushrooms in our closet. And we're getting them to all these people around us that are just really drinkers. And Winnipeg's got a dark energy. It vibrates at a low frequency. There's poverty. There's Crime. There's a lot of alcoholism and drug addiction. And it just opens portholes to fucking demons. Yeah. Possessions. Like people get possessed. You can r Google harsh news stories in Winnipeg and you will find the harshest news stories. It's kind of like ⁓ in America, you you guys start it with a Florida man. Yeah. So that's your version. We've got we've got our version. So yeah, it's hardcore. ⁓ very hardcore. But we were taking so you know, and also We had met this gentleman who was a mentor to Martin, Harry, and Harry had invented a game by the name of Scruples. Okay. And this game made him millions of dollars. It was like a board game. Anyway, so we're eating these mushrooms like five grams at a time. Whoa. Yeah, this is what Terrence is saying on his lectures, which we ended up getting these lectures from Harry, who was the mentor to Martin. He says, You guys should listen to these Terrence McKenna lectures from the 1988 Eslam Institute in California. And it's like Terence McKenna. Ralph Abraham, fractal mathematician, Rupert Sheldrake, cell biologist, and they're just having these insane, super high-level intellectual, psychedelic conversations. And I'm like 18 years old listening to these things, dude. Eating five grams of mushrooms. Well, this escalated my ability to learn, to retain knowledge, ⁓ language, everything. Just was, I went from like, hey man, what the fuck? But like talking like a complete brain dead idiot to people would be like, Did you go to university? Like they'd be looking at me like, what the fuck are you? I'm talking about right now. Like I didn't really so these mushrooms really kicked everything into I I would be remiss if I didn't mention the importance of the mushroom and what it played in my journey of this cannabis journey. The mushrooms always been there in the background. You think it's just the all the brain pathways that it opened up by using? I mean, I can't pretend to do you have you done five grams of dried mushrooms in a dark room? Not in a dark room, but at a music festival. Right. Well, that's insane too. Yeah. But I've done it in a dark room. I don't even know how many times. We were doing it like two or three times a week sometimes. I was growing the mushrooms. In the whole the whole trip, like the whole six, eight hours in the dark room. Yeah. ⁓ my gosh. Yeah, with barely any shadow. It I I all I can say is what is the benefit of that? Well, the benefit is you can start perceiving the unperceivable. Okay. With less of the perceivable in your perception. Right. Because what we were trying to do is use psychedelics as a prosthetic for our consciousness to escape this five cents prison that we seem to be locked into. Okay. Right. Which we understood was the human experience. Right. But if you weren't in this, you're just back at the hole where you came from or where you're going. Okay. Right. Like we're all from the same source. We're fractions of this source. And the fraction is the value because you get to be you. Right. But then there's also free will, which is like, ⁓ it's kind of it's kind of scary. You know, free will. It's a scary thing, right? Yeah, it is. It's like, yeah, I can smoke this dab or that guy can stab me in the head. Like it's a it's a scary thing to have free will. And you get a lot of people in the world who are like, We should control will, but it's like, yeah, but the whole thing collapses if we don't have that, believe it or not. Like it's all a balance of energies. And if you only have the one side, I suspect it becomes more dystopian than utopian. That's probably fair. Yeah. It's probably fair. So anyway, those mushrooms had a big you know, they really projected me to BC. You know, out in BC, I'm like, I have no tether. Well, my tether is Manitoba. That's where I know how to make money. I don't really have a lot of connections in in BC. I know one girl, her name's Hilary Black. She worked for Mark Emery at the Hemp B C store. And I would we would go there and we'd visit. And Hillary was always the nicest to us. She was just so sweet. She was very young when I met her. She was fifteen or sixteen years old. I've known Hillary for like thirty five years now. Wow. Yeah, she's like a real sister. She started the BC Compassion Club. Okay. So she was really the one that started ⁓ you know, she was dating this guy, Todd McCormick. They were living down in California. Todd had this big mansion. He was living next door to like Ronald Reagan growing weed, which he ended up doing five years on Terminal Island for. He got busted hard by the DEA. But before that happened, Hillary was like kind of in love with him and she was like, Should I stay here? I'm like, no, like what the fuck? Like, come back to BC. Like, I just moved here. You're the only fucking person I know. And Todd was like ⁓ he loved many women. And Hillary was she needed a monogamous partner. Yeah. She's like, should I go back and like be in the harem or should I I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? Of course not. Like come to Canada and be you. And so she stayed in Canada and she was a West Van girl, you know, came from a sort of affluent part of town and the blacks had beautiful property on Gambier Island. And ⁓ they they they did well and So she just decided I'm gonna go to East Vancouver, live like a pauper, and sell cannabis to the most vulnerable people that I can find, which were drug addicted, homeless, mentally ill, terminally ill people. All four. Never just one. All four. And she started the BC Compassion Club, really on my living room floor. And I would became her first grower. ⁓ at that point in time, I was kind of like the tether to Manitoba was a little bit more gone. And I was like, I could make money flipping. I have a skill. Yeah. I can find good weed. Yeah. ⁓ and then I it's they give it to me at a certain price. And then someone else who can't find good weed but can find me will buy it at a different price. Yep. And during the nineties, it was a pretty big deal. There's a lot of Americans coming up with big cash. ⁓ yeah. A dollar American was like a dollar forty-eight Canadian. ⁓ they did as well. That's why all the movies and all of Hollywood left California and came to BC and filmed the X Files and every other movie. Cause The tax incentives and the fact that if you were doing like a $50 million movie, you had $80 million in Canada with that money. Your $50 million was $80 million. And it's not like things are like the equal, like it's the same price. It's just a dollar. Right. But our dollar's just like so it was good for everyone involved. So a lot of people came and BC weed, you know, flooded America and we all did very, very, very, very well. And I used my philanthropy from that. To just give to the compassion club. Cause I'd go meet these people and I'd be like, dude, whoever's selling weed to these people and making a single dollar should be like flogged. Like these are seriously vulnerable people. Like I I started giving it to her at a loss. Like very early on. I was like, I can't even like forget about making money. I'm losing money. Like this, I can't even. I started ⁓ paying healers to go to the club and just give massages or acupuncture or whatever else. No kidding. Yeah. Yeah, because I was doing it myself like four days a week or whatever. And I'm like, man, I'm all bougie and these poor people are living on the street. So I I tell my masseuse or my acupuncturist, Would you be willing to go down and do eight hours at the BC Compassion Club if I paid you for the whole day? ⁓ wow. And they'd be like, sure, why not? And it sort of built this whole holistic center. They've got they have beautiful ⁓ herbalists and like all sorts of different people that they Hillary figured out a way to take all the profits that were being made from the cannabis to pay the people that work there. And the rest over to be given back in free services. What a beautiful thing. Yeah, it was pretty cool. You know, it went for a long time. It inspired all of medical cannabis in Canada. The federal government never busted them. In fact, the federal government went and had her consult how we can do this Canada wide and create a federal medical cannabis experience in Canada. And Hillary was a huge part of that, like really a huge part of that. And so how that story ends for me is I'm bringing her weed one day. And I drop off I I have a bunch of weed. In fact, what happens is someone drives their car through the front door of the BC Compassion Club and tries to steal their safe with 35 pounds in it. Breaks it open, the safe is reeking, weed smell everywhere. The cops show up, they guard the safe. They protect the safe until Hillary gets there. She calls me up. She's Do you think you could ⁓ you know, I've got all this weed. I don't want to leave it at the club. It's about 16 kilos, like 35 pounds. Yeah. And I was like, Yeah, I'll take it, no problem. And I get pulled over on a at a roadblock on my way home. No. So I get I get ⁓ I get busted with all the weed and I had about six grand cash on me. No, but it was great. It was the greatest thing that could ever happen. So when Constable John Lowe pulled me over that day and pulled all those pounds out of my my trunk, I thought it was a pretty bad experience. But in fact You know, within about six months I would start fresh headdies in the bubble bag company and I would move I would go on to sell millions and millions of dollars in bubble bags. I would teach the world how to make hash. I would become a voice of authority on hash. I mean, dude, it was crazy. I never really tried to do any of that. I just always wanted to be an important ⁓ I wanted to serve cannabis. I was like, what can I do for cannabis? Well, I got hemp growing. Yeah. I did this thing with Hillary where I helped. You know, supply medicine for really vulnerable people, that felt really good. Made my made my heart feel good. Didn't buy me a Lambo, but made me feel really good. And ⁓ and buying a Lambo would make me feel the opposite. Right. Right? Like a big empty hole, no soul, just throwing money at it and just being unhappy and miserable and a and a huge dick. So I try to go the other route, you know, have a little humble pie every day. I think it was Mike Tyson who said, ⁓ if you are not humble in this world, this world will dress humility upon you. And that's one of my favorite quotes. If you are not humble in this world, this world will dress humility upon you. So I got it. I was bawling hard, you know, penthouse apartments and mansions on the water and just like making so much money. I got spanked. And when I got spanked, I was like, I was like, I think I was like a part of this. I think I asked for this. I think this is like, even though it felt like I was leaving behind something that I was super good at. 'Cause I could make so much money in a I could sell a hundred pounds in a week and make ten grand. I could smell I could sell six hundred pounds in a week and make sixty grand. Like super easy. Like that. Like it was like foot shooting fish in a barrel in Vancouver. Cause so many of you guys were coming up with bags full of money. So ⁓ I chose the other path, the humble path. Thank God for my wife, to be honest. My wife's been through everything with me. I've been with her since she was fifteen years old. I only her name's Charlene. Shout out to Charlene. Charlene Faith. She has her faith is her middle name, which is amazing. Her father gave her the name Faith as a middle name. It's become very powerful in our as we've gotten older. We've been together for 37 years. Wow. Yeah. So you can't buy that at Walmart. I know I know you can get a lot at Walmart, but you won't find that in any of the aisles. Definitely not. She's been there for the whole thing. You know, she was the one that was like when I got busted, and I there was, you know, there was a company that did bubble bags in or isolator bags. It was, they had been around for three months, and I just wanted to sell. Those bags. And I went to Amsterdam and it didn't work out. I had a bad experience and the woman got mad at me. She called me a silly American and kicked me out of her shop. No way. And I was like on the way out, I was Mila, you know I'm not a silly American. I'm a silly Canadian. ⁓ And left, which was just all funny. It was a bad experience, but it was also her manifestation. Right. She chose the wrong path, which I we can get to in a little while where I chose the wrong path. And right, it's like Herbie Hancock told a story of playing with Miles Davis when he was very young. And he embarrassedly embarrassingly played a wrong note. And instead of getting in trouble for it, what Miles did was in the moment played a variety of different notes than he was supposed to play. And he made Herbie's wrong note the right note. And that is a metaphor for life. And you always have the opportunity when people come at you to play more wrong notes or to make some very unique, different notes that you don't normally play. To make the wrong notes that are coming at you the right notes. And so ⁓ yeah, I think it's that's what getting busted was for me. I I could have just been like, ⁓ I can't sell weed anymore. I just lost my nut. I don't have money, like this is insane. But we just with like six grand started the Fresh Heddies company and the bubble bag company and bought a computer and bought a camera and bought a sewing machine and you know, bought some nylon and some screen and just did it. Started selling bubble bags, you know. What what What really like gave you that vision? Cause I mean My wife. Really? Yeah, she's super quiet. She never says anything. She's like the she's the very quiet energy. And she goes, when I come back from Amsterdam, I said, We're screwed. We can't. I would all I was gonna buy a thousand sets of these bags and just start selling them. And she goes, totally out of character. Why don't we make our own? And I was like, We could do that? I was like, we could make our own? Love that. You know, so she's like, Yeah, just go buy me like a sewing machine and some some some of the material. And I was like, You don't even know how to sew. She's I'll learn. And she did. She learned. I bought her a two thousand dollar sewing machine, the Bernina two thousand. It was like the Cadillac. It was a pimp sewing machine. You could you could do like the flower seams and stuff. You know what I Back in like ninety nine. ⁓ yeah. And so she made the first set of bubble bags at our house in Lions Bay. And I took a picture of them and made a little like ⁓ you know, online tutorial. Yeah. And ⁓ bubble bags started being sold on overgrow.com. All the timing was these cannabis websites were just really in existence for about a year. Okay. Cannabis ⁓ world.com, cannabis.com, cannabisculture.com, ⁓ overgrow.com. These were the late 90s. This was the beginning of the cannabis culture starting to communicate with one another through anonymity. Okay. It w right, it was still illegal, but everyone's like, I'll just call myself high grade and go on there and You know, no one knew that they could track our IPs and right. Even they were too stupid to do it, you know. Like they just need people to rat in order to bust people back then. That's how easy it was for them. We'll just wait for someone to tell on someone and then we don't have to investigate anything. Right, right. We can go take care of business. So yeah, my wife was like, Why don't we make our own? I was like, Really? I was like, All right, she made them. I started doing photo essays. I remember buying my first camera. It was a Sony. I'd be happy to know. it was the two point one. Megapixel Sony cyber shot. Stop. The one that went like this. Yeah. Dude, that camera was so pimp when I bought it. But we were suddenly able to share photos online that were looked mouthwatering with the sun shining and people were like, what? It was the first time we were connecting this psychology of sharing the image digitally in a way that was like it just created a new connection. And this was all the timing that was happening. It's not like I'm some brilliant businessman and I got super lucky. You know, like for whatever reason, Mila was having to have her li her lesson because she had the bags. She had them. It was only a two-bag system. And what I would create later on would become very different. Well, let me tell you, like, this whole water extraction thing got very complicated. I ended up in a lawsuit with it. ⁓ I got a lot of hate from Mila and in the Amsterdam for probably 10 years, because the only game in town was the Amsterdam Cannabis Cup. So the only place other than the overgrow and the websites were once a year I would go to Amsterdam to the Cannabis Cup. And Mila owned Amsterdam. She held it down. She was like super respected. Everyone loved her. So she made my life hell in Amsterdam. If I was, you know, a magazine would call me and say, Hey, can you write an article? I'd sure. She'd hear about it. She'd call the magazine and scream at them for an hour. Scream at the editor, like, you better, he stole from me, blah, blah, blah. Because she convinced everyone I was this huge thief. Well, eventually I would find out. This was a this was, you know, more of me. I played the wrong notes. I had a guy, ⁓ an author come stay ⁓ at my booth at the toker's bowl one year. Chris Bennett was like, hey, this guy, Joe's Petrie, he he doesn't have any money. Would you mind letting him share your booth? I said, Of course, man. He wrote a cool book called King of Nepal about smuggling hash out of Nepal. And ⁓ I did a whole weekend with him at the toker's bowl, and about two weeks later he called me up. And he said, Hey, I I wanted to get you that money I owed you. And I said, Money? You don't owe me any money. He ⁓ yeah, well, I took a set of bags. I'm like, What? He's like, Yeah, I just I took a set of bags while we were at the de the table together and I wanted to get you the money for those. And instead of me just going, ⁓ okay, well, that's cool, dude. You can send the money here. I was like, What do you mean you took a set of bags? ⁓ no, so this was my Mila experience, right? Sometimes instead of playing different notes to make his wrong note, because he played a wrong note. Wasn't really the end of the world. He was calling me to tell me. Right. I could have just played different notes to make his wrong note the right note, but instead I played a bunch of wrong notes. And then he got in touch with this Swiss guy I didn't even know existed named Reinhardt Delp, who apparently had a patent on water extraction. And I ended up in a five-year lawsuit with this guy. No.