012 Claybourne Co. - Always on the Gas

Michael Williamson: 0:00:00

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Cultivation Elevated, sponsored by Pip Horticulture. I'm your host, Michael Williamson, and I'm here today in Paris, California at Claybourne Co with Brent Barnes, co founder and VP of cultivation. Appreciate you having me, and thanks for the tour earlier.

Michael Williamson: 0:00:16

No, thanks for having me. It really is a pleasure being on this.

Michael Williamson: 0:00:19

Yeah, I appreciate it. So tell me a little bit about kind of how Claybourne was born.

Michael Williamson: 0:00:25

Claybourne was born with real basic mentalities. It was really basic ideas. It was trying to bring good quality product with good quality marketing and branding and really just customer service. We started Claybourne with the idea of the industry needed help with customer service. They needed help pushing a product in a direction that said, hey, this is good quality product, but also we can have a real business that supports you in this aspect. The good quality product was something that it was my other founder. So my other business partner, Nick Ortega, and Jonathan and I, it's like we came together and said, hey, it's like there are gaps in quality here in the market, and there are gaps in customer service with distribution of wholesale product.

Michael Williamson: 0:01:14

What year is that?

Michael Williamson: 0:01:15

This was 2017. 2018. Right around that era. It's like, is when we first started talking about starting a business, essentially because it took years to start a business, let alone actually get it running. But the idea was, hey, let's bring a brand. Let's bring a real marketed, branded product. I had a background in marketing. My other co founder partner, Jonathan Griffith, had a background in branding and marketing and things like that. And Nick? Same thing. It's like we'd all worked with other industries and we all enjoyed cannabis, but, hey, let's actually bring this to a cannabis industry that was lacking, that was new, that was fresh, that needed innovation. And we started Claybourne, and we started it with a generalized idea that, hey, let's see if we can get this going. Let's see if we're batshit crazy or if this is real. And that's just the truth. And we said, let's design a brand.

Michael Williamson: 0:02:10

It's like, let's buy some flour from people that we trust. We know farms that we know are cultivating quality flour, essentially, and take it and put it into our jar. All right, white label product. It's kind of how we call that nowadays. And we went, we searched farms, we talked to farmers, we talked to people about everything that we knew and understand about quality of product. I was the only one that had ever grown cannabis, and I treated it like a tomato plant. And that's really truthfully how it was. I was a little twerpy skateboarder kid who was smoking weed and decided to grow seeds from his freaking cheap ass dime bag he was buying. And that was the first time I'd ever grown. And what's funny about that is that.

Michael Williamson: 0:02:51

How old are you I was 13. There you go. We have a lot of similarities. I got one of those stories, too.

Michael Williamson: 0:02:57

Yeah, I was grown in a river bottom. It's like and it was just right behind my house.

Michael Williamson: 0:03:01

Did you have a successful crop at their no, of course. Me neither.

Michael Williamson: 0:03:05

But we took it and grew, and for me, it was always just another part of life kind of thing. It was just a part of relaxing. It was a part of having fun. Later on, I had kids, and things kind of changed a little bit, and it turns into a completely different thing. A lot of what got us, or got me into it personally after that had to do more with my kids, my wife and things like that, which we can talk about that another day, but Claybourne came from this just idea of let's make this better. Let's take something that you can see is clearly kind of struggling in some areas, and let's bring consumerism to it. Let's bring good quality product, good quality customer service, and here you go. Here's a good brand. We did it with nickels and dimes, too. We bootstrapped everything. It's like none of us were rich kids. None of us had money coming out of our ears. It was just an idea. Essentially, we worked two jobs, all three of us. It's like we were working day jobs, and then we were doing this at night, and lo and behold, it's like we selected good quality flour from people.

Michael Williamson: 0:04:11

We knew what we were doing. We smoked, obviously, what we were trying, and the brand started taking off. It started really selling.

Michael Williamson: 0:04:19

That's an important statement that you just said you were smoking what you were trying. Of course, but sounds logical, right? But a lot of people don't, and they're like, oh, yeah, that looks good, or oh, the price is good.

Michael Williamson: 0:04:30

There's one thing I will tell you personally. For me, it's like if I wouldn't smoke it, then I'm not going to put it into my jar.

Michael Williamson: 0:04:37

Nice.

Michael Williamson: 0:04:38

And that is just the truth. I don't care who you are. It's like if there's something wrong with that product, there's an alternative path for that product. It's like whether it's extraction, whether it's anything. It's like there's so many things you can do with this crop. Don't waste premium product on putting it into a brand and destroying your brand.

Michael Williamson: 0:04:56

Amen. You only get one first time to market with that brand, too. The amount of brands that are in California, it's easy to try something and be like, oh, yeah, I've had it. It wasn't really good. And they don't go back. You have to really turn the wheel around and have a lot of hype around it. And people saying, man, have you had this from them? Because they've gotten a lot better. But most people, they'll try your brand once, and if it doesn't cut mustard, they're done.

Michael Williamson: 0:05:17

Yeah, consumerism, it's like, it really sucks. That the industry that I came from, and that was the nature of it. It's like, give people what they want. Give people good quality products. They need to be the best or competing with the best, because if they're not, who are you?

Michael Williamson: 0:05:33

Before we talk about the infrastructure here at Claybourne, let's talk a little about you. You have a really unique background that is very complementary to this industry. And also it must be like a step forward and step back at the same time. In some aspects.

Michael Williamson: 0:05:49

My background is what makes me me. It's like, in all reality. And what's funny about it is that every step I took in my career kind of created who I was in many different ways. When I went to school, believe it or not, I was working at a pet store, and I thought I was going to be a veterinarian. I was like, I really like animals. I had all these snakes everywhere. I had every pet known to man, ferrets, chichillas. It's like you'd named it, I had it. It was just weird thing, but just hear me out. I was really into fish tanks. It's like, literally fish tanks, and I had reef tanks. I started going to college and I was like, hey, I'm going to be a veterinarian. I'm going to get a biological degree, and I'm going to take it and go to Cal Poly, one of the Cal Polys, and say, I'm going to be a veterinarian. I went and I took a class. I took a class and botany, all right?

Michael Williamson: 0:06:37

And I'm not kidding you, it clicked. It was like that. And what was funny to me is as a kid, my mom and dad, they separated. I was, I don't know, ten somewhere around that age, somewhere, it's like and my mom went back to work and my grandmother took care of me. My grandmother took care of me. My grandmother was the most avid gardener you can imagine. It's like you'd walk into her house, it was a jungle. It was just like everything under the sun, from epiphylums to orchids all over the place to flowering plants, and she lived for plants. And as a kid, I sat there and gardened with her every day, and she made me breakfast. My mom would leave, take care of my brother and I, essentially. And she was working. She was a teacher's aide at the time, and my brother and I my brother was old enough to kind of do his own thing, and my grandmother took care of me and I gardened. And truthfully, I never really thought anything about it when I was younger, how much fun it was. Like, teach me how to vegetable garden and teach me how to cut shrubs and do all these things like growing up around flowers. And then I took that botany class and I was like, I love this.

Michael Williamson: 0:07:45

I love what I'm learning right now.

Michael Williamson: 0:07:47

Well, do you remember what it was specifically?

Michael Williamson: 0:07:50

Truthfully, at that time, it was actually just a general horde. So it was like the beginning of botany. And it was taught by Jody Holt, which I think at one point in time was a chair of the department and different things. But she was just a happy person. She was easy to listen to and talk and stuff like that. But it was just about general growing techniques is all it was. It was like how plants grow, their physiology and morphology.

Michael Williamson: 0:08:12

I wonder if you would have had a different teacher, if you would have had a different experience.

Michael Williamson: 0:08:16

Life chooses its own way. It's like the paths are kind of given to you in different scenarios.

Michael Williamson: 0:08:22

So you got bit by the botany bug when you're in what, you're a freshman? Sophomore.

Michael Williamson: 0:08:26

I was a sophomore in college. It was taken as like a general ed course.

Michael Williamson: 0:08:31

And that was UC Riverside?

Michael Williamson: 0:08:33

Yes. University of California, Riverside.

Michael Williamson: 0:08:34

Okay.

Michael Williamson: 0:08:35

And what's funny about is I took it and then I was like, hey, I really like this. Took another course and another course, and I finally ended up meeting another person. His name was John Smith, as crazy as it sounds, but that was his name. And he was actually a sub. And he was like, hey, I know some people in the botany department. They're friends of mine. He was like, do you want a job? And it led to meeting two different people that I got jobs with a person named Giles Waynes who managed breeding. He was a plant breeder, and he bred wheat and penaced and all these different types of grass, but he also bred ornamental plants, so pretty flowering things. And he was like, I'm going to introduce you to another person I know, Robert Krueger, who worked for the USDA, and he worked in citrus and dates at the Germ Plasma Repository. And at the time, I didn't know I was going to be a breeder. I had no clue. I was just trying to work with plants. But what was funny about it is that those two things working for a Germ Plasma Repository, which is like a seed storage bank for plants and then working for a plant breeder, pretty much turned me into the person I am today as a plant breeder through many different facets. I worked for both of them as a student for a couple of years apiece kind of thing.

Michael Williamson: 0:09:55

And I actually worked both jobs at the same time. Both of them were just student jobs. They were three, four, five, 6 hours a week. Man.

Michael Williamson: 0:10:03

Compared to most student jobs, people are doing like flipping burgers and tacos and waiting tables and stuff. I mean, you could ask for a better situation to set you up for future success.

Michael Williamson: 0:10:11

Yeah, looking at pretty ornamental plants and then looking at citrus, it's like getting every type of citrus known to man. It was a godsend.

Michael Williamson: 0:10:20

Was that one of the first times you really identified with, like, a mentor?

Michael Williamson: 0:10:24

Very much so. Giles Wayne was very much my first mentor, and I appreciate him more than anybody because he was very once again, Laissez Fairy was just like, calm. He was working with a crop called salvia. He worked with quite a few different crops Delfinium and lilac and salvia GregII microphyla. But another funny thing is that he had a specific color of salvia gregiae. That was a mutation found in Mexico.

Michael Williamson: 0:10:54

What color is that?

Michael Williamson: 0:10:55

It was yellow.

Michael Williamson: 0:10:56

Okay.

Michael Williamson: 0:10:56

It was yellow salvia gregiere. And he was a part because he managed the herbarium and he managed the Botanic Gardens there. And he just happened to have it. And he was like, hey, Brent, I want to cross this with all this stuff. And he showed me essentially how to do population crosses and hybrid blocks. Then he also showed me just, hey, this is how you hand pollinate these crops that are hummingbird pollinated. But he started like this new mentality, and he was like, you're going to create new colors with this. And at the time, once again, I was like, Cool. This is fun.

Michael Williamson: 0:11:29

Totally.

Michael Williamson: 0:11:29

We were working with inner specifics, which are hybrids between two different species in the same genus. And I was working with this in salvia. He introduced me the same thing with delphinium, with red colored delphiniums, hybridizing them with blue colored delphiniums. And lilacs was just like, here you go, Brent. Here's some mess with heat tolerant lilacs, which out here in Southern California is nearly impossible. But it led down all these different paths and made me so interested with innovation that I was my 100% my focus. I started collecting different species of salvias and all these different things. That was the first time I had grown cannabis in, like, a larger scale because I had greenhouses now set up in my backyard. And it was the first time I had a friend of mine I was working with. It was like, hey, I'm growing weed. And I was like, hey, can you give me some cuts? Like, I haven't grown in a long time. I kind of want to grow it like as a real gardener. I grew it in a hot house in my backyard. I had six plants, and that was the first successful crop.

Michael Williamson: 0:12:30

And this was I was 1920, maybe.

Michael Williamson: 0:12:32

Sounds about right. Something like, yeah, sounds about right. So then you have these incredible mentors. You go down a botany path or what was your end degree when you when you graduated?

Michael Williamson: 0:12:41

What? Everything was biological sciences or plant biology at UCR. It's like the university system is so much different than the cal poly system. University system is always like, well, you get a generalized plant biology or plant microbiology or something like that. And then if you want horticulture or agronomy or something like that, you go to a more of a trade school, like Cal poly pomona, cal Poly Slow, something like that. But I ended up I was one of those guys at that school. I was like, I didn't really know what I wanted to do when I graduated. I wanted to work with plants, and the USDA was looking to fill a greenhouse position, like a greenhouse tech position. I had been there for a couple of years by then, and they were like, hey, you should apply. I applied. And I ended up not getting the job because a veteran came in and got the job over me because they have veterans preference. And I was okay with that. And it led to me getting a job with, believe it or not, another professor who put me through grad school for free. So it was a professor who was breeding inner specific turf grass, and he was doing trials. So R and D agronomy trials for chemical companies.

Michael Williamson: 0:13:50

Bayer, Syngenta, Monsanto, they all whenever you label something on a chemical label, they require you to do localized data so they collect their localized data so they can say, you can use this in Southern California on Bermuda grass. And I did that for him. And that was my first real job with a degree. And at the same time, it was a graduate student researcher. Same time I was a specialist, a junior specialist paid for my education. And I got to breed turf grass. And while I was at it, I still got to breed ornamentals and things like that. And I bred and I did field agronomy trials. And I did seems like hundreds upon hundreds of different field agronomy trials for chemicals and fertilizer and fungicides and everything that we all hate in this industry. But it was just the truth, and it paid for what it was. And then one day, out of nowhere, I was like, you know what? I want to be a plant breeder. This isn't taking me in the direction that I want to go for. I'm going to start looking for jobs. And I found a job down in Bonzall So, san Diego County.

Michael Williamson: 0:14:56

Down south? It was like an hour south of me. And it was for a company called Plant 21. It was plant 21 LLC. And it was ornamental plant breeder. And I was like I was like, man, ornamental plant breeder sounds like so much fun. And I get to actually work with inner specific hybrids and breed all these different plants that were listed on there. Like, I'm going to apply for it. I'm never going to get a call back. And they called me back almost immediately. It was like next day. And I called and I interviewed, and I had this cheap, shitty suit, and I had a nursery at home. I was still growing all this stuff, and all I cared about was innovation, was creating new things. I ended up getting that job. And to this day, I was like, how did I ever get that?

Michael Williamson: 0:15:42

I wasn't a plant geneticist at that time? I hadn't been a plant breeder, really. I was just a student. And what's funny about it is I got that job, and my first true not really true, but my first real mentor, very specific mentor, is who I met at that job, and it was a gentleman named Ushio Sakazaki. He was a Japanese plant breeder. I got that job, and I didn't have any clue what it was. And I show up at this huge 80 acre greenhouse facility that they rented property from, and they grew all ornamental starts, is all they did. It was a company called Euro American Propagators that was owned by a company called Proven Winners.

Michael Williamson: 0:16:25

Yeah, there we go.

Michael Williamson: 0:16:26

So Proven Winners had three nurseries that they owned nationwide. And proven winners is an international company. And every Home Depot Lowe's garden center has proven winners. Plants. I didn't know at that time that that's what I was going to be doing. But plant 21, there was two breeders at the time. I was the third. They hired one other person with me, controlled over 40% of Proven Winners catalog. And Proven Winners is a huge company, and that breeder, Ushio, he hired me because I had worked with inner specific hybrids, specifically that because I had experience hybridizing two different species of plants, which is not normal, by the way. Most of the time when you hear about a plant breeder, they take, here's a blue petunia. Here's another blue petunia I'm going to cross together like ink. Super blue petunia.

Michael Williamson: 0:17:16

Yep.

Michael Williamson: 0:17:16

And in cannabis, it's the same thing. I'm going to take this cake, and I'm going to cross it with this sunset Sherb. Those aren't different species. Same exact species. We're just hybridizing them. What we did was we went into the wild. We collected wild species internationally. I have to be careful when I'm talking about this stuff.

Michael Williamson: 0:17:33

Sometimes a little sensitive.

Michael Williamson: 0:17:34

Yeah. But we worked with herbariums. We worked a lot of different companies, a lot of different universities and stuff like that, and we would collect wild species and bring them back into the United States and hybridize them with inbred lines that were naturally created by people who I just talking about breeding a blue petunia with a blue petunia. They're creating inbred lines for us that are very stable for blue petunia. And I would hybridize them with wild species and create a completely new, innovative product.

Michael Williamson: 0:18:02

And how stable was that after that first?

Michael Williamson: 0:18:05

Well, cross true f ones, your whole population is usually different. But Usio, my mentor, had made a full business off of regenerating vigor from plants and re innovating inbred lines from that. Proven Winners was a company that was built off of taking cuttings during a time when seed was the only way to propagate a lot of this stuff. And what they did was his breeding, actually, it selected things and innovated them so much that people thought they were different types of plants. So taking a petoon because of that hybrid vigor, just because heterosis it's heterosis well, heterosis yeah, technically is reverse sometimes. But that hybrid vigor was so different that people were like, wow, I've never seen a petunia like that.

Michael Williamson: 0:18:54

It's kind of like when you see a disease cannabis plant and then you see a tissue culture cannabis plant of the same variety, and you're like, oh, that's what it's supposed to look like.

Michael Williamson: 0:19:03

Yeah.

Michael Williamson: 0:19:03

And it can be completely different.

Michael Williamson: 0:19:04

It was huge at that time. It was in the early eighty s, and he had started doing he did it with Verbina and calab akoa and all these other pretty crops that you see all over the place. But that one thing changed my whole mindset on everything I'd ever done. It's like that one concept that nobody even thinks about is true innovation, what it is, and taking it and hybridizing things and finding a plant that no one has ever seen before. Even differences in species, it's like most people think, like, oh, it's a plant species. It could be any species. Oh, they're all the same. That's kind of what we're taught. Or a species in general is a similar thing. Okay. When they don't look at us as humans, like, we're all the same species.

Michael Williamson: 0:19:49

Sure.

Michael Williamson: 0:19:49

And we're all very, very different. Why can't plants be that same way? And that one logical thought process changes the way that you breed plants for the rest of your life, or changes the way you look at things. It's like everything is bred. Almost everything we see is bread. Even the weeds, technically, are bred. They're bred for our region.

Michael Williamson: 0:20:09

Maybe natural, it's more of a natural selection.

Michael Williamson: 0:20:13

And that led me down my path of everything. It's like it literally turned me into I end up becoming the director of plant breeding. To close this off and stop talking about plants, I apologize, but it's, oh.

Michael Williamson: 0:20:24

No, we're not done talking about plants. We're just getting started.

Michael Williamson: 0:20:26

But it changed the way I viewed things. It changed the way I looked at a lot of different things. And when to bring Claybourne back into this, it's like I end up moving up in the ranks. At that company, there were three of us. We ended up with three different breeders. We competed against huge companies like Syngenta, Bayer, Monsanto for breeding programs. Three of us competing against teams of 50 to 100 breeders with molecular lab techniques that they were able to do whatever the hell they wanted. We were just classical genetics, breeding wild.

Michael Williamson: 0:20:56

Species for people that are listening because we have talked about some high level dialogue. But can you explain the differences between classical breeding and advanced genomic breeding?

Michael Williamson: 0:21:06

So classical geneticists are really what we call pollen pushers. It's like we're taking like in our situation with cannabis, we take a male plant and a female plant. It's like, take those plants and hybridize them together. We have a seed population. Then we evaluate that seed population for the traits that we're looking for. Those traits can be anything. Could be disease tolerance, could be flavor. It could be trichome coverage density. It doesn't matter. Those are classical things, and we're visually looking at them just by hybridizing male and female plant parts, all right? Most of the time, they're perfect. Plants are perfect flowers. So they have male and female parts on the same, which is majority of flowers in this world. Cannabis is diishis. So cannabis is very special in this situation because there's not many dieshius plant groups in the world where they have male and female plants, monishius sometimes where you have male and female flowers, but you still tend to have one plant with both parts on it.

Michael Williamson: 0:22:02

Cannabis is fully different. Now, when you have genomic breeding, it's like any type of molecular breeding. Those molecular scientists have taken a population, usually of plants in a gene pool, and they say, okay, I have phenotypically labeled this on this part of the population. And I have phenotypically labeled this on this part of the population. I'm going to go look into the RNA sequences and the DNA sometimes, but the sequences of these plants and say, these plants have these genes that are always different than these plants, all right? Then they spend a whole bunch more time honing this in, because you can do that over and over and over, and this is just simplistic terms, by the way, guys, there's so many more ways to do this, but then I'm going to find this plant, and I'm going to label that, all right? Label could mean anything. Label could actually mean, like, a physical marker or something like that color.

Michael Williamson: 0:23:02

And you're labeling or identifying traits or markers.

Michael Williamson: 0:23:06

Technically, it's markers.

Michael Williamson: 0:23:07

It's like, word, I think, right?

Michael Williamson: 0:23:09

Traits is a hard thing because technically, they're the same thing. Like, you personally have given the trait that the marker is attached to. It's not always 100%, though. Sometimes it's like, oh, hey, I got to do a little bit more research, and that usually goes into the next generation. Molecular breeding can't be just molecular. It has to be classical and molecular, because a lot of times when you're marking things or when you're labeling something, you find it and you're like, hey, the data is still a little cloudy. Let me make a more inbred line that separates it even more, and let's do the same exact thing we just did, but let's do it again. And eventually, what you do is you create a genetic marker that truly does mark a trait that you're looking for or an expression or anything. It doesn't matter. Some type of gene pool that gives you something.

Michael Williamson: 0:23:56

Once those markers are identified, then you can do marker assisted breeding.

Michael Williamson: 0:24:00

You can do marker assisted breeding. Exactly. And that marker assisted breeding it doesn't always work because then you have complex situations where sometimes that marker is the same for everything and sometimes it's only for certain subgroups or something like that, but it still works. It's really what it is.

Michael Williamson: 0:24:18

And is the idea that with marker assisted breeding that you can get to your end breeding goal. Because each breeding project has a breeding goal that's established upfront. Unless you're just a wild chucking. Let's see what happens.

Michael Williamson: 0:24:31

I was on the classical side of things. It's like I dealt with molecular breeding techniques mostly for patent infringement and stuff like that. I'm a classical geneticist. That's who I am. That's how I was trained. And I just happened to train in a field where innovation was still something very common in ornamental plants. You could breed a wild species with an inbred line, you could still get true innovation without any marker assisted breeding period. Dot, dot. And that's what we did. Whereas other companies like Ball Horticulture, one of our biggest competitors, they had full labs where they did do marker assisted breeding. And it helps is the advantages that.

Michael Williamson: 0:25:08

You can get to your end goal faster. That's right. Like in layman's terms for simple minded folks like myself, not at all. I refer to it as like speed breeding.

Michael Williamson: 0:25:18

Sometimes it is, but there's a cost associated with it. So the biggest telltale, like the biggest thing that I always explain it to people, it is faster breeding. It truly is. There's nothing wrong with that. But you have to remember that marker is only marking a trait that you found. What if you're looking for something that's not found?

Michael Williamson: 0:25:38

You could totally miss it.

Michael Williamson: 0:25:39

Well, you don't even know because there is no marker for it. Sure. It's one of those things where I worked in a field where innovation was 100% of everything, where I was looking for new novel hybrids, whereas marker assisted breeding is more for those people that I was talking about earlier. Blue times blue equals blue. Well, it's like if that's inbreeding and you're going to get more powdery mildew issues with that. But there just happens to be a marker for powdery mildew tolerance. That type of breeding goes hand in hand and it's a mixture once again, of classical and marker assisted breeding. There are, I will say, a lot more. There's more to this nowadays than there used to be. It's like CRISPR, for instance, adding genes to something.

Michael Williamson: 0:26:20

I was kind of hoping we could.

Michael Williamson: 0:26:21

Touch base here a little bit. I am not a CRISPR expert, but it makes very good sense being able like I was more of the gold particle blasting era where it's like, I'm going to add this vector and I'm going to blast the hell out of this plant with gold particles until it just accepts it and absorbs it into its sequence. I was of that era. CRISPR came later in my lifetime. But the idea of simply. It's almost just like pressing a button and adding something to a plant.

Michael Williamson: 0:26:52

For someone that's not familiar with CRISPR cast technology or gene editing, is that the right way to say that? Can you just give a simple term of what gene editing kind of consists of?

Michael Williamson: 0:27:03

Truthfully, I may not be the best person for this as far as my knowledge goes. What it has to do is you insert with a primer, essentially, and that primer just adds it into the DNA in the sequence that it needs to be added into. And that's the stuff that it's complicated. You need to be a molecular scientist.

Michael Williamson: 0:27:22

Well, it's not just for plants, because I used to go to pag plant animal genome down in San Diego conference, and I was the dumbest person in the room. And it felt great because I was like, wow, look at all this stuff. And I was just there for the cannabis segment. But I would stay and listen to the other stuff, and I mean, the stuff they're doing with the stuff they're talking about with humans, animals, I mean, like kind of designer babies, essentially. Like, you want a kid with blue eyes and blonde hair and these traits. That's a possibility.

Michael Williamson: 0:27:48

You're hearing about it already. Like, even I have companies that just this month I have a meeting with somebody who's approaching me on these same topics, because in cannabis, it makes total sense to me. It's like, imagine in cannabis, you were like, hey, I have this plant that's perfect, but it doesn't produce this flavor profile. And you just happen to be able to say, like, okay, I want to add alpha pineine to this plant because it's missing it, but this sequence can just be blown into a portion of it, and all of a sudden you have a plant that's producing the same terpenes plus alpha Pionine. It's like, it almost truthfully. It makes a lot of sense that you would use it for cannabis.

Michael Williamson: 0:28:27

It does make a lot of sense for cannabis to me as well, even though it seems like an unnatural thing. And I imagine as a traditional geneticist, it's probably a little cringy, but most people, when they say, like, oh, I've got a winner, it checks all the boxes, I find that's almost never the case. It checks a lot of the boxes, but it doesn't check all of them.

Michael Williamson: 0:28:45

No.

Michael Williamson: 0:28:46

And then some of the best stuff that has some of the highest demand, as we were talking about earlier yeah, it's heady. It checks flavor profiles and all this.

Michael Williamson: 0:28:53

Stuff, but it doesn't yield yeah, 100%. It's like we were talking about earlier too, with populations. It's like, I'm used to germinating millions of seeds to find something, whereas in cannabis, it's like, we don't have the luxury of germinating millions of seeds, or at least we don't Claybourne.

Michael Williamson: 0:29:07

Most people don't.

Michael Williamson: 0:29:08

It's like, even if I want to germinate 10,000 seeds, you know how much labor and time and cost goes into this. And it's like the truth of the matter. The thing that I find the least of is agronomy, just basic agronomic things. It's like, how well does it grow? How well does it root? How fast does it start in Veg? It's like all of these things are what matters most to me. And then latter ends. It's like right now, sadly, our wonderful industry, it's like, is THC high enough? Is it beautiful enough with trichome density? Is it dense enough? Is it colored? Does it have the right flavor? And I feel that real advanced breeding is coming. It needs to come because we need to better the industry.

Michael Williamson: 0:29:52

But we're still dealing with a lot of issues. I was talking about OGS with you and the issues I have with growing OGS. Sometimes most people exactly right. But the reality is, can we breed an OG that's easier to grow?

Michael Williamson: 0:30:05

The answer is, of course, I would want to breed. Like, my breeding goal for OG would be, like, resistance to lodging, some kind of increased turgar pressure or something, because it seems to be one that just needs a lot of traditional support.

Michael Williamson: 0:30:20

Yeah.

Michael Williamson: 0:30:20

And it's very challenging in these multi grow environments.

Michael Williamson: 0:30:24

100%. It's one of the hardest things that I've found to grow in these multi stores.

Michael Williamson: 0:30:27

And you're in Southern California, where you got to be growing some OG.

Michael Williamson: 0:30:30

Yeah. Well, you're hoping.

Michael Williamson: 0:30:35

So just transitioning a little bit. Let's talk about some of the infrastructure here, because I've been to several pip cultivation facilities and other growth facilities around the world, and you guys are doing something that's quite unique, and you're doing it very well. So can you start to maybe paint the picture for listeners on kind of the campus that we're on and some of the infrastructure and buildings, et cetera?

Michael Williamson: 0:31:01

Claybourne, we have two facilities, so we have a single story facility, which is our traditional it's what we started with. It was our footprint. It's what created Claybourne flower the way it is. And then we have our new facility. Both facilities use piprax. Just so you guys know, it's like our Veg other facility uses two story pipracks. We vegetatively grow all of our mother stock, all my breeding stock, everything going into Vegetative sessions or Vegetative growth cycles.

Michael Williamson: 0:31:26

We've seen that's a new tradition, by the way. Not tradition, sorry word. But it's a new not sure the word I'm looking for. Pattern, maybe, but people are you went from these growing these big mothers, right, single tier, to now growing two tiers, small, medium sized. Cycle them out a lot more.

Michael Williamson: 0:31:41

Cycle them out. We cycle out every four to six weeks across the street.

Michael Williamson: 0:31:44

So we have anywhere from three to.

Michael Williamson: 0:31:46

Four sets of mother stock.

Michael Williamson: 0:31:48

You're not cloned to kill, are you? You're pretty close.

Michael Williamson: 0:31:51

No, we're pretty close. We have to be, because we run at four and a half feet across the street so the mother stock can't get as big as what we want it to, but the mother stock still gets big enough. It still grows for about two months before we harvest.

Michael Williamson: 0:32:03

Well, would you say are some of the benefits that you see with having a two tiered mother room versus with medium sized, small to medium sized mothers versus a single tier with a larger mother, older mother?

Michael Williamson: 0:32:15

For us, believe it or not, we made the decision because of flowering square footage. We added by doing this, we added a whole nother room of flowering canopy. So even in a single story operation, it made fiscal sense. Made perfect fiscal sense, I'm sure. Yeah.

Michael Williamson: 0:32:29

The return on investment was first harvest with that idea.

Michael Williamson: 0:32:32

The mother stock itself. The mother stock itself, it's like you do find and may not want to keep this out of here, but it's like what I found. You do get smaller cuttings, you get thinner cuttings, less stem diameter when you grow them as small as we do. That's why we have to cycle them so much. We cycle them more frequently because it gives us the stem diameter of the cutting that we need to produce a successful crop. So the reality is for us, though, too, it also allows us to watch for virus a little bit more frequently, because if you're cycling your mother stock out frequent, guess what? You get to throw things away more frequently, meaning you get to keep clean stock. We do work in tissue culture, so I bring in new tissue culture, mother stock every three months at both facilities.

Michael Williamson: 0:33:13

Nice.

Michael Williamson: 0:33:14

But the reality is that you still deal with virus. It's kind of hard to hide. Sometimes we purchase in nursery stock. We still do. We're a large farm. I work with people. I like working with other farms. I have a mentality that I don't want to do this alone. It's like, why should you when other people are successful too?

Michael Williamson: 0:33:33

Well, in California, it gives you that privilege. Some of these other states, you're not allowed to do these types of things. I remember when I was growing in California, I was like, you can sell a teenage plant. And someone was like, you can sell a ready to flower plant. I was like, what's a ready to flower plant? And they were like, yeah, basically you just get the whole plant, it's already veg free, and you flip it in the flower. I was like, that's a thing. Because most places are like two inch substrate, and then they'll generally restrict you on height, like eight inch clone.

Michael Williamson: 0:33:58

That's interesting. Which states all states are like that.

Michael Williamson: 0:34:01

A lot of them. Colorado is one like that. That was a big one growing up. A lot of them are that way. They have a restriction on the height of clone.

Michael Williamson: 0:34:08

That would be really hard.

Michael Williamson: 0:34:09

You can have prematurely topping clones.

Michael Williamson: 0:34:13

It's a mess in our situation because given that I came from a company, Euro American Propagators. It's like where all they did were starts. It's like they did starts and they did a four inch pots. It's like it makes if somebody can do something faster than you and cheaper than you, and you can take that square footage and turn it into flowering canopy, why wouldn't you?

Michael Williamson: 0:34:30

Some of the biggest players in the world, they buy their starts from Holland or they buy their starts from anywhere.

Michael Williamson: 0:34:35

Nobody does in AG, at least. Nobody really propagates their own stuff unless they're smaller, unless it's like a specialty crop or something like that. Almost everything is purchased out.

Michael Williamson: 0:34:44

Yeah, you either are working in starts or you're in that veg kind of or finishing a crop in some cases.

Michael Williamson: 0:34:50

Our facility here, we ended up doing three story. Three story crops, or three story flowering crops.

Michael Williamson: 0:34:56

When you say three story, you mean three tiers of racking? Three tiers of story building. I'm sorry, no, that's clarifying for my.

Michael Williamson: 0:35:02

Own three tiers of racking. And the rooms are very large and we had a lot of opportunity to do single story, double story, triple story, or triple tier. Sorry, single tier, double tier, triple tier, lots of different options. And we evaluated so many different things. And a lot of it comes down to fiscal in the end, it comes down to money. And I'm sorry, but it's just kind of true. And I'm an AG guy. Cost of production matters. A lot of what we do in this industry and in cannabis, if you're not thinking that way, you need to be thinking that way because it does matter. We hate talking about it, but if you're growing something for 1000 pounds and the bulk market is selling it at 1000 pounds, well, your business isn't going to be very successful. But the reality is, we chose to do three tier for a lot of different reasons. And it was hard. It was a hard decision because I had to be the person to evaluate why I was the grower. I was the person coming into a situation who had single tier, two tier. But I had never done triple tier.

Michael Williamson: 0:36:07

I had worked with people who did. I had worked with people who did who shut down their triple tier. It's like because it didn't work. Same reason that funny is the same reason we were talking about earlier is there's too much canopy in the room so they can't control temperature, humidity properly?

Michael Williamson: 0:36:24

Real quick to sorry to interrupt you. I find it so fascinating when people are like, oh, multi tier doesn't work, or triple tier doesn't work. I mean, we've seen five tiers. It is never a function of the racking or trays not being the issue. It is always 100% the mechanical, engineering and design associated with the HVAC system.

Michael Williamson: 0:36:44

It is crazy. If you go into a triple tier or even a two tier a double tier scenario and if you're not thinking about your airflow or you're not thinking about the load capacity of your dehumidification your load capacity of your cooling, which is also your dehumidification. It's like you have all of these things that help you grow stable, constant, keeping your room temperature constant. Anytime you have a fluctuation in temperature, humidity, any type of these controls, guess what? You're going to have issues. It's going to happen naturally. But the reality is that if you take the time to design your facility, guess what? You don't get those issues. We spent a very long time designing our facility, going to farms.

Michael Williamson: 0:37:33

Well in the reason coming, I would say slightly late into the market in California was a blessing because you got to see a lot more like some of the earliest innovators in multi tier. They were doing it for the first time and there wasn't a lot of places to go check out or they didn't have a lot of homies they could call and say, hey, you guys are doing this over there, right? And there wasn't that information share the ability to go to or something. This world that we live in now in cannabis is so different than it was 510 15 years ago. And it's really been brought out of secrecy and put into kind of like a more mainstream, more horticultural style.

Michael Williamson: 0:38:11

Like now it's controlled environment.

Michael Williamson: 0:38:13

Totally. That is the game, CEA.

Michael Williamson: 0:38:16

It's controlled environment. AG. It always has been a thing, but now it really is. Cannabis is this now. And there's a lot that we can learn that's already on the market. There's a lot we can learn from people who have done it. Like what you're saying I have people that I can go to and say, hey, what would you do? Have you seen this? How is it done? If I had to do this without any help, trust me, I would have cried too. It's like it would have been crop loss. Well, it's just tough.

Michael Williamson: 0:38:49

You're like second guessing yourself. In the early days, you're like, am I crazy? You're just beating your head against the wall trying to figure something out. And sometimes when you're so tied to your operation, you just need those outside eyes and it's like you can't see what's right in front of you sometimes. So it's so valuable to have the right relationships that you can bring people in that you trust and respect as far as their opinion goes. And then you can go visit stuff. These days, I mean, it's a whole different world.

Michael Williamson: 0:39:14

Yeah. Even with our design, visiting farms was probably one of the biggest things that helped. It's like visiting other farms and seeing how they were doing it. I will say we can talk about the design really quick if you want to, but it's like everything that we chose to do with the triple tier development was either from me going to a farm and seeing something I didn't like, or going to a farm and seeing something, I was like, yes, that makes sense, even. We chose so we chose to do triple tier. We chose to do 6ft of growing space minus the lighting, which was right around five and a half feet.

Michael Williamson: 0:39:48

So you're 18 foot tallish rack, right? 18 and a half, I think.

Michael Williamson: 0:39:52

18 and a half. We ended up cutting off six inches. I was telling you because of fire safety stuff, which, by the way, anybody listening to this, always get your fire marshal involved. I really, really promote it because right now, there's not a lot of code for what we do. But if they ever decide to make code for it, if you didn't get them involved in the beginning, then you risk a lot of things.

Michael Williamson: 0:40:14

There's a lot of nuanced differences between local municipality, fire chiefs. They're now communicating a little bit better, but what might be okay in one county is not okay in another county. So I can agree with that comment more. Save yourself some headaches. Do you guys have any big challenges with CCC California Code check?

Michael Williamson: 0:40:29

No, it's like everything we ended up doing yeah, we ended up doing an alternative Means and Methods submitted for it, and it went directly and it was approved because it's hard, because there is no code. There's no code for moving racks. It's like, well, there is, but not for what we use them for. And the systems that are involved with the moving racks have pivot points that are too new in fire safety, where they're like, I don't know if I trust this. So this is the best way based off of what this is.

Michael Williamson: 0:41:00

It's like a fear thing. So they just throw it all at you, right?

Michael Williamson: 0:41:02

So it's like they tell you flu spaces and tell you access fire control with water and all that type of stuff, which you need to have somebody who can support that. These systems do not catch on fire. I'm sorry. It's like not these systems. It's like when you have HIDs on plastic, that's a different because they get way hotter than LEDs on the trays that we deal with. And it's always grow by grow. So it doesn't matter what I say, it's your grow and how it works. But after doing everything and doing the actual analysis, we built out models, fiscal models. It's like financial models. That said, if we do single story, this is what we will get annually. If we do double tier, this is what we will get annually. If we do triple tier, this is what we will get annually. This is how much square footage we have to use this is how much square footage we have to use for this. And this and this. This is the cost per square foot for this, cost per square foot for this, and cost per square foot for this.

Michael Williamson: 0:42:01

There's some things in this, though. If you understand financial models, you're going to start understanding what's happening. It's like anytime you're factor adding a factor to something that doesn't necessarily increase the cost of other things, guess what? You're saving money per square foot. A lot of people don't understand. It's like for every tier that we went up, our cost of production went down. Okay. That's kind of basic stuff. Because it's like you have more plants in a room.

Michael Williamson: 0:42:29

Let's talk about one of those rooms real quick to give people some stats. Because I'm sure you got your stats. No, I'm loving everything you're saying. It's really interesting. So you have a I'm trying to remember how many square feet is the actual room itself?

Michael Williamson: 0:42:41

The room itself is right around about 2100 sqft.

Michael Williamson: 0:42:44

Okay. And then how much canopy would a single tier be in a room like that?

Michael Williamson: 0:42:49

A single tier would be right around it's essentially 1200. It would be right around 1200 sqft.

Michael Williamson: 0:42:56

Okay.

Michael Williamson: 0:42:56

So there's 3500 and some change square feet in each room of canopy, flowering canopy. With the design that we essentially created.

Michael Williamson: 0:43:03

A whole additional 1000 plus square feet of canopy in the same exact same space. Because you were able to have tall ceilings in this building and maximize cubic footprint.

Michael Williamson: 0:43:12

Exactly. It's like in the AC design or the mechanical design, you just kind of added on as needed. But because you were cooling the same space, guess what? Also that has reduction in cost. Because you have scalability. Now you have scalability. You can get larger units even with redundancy in our room, in that room.

Michael Williamson: 0:43:31

Has each flower room has two HVAC units.

Michael Williamson: 0:43:34

It has three HVAC.

Michael Williamson: 0:43:35

Three, that's right.

Michael Williamson: 0:43:35

So it has two twenty five S, and one hundred and forty and two twenty five ton units. They're Lennox units with added air handle or added heat strips, essentially. And then we have a 40 ton unit up top that's full. It's like pretty much everything in under the sun. And you guys say Addison units. For me, they're elevated units. Props to critical climate on that one. If he's listening, he won't listen. But it's just true. And the truth of the matter is designing it with the redundancy that we had, it just instead of having hundreds is what it felt like of twelve to 15 ton units on site. It's like the whole rooftop would have been covered with 15 ton units assuming.

Michael Williamson: 0:44:19

The roof could support the weight.

Michael Williamson: 0:44:21

Right. It's like it made more sense to do it this way anyway, because in the end you get that scalability on the pricing of everything. So also, once again, your cost of build goes down. Your cost of running a lot of these bigger units are more efficient. So guess what? Now you get efficiency gains and stuff like that. I actually am a humble person, but I do feel like our design is good. I haven't had any of the issues that I was told I was going to have. It's like what the rooms do now, like what you guys saw. It's like they dry. They dry too much. So a lot of my issues are, can I keep the humidity high enough to do what I need it to do?

Michael Williamson: 0:44:58

So one of the things I noticed right away with your space is you were very gracious with your front, what you call the front main aisle. So I think you said you had 10ft there.

Michael Williamson: 0:45:10

Yeah.

Michael Williamson: 0:45:11

And then more importantly, you have 4ft on the back end. Now, not everybody gets to do that because they're cramming stuff into a smaller space, but you guys have a pretty big space here, and you're able to pull that off, and it makes a world of difference in terms of where your returns are elevated and having that buffer zone on the front and the back end. Can you talk a little bit about kind of how the air flows in your space, where supplies are and where returns are and, of course, processor coming from AG.

Michael Williamson: 0:45:37

It's like working in greenhouses and stuff like that. Looking at cyclic airflow in a greenhouse. It's like the design that we use for this was the same way. It was something that I worked with my mechanical engineer very heavily on and saying, hey, I want this type of mentality. And at that, we call it laminar because to me, that's really what it is. It's pushing air in a direction, even though this is triple laminar when you start thinking about it. But everything in these rooms, all the supplies, the supplies move all the air to the front entryway. The front entryway is 10ft. Okay? We did that for a lot of different reasons. It hits a fan. So essentially, an inline under canopy fan, it hits it, and it pushes the air through the canopy and up from the bottom up, right above the pots. We grow in three gallon peat moss. Just pots. Okay.

Michael Williamson: 0:46:28

And the returns on the system are mounted in different spots. So we have returns for the 25 ton units down low, and the returns for the 40 ton units are up.

Michael Williamson: 0:46:37

High in the back of the back of the racking.

Michael Williamson: 0:46:41

Really, you have to look at it as one big cyclic airflow, is all it is. It's moving in a circle. The reason why we develop that front entryway space, that very first entryway space, is when all that cold air is blowing to the front of the room. Okay? It's very directional. All the supplies are directional straight to the front of the room. All right. It's like a jet engine up there. And what's funny about is that when you go on the third tier, you really don't even feel any of that airflow because it's directed to blow to the front of the room. All right? It comes to the front and hits the wall, and it spins, okay? And it's mixing the air and what it's doing is it's gradually mixing the temperatures, it's mixing the humidity, it's doing all that stuff. All right? And the fans, all the under canopy fans are collecting that mixed air and blowing it back through the 48ft, because we have 48ft of rows. All right.

Michael Williamson: 0:47:33

And the vents are blowing it up into the canopy. It's removing all the microclimate that's created from our peat moss based soils is really what it is, because peat moss, truthfully, it holds a lot of moisture right there.

Michael Williamson: 0:47:46

Yeah, for sure.

Michael Williamson: 0:47:47

And if you're not careful, it will create a microclimate that will give you powdery, mildew issues, gives you all sorts.

Michael Williamson: 0:47:52

Of wonderful issues, and you mitigate that through irrigation.

Michael Williamson: 0:47:55

And then just irrigating properly, I think, is one of the biggest things. Even with our simple facility, irrigating once a day and allowing the dryback to happen accordingly totally helps. Everything's on, spitters it's on. Just a half gallon emitter is all it is. Each pot has two of them. It irrigates it literally. And you might see a slight bump in relative humidity right after you irrigate. But because the airflow is so cyclic, couple of points, couple of percentage points, and it just normalizes a flat curve.

Michael Williamson: 0:48:29

And then you also do some environmental strategic cues when the lights are off. Can you talk a little bit about that? What are you talking about in terms of running a differential?

Michael Williamson: 0:48:43

Oh, running the diff. Well, the diff. So running a diff, there's two ways to look at diffs. It's like we run two different types. So two different types of diff, the differential and temperature. There's a lot of different things. You can drop the temperature or you can raise the temperature, depending on how you want to manipulate humidity, I guess.

Michael Williamson: 0:49:02

No diff as well.

Michael Williamson: 0:49:03

Yeah. When we're going late into the cycle, believe it or not, using Thrive, the reason why you even get a diff in those rooms when the lights turn off is mostly just because using Thrive, we ramp it down and it naturally controls it with the HVAC unit cooling the coils.

Michael Williamson: 0:49:18

And thrive is your controller.

Michael Williamson: 0:49:20

Thrive is our controlling I've had my fair share of non complicated controlling systems for facilities where it's just like, here you go, I'm going to set my thermostat and just do it kind of the best way that you can. And Thrive gives you a lot of luxuries of doing these things because we also use a morning diff, so we use a cool time in the morning. We drop early morning temperatures for the first four weeks. It's to do the same thing, but it also controls the inner nodal length of plant growth. So by dropping right around about if you can drop your temperature while the lights right when they turn on, anywhere from five to ten degrees below night temperature, it also gives you a natural PGR effect, keeping plants shorter. So it's a big thing that truthfully, candace growers, most of those guys probably don't even hear about it, but we use it a lot in the floriculture, use a lot in ornamental plants to control how a plant branches. It's like because you want a plant that grows short, stout, and very well branched. Well, it's like if you allow the plant to grow at the rate that we're growing them at, they're just going to be these tall, lanky things all the time.

Michael Williamson: 0:50:27

So it's like an environmental PGR, or plant growth regulator, which we know that plant growth regulators from a chemical standpoint aren't allowed in most cannabis states. So it's an environmental PGR, essentially?

Michael Williamson: 0:50:39

Very much so. And they tend to help us a lot with growing height in our rooms at least. It's like because growing things in five and a half feet of space, it's like some plants can handle that very well, some plants cannot. It's like we deal with that in a lot of different ways, too. By using the diff, by using different age of vegetative growth, by topping plants accordingly at the right timing. It's like there's so many different factors that you can use.

Michael Williamson: 0:51:01

Veg timing seems pretty critical in the multi tiered space, and you guys run over 30 different varieties, so therefore and you haven't even really got to start your breeding projects over here to the level that you'd like to be doing them.

Michael Williamson: 0:51:13

Not at all. It's like starting up a facility doesn't give you the luxury of having free space.

Michael Williamson: 0:51:19

It's the truth. We talked about it earlier, right? It's like flying the airplane while you're building it. And I think any grower that's listening to this that's worked in a commercial facility or even at their house, I think they can all relate to that comment because you're always patching something or if you get a TCO or temporary certificate of occupancy, you're in. But meanwhile, maybe this room that you're growing in is kind of commissioned, but everything around you is still wide open or exposed or you have different contractors coming in and out. And as we said earlier, for better or worse, humans are the vector, we're the disease, we're the spreaders of the bugs and issues. And so when you have strangers in your space who don't take the same level of care to things like PPE, it causes problems. And it's frustrating because you're like, you got investors you got to listen to and answer to and your hands are tied and you got this situation and you're like, this is about as good as I'm going to be able to get it until you get these people out of my space.

Michael Williamson: 0:52:18

It is life as a grower. It's like life as a grower is putting out fires. And sadly, when you have as many employees as we have as many people entering a room or just entering a facility, it doesn't even matter sometimes because they see a color on your shirt and. That's a thrip coming in and looking at your shirt and saying, hey, I thought it was a flower, but now I have a whole room of them.

Michael Williamson: 0:52:44

So no yellow and blue shirts at the facility.

Michael Williamson: 0:52:47

I wish. Right? I wish. But the reality is that we all deal with it. We all deal with bugs. Any grower who tells you they haven't dealt with bugs is full of shit.

Michael Williamson: 0:52:57

Well, and they're probably not a grower at that point. It's hard to give yourself that title. Speaking of titles, you're not really a grower.

Michael Williamson: 0:53:03

No.

Michael Williamson: 0:53:04

At least you don't claim to be, even though I would say you're a grower. Can you maybe explain just briefly the difference between a geneticist and a grower?

Michael Williamson: 0:53:13

Yeah.

Michael Williamson: 0:53:13

And how the two are very different?

Michael Williamson: 0:53:15

Very much so. It's I am a plant breeder or a plant geneticist, a classical geneticist. It's like we've been talking about a little bit, and I've spent my entire career breeding plants, breeding plants for a lot of different things, which tends to be agronomic. So yes. Can I be termed a grower? Sometimes? Yes, to the right people. But would I ever call myself a grower? Never. I would always call myself a plant breeder. And a lot of that has to do with being a plant breeder. You have to breed things that grow. So you have to understand techniques of growers and how growers use different traits or different ideologies or different sorry, to rephrase that different types of growing techniques for many different reasons, whether that's chemical or fertilizer needs or something like that. I used to breed every single crop I bred. Actually, you had to breed it for PH tolerance.

Michael Williamson: 0:54:08

People would be like, well, what's PH tolerance? It's like, well, majority of the world deals with a standard growth or standard increase in PH over a crop cycle. So when you're selecting something for breeding, you see a lot of high PH nutrient issues that are related with growing inbred crops. But you learn very quickly, hey, 5.5 or 6.0 is the right PH that the substrate needs to be, or the water soil substrate kind of communication needs to be in order to get the best crop out of this. But would I ever call myself a grower? Sadly, it's hard for me to do. Sometimes I deal with the same struggles that any other grower deals with. It's like I ask for help when I need help, and this is coming from somebody. I grow many 10,000 crops, and it's like, I've managed huge greenhouses, but it's not about that. It's like when I manage huge greenhouses, I had huge teams to support you. And in cannabis, we have to work together like that. We don't all know what's best for everything. Even me. Every time I bring in a new crop, I'm starting on a blank site, too. It's like, I'm going to grow it.

Michael Williamson: 0:55:19

I'm going to keep an eye on it. But in the end, you're still just somebody growing it for the first time. And it may like our growing conditions, it may not. It's a very hard thing sometimes to cope with is that humble nature.

Michael Williamson: 0:55:33

A lot of people, when they think about the word strain or cultivar, they think that it's all about the genetics. But the environment plays just as critical of a role in genetic expression as sometimes the breeding does in some cases. Can you talk a little bit about how environment plays a role in trade expression?

Michael Williamson: 0:55:51

Very much so. In cannabis. Truthfully, cannabis is probably the best example of that. I'm not going to lie. In all the crops I've worked on, I've worked on hundreds of different genres of plants. It's like we bred plants to grow the same no matter where they were grown in the world. All right? And that's a very hard thing to do. It's not easy. And for proven winners, that was a necessity for breeding because they had locations in North America. They had locations in Canada and Europe and South Africa and Australia, all these different things. And if they were selling a plant and it didn't look the same in North America as it did in Europe, well, guess what? You're dealing with an issue. It's like, hey, I saw this plant. It's not growing very well.

Michael Williamson: 0:56:33

Climate, the amount of light something receives, the humidity that's in your growing region, how moist or dry the air is to just pretty much what you're feeding the plant, even sometimes, or stability of those things, everything. It's like all of that stuff changes the way that plant grows. And we see that in cannabis. We see it all the time. Sadly, we see it. When we were talking about ChemD earlier. It's like the ChemD cut that goes around. It's like it came from a nursery that I get it from, that I had it from a long time ago. And it's like that cut seems to be the only one that I see around anymore. That plant, under the right conditions, produces a very beautiful, frosty, dense bud under a humid condition and a little bit higher light. It produces a little bit what I call larfy or airy type bud, simple things like that. That's climate that's growing, and that's also plant breeding. It's like if you can breed a plant that is able to handle all those different types of light and humidity and look the same, guess what that's plant breeding.

Michael Williamson: 0:57:41

Well, ChemD specifically. It's funny to use that one specifically because that was a bag seed. I don't know how much stability went into that one in the end, not at all. But shout out to Peabud, by the way, for making that thing stay around for so long.

Michael Williamson: 0:57:55

It's a beautiful plant.

Michael Williamson: 0:57:56

Yeah. Great medicinal effects, too.

Michael Williamson: 0:57:59

Probably one of our top sellers to this day.

Michael Williamson: 0:58:01

Okay, nice.

Michael Williamson: 0:58:03

The reality is some of these things are climatic expressions and some of these things are stability in lines. And the way that I see it is probably a little bit differently than most. It's like a genetic expression is not the same thing as, like, a climate expression, but genetic stability, that gives you climate stability, that's a different thing. It's like those are two different topics, because if the plant's genes are the plant's genes, that's not going to change the way it looks all the time. Now, if the plant's genes are unstable to the point where it just can't handle humidity, that could be something that might be semi different. There's a lot of ways that expression that we see of as expression in cannabis is a little bit different. I see it as stabilizing a line to handle multiple different types of climate, whereas other people will just say, well, this plant just doesn't handle multiple types of climate. The same thing almost. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Michael Williamson: 0:59:03

I do.

Michael Williamson: 0:59:04

And that's kind of where a lot of cannabis growers will say, well, the genes are causing it to do this. Well, no, I disagree with that. It's like, more than likely, if you saw it and it looked like this and it was selected in this climate, I would say you just need to grow it in this climate to keep it uniform.

Michael Williamson: 0:59:19

You triggered a question that I've been waiting to ask someone, and you're the right person to ask, especially with your background. So it's not uncommon for cannabis growers to have a cultivar. They've been running for a while, and then all of a sudden, it just starts to deteriorate for different reasons. And this label came out that I never quite agreed with, and I still don't. But I'm curious to get your opinion. Is there such thing as genetic drift?

Michael Williamson: 0:59:44

Yes, 100%.

Michael Williamson: 0:59:46

I was hoping you were going to say no.

Michael Williamson: 0:59:47

No, I'm sorry.

Michael Williamson: 0:59:48

That's all right. Tell me all about it.

Michael Williamson: 0:59:50

Genetic drift, a lot of times what it has to do with is when you're when you're clonally propagating something over and over and over again. Okay. Sometimes you can have a stress event, or sometimes the plant just does it, and it just creates a mutation.

Michael Williamson: 1:00:04

Okay, would that be poor selection?

Michael Williamson: 1:00:07

Stability? I will tell you, stability in ornamental crops were the same way over time. Some things just decide that they don't want to be the same.

Michael Williamson: 1:00:17

And it's not like disease that we haven't identified that is always possible. Okay.

Michael Williamson: 1:00:21

Because hops latent is one of those things. It's like hops latent, it 100% creeps in, comes in everywhere. It's like, if you have truthfully, hops latent is everywhere. I don't know anybody nowadays who doesn't have it unless they're buying in 100% from clean tissue that they know is negative. And even then, I still kind of doubt anytime scientists call something a viroid, they don't really know where those snippets of RNA are coming from. It's like, oh, it's a viroid. Well, yeah, it's a snippet of RNA that you're finding, but it's like, where is it coming from? What is the vector that's bringing in this RNA? But genetic drift, it's a hard thing to even quantify because what you're talking about is something that we can't see. It's like we don't see little tiny mutations. It's like we kind of like we're growing a plant, and all of a sudden it mutates. It's like majority of mutations aren't visible.

Michael Williamson: 1:01:16

Well, it's probably associated with survival, I imagine.

Michael Williamson: 1:01:18

It could be a lot of different things, or it could be just the Maristem as degrading, just like our telomeres degrade over time, which is how it was always taught to me. It's like we have genetic material all throughout our body. It's like over time, those telomeres get shorter and shorter and shorter. And a lot of people think that this genetic drift is something very similar to that. Well, you have a very old variety. It's being stored in tissue culture, which tissue culture is really just slowing things down is all you're trying to do, trying to slow down the growth of this plant. And the reason why they do it is for this very topic that you're talking about, is because of genetic drift. If you take a cutting off of a plant over and over and over again, okay, there is no way to say that it's not mutating. Because every time you take a cutting, guess what? You're stressing the plant out. Every time you get a drydown, you're stressing that plant out. Every time that plant gets too much light, every time that plant is underfed all these different things that technically could be mutagenesis. It's like different types of effects that cause a mutagen to happen. It's like every one of those things, and they're all chimeric. So it's like they're just random, just like this random mutation, and you have no clue where it's coming from.

Michael Williamson: 1:02:26

I think when I started hearing that word a lot, it was years ago, but I really do think the majority of what people were referring to as genetic drift was just unidentified hop latent virus.

Michael Williamson: 1:02:35

Yeah, 100%.

Michael Williamson: 1:02:36

I agree with you, because in the.

Michael Williamson: 1:02:38

Very beginning, it's like, I didn't deal with hops latent even six years ago. Hops latent. It's like I didn't see it in most of my crops. It's like I saw it. I would see a shitty plant. If I can't curse, we can say shit, okay? It's like if I saw a shitty plant, it was just like any other crop that I was growing at that time. Even when I was in AG, it's like I saw a shitty plant. Well, I just throw it away.

Michael Williamson: 1:02:56

I was trying to think when I first spotted it. I first bought it in California working in Salinas. And I want to say it was 2016 was the first time, but nobody was labeling it that.

Michael Williamson: 1:03:06

No, you would probably thought, like, oh, this is probably just Pythium or something.

Michael Williamson: 1:03:09

I was like, do I have broad mites? Do I have Russet mites? It was very different. But then, yeah, one of the positive and negative things about California's system is people do share genetics here, like, in an incredible way. Going from East Coast or any of these other states and then walking into any of these big nurseries or retail that has sometimes a retail nursery display is like bigger than some dispensaries in other states, and they're doing even bigger numbers than those dispensaries. And so I had never quite experienced anything like that. I was like, wow, this is so incredible. And so the first thing I did at our big greenhouse was I was like, go ahead, I'll take everything you got at the store, at the retail, and I took PP. I took it all. No clinic, and I received it all and every little issue along with it. So, yeah, it's like a blessing and a curse out here, because you do spread stuff 100% so quickly in California.

Michael Williamson: 1:04:02

I saw it very early on, I saw it seed born. So it is seedborne, as far as I will tell you. It's like that. It looks like it is seed born. And that's from my own breeding, my own findings and stuff like that, that you find a small portion of a population. It's like if you use it as a breeding stock, as a mother plant, or as a male plant or something like that, to me, it seems like it's sealborn seedborne. There's different types of Tabamo viruses. There's different types of viruses out there that are from other industries, too, where if the plant is inbred enough, you get kind of like a decrease in vigor so much that it's kind of like, is it seed born or is it just a really shitty plant kind of thing. But that's kind of where the seed born mentality comes from. I germinate a lot of seed in my beginning years for the same reason that anybody would. I was trying to develop a portfolio. I was doing my own breeding. I inherently saw it in the very beginning, mostly just because of that. I will tell you, and this isn't me tooting my own horn or anything like that, but I've bred a lot of crops, and I've bred out virus in a lot of crops and simple things like vigor. You can breed out a lot of these viruses.

Michael Williamson: 1:05:16

You can just breed a tolerance to them where they instead totally, we see.

Michael Williamson: 1:05:20

It all the time. Big healthy plants, they're like, yeah, there's a virus here present. But when the plant's healthy, you don't see it. When the plant's not healthy, you see it.

Michael Williamson: 1:05:30

You see it and inbred lines. It's something that's thrown around in cannabis a lot. Like, oh, I'm inbreeding this, like, it's a good thing. My mentor, Ushio Sakazaki, the person that we talked about earlier, everything is inbred. I'm not going to lie. Even in cannabis, everything's inbred. And anybody who says different either doesn't know the reality. Now is cannabis diverse? 100%. It is super diverse. Maybe the most, right amazing it is that two or three species, depending on who you talk to, two or three species, 300 plus essential oils. It's like you can breed cannabis to freaking smell and taste like anything. Totally. It is super diverse. And all the different types that you see, it's like all the Chemo types and phenotypes that you see.

Michael Williamson: 1:06:13

It is crazy how diverse it is. But you can't tell me that when somebody takes Sunset Sherbet and crosses it with everything in their portfolio, and then the next person buys their seed and does the same thing with their Sunset Sherbert, and the next person does the same thing that that's not inbreeding you're inbreeding Sunset Sherbert or inbreeding cake or cookies. We were talking about cookies earlier. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's breeding. But that is what we call inbreeding when you're talking to a geneticist. And sadly, the first thing you see that returns when you outcross to a wild species is vigor on everything. And it's extreme vigor. It's not like, yeah, hybrid extreme vigor.

Michael Williamson: 1:06:56

I've seen it. It's incredible. So on that note, you can create all kinds of stuff. You can source stuff here. You guys have selected some in house stuff. You've put it together a portfolio here. What are some cultivars that if someone hasn't tried your product, what is the absolute must try? I know you mentioned the ChemD as a top seller. ChemD is a top seller.

Michael Williamson: 1:07:20

We didn't grow it for a little bit, and we reawakened it just recently. It's like truthfully out of our portfolio that most people want to try more than anything is our Judge. It's called the judge. It's a gold cut, so it's one of our premium flowers. The judge. It's a high THC. It's a GMO. It's a selection of GMO I selected five years ago, something like that from PAX seed. But believe it or not, it was everything that I wanted it to be. It finishes in under 70 days, which is pretty amazing for what the size of this plant is. It's like finishes under 70 days. It ripens to a nice purple. It has the strongest nose. It hits THC points well above 30, but it doesn't knock you on your ass. It's more of a nice, relaxing high.

Michael Williamson: 1:08:05

A lot of those things that's what I go after personally, is something that doesn't put me in a couch lock, that I'm just going to fall asleep. It's like I tend to be hybridizing a lot of things with Jacks. So your jack hair types, props to jack hair for all that stuff. A lot of those uplifting terpenolene based varieties are what I go after. Personally, I'm a lemon, lime, orange. People knock on Mimosa all the time. But truthfully, it's some of the best flavor on the market. It's like, different.

Michael Williamson: 1:08:32

It's so vividly, unique. If you taste that, you're like, you know exactly what it is from the moment it touches your lips.

Michael Williamson: 1:08:40

I love that about cannabis. I absolutely love that there are flavor profiles everywhere. Like right now, we were talking about Blue Dream earlier. It's like, I found original blueberry hybrid. It came from a nursery. I'm not going to lie. I didn't select it. And we don't sell it in our goal cuts because of it. We sell it in our private stock. But truthfully, it's an amazing blue dream. It's like, got that blueberry nose. It's a nice uplifting, happy high. It's like you can't really go wrong with it. And it smokes super clean.

Michael Williamson: 1:09:06

So talk to me a little bit about your lines, because I know you've got a few different product lines. Some of them are over my shoulder here, but yeah, can you give me a breakdown from kind of, I guess, maybe the top to the ancillary product?

Michael Williamson: 1:09:19

This is where Nick would be the best person to seriously come in here. But what we have is we have a whole bunch of different products. They're all kind of color coded in the way that we produce them. So we have our power line, which is all of our keith infused or keef added products. So our power packs, which are smalls, it's an 8th of smalls with a gram of keefe, high end keef. We produce all our keef here. It's all trimmed in keef. We have power stacks are in that, which are two and a half grams of ground product with a gram of keef. Once again, it's pre ground product, just.

Michael Williamson: 1:09:48

Ready to use, essentially just like milled. So it's like roll your own quick.

Michael Williamson: 1:09:52

Roll your own product. And the same thing with power Pack. Power packs were made to be they're in like a little folding pouch, like a tobacco pouch. It was made to be kind of the same indifference. We have our private stock, which is all of our kind of they're more heritage varieties in all reality. It's stuff that's been on the market for a long time. It's not bad flower or lesser flower in any way, shape, or form. But that's where you find your Blue Dreams and your chemds and all that kind of stuff, because it's been on the market, and there are amazing selections of these things. So why would we not grow them? Why would we not I'm not going to try to recreate ChemD. It's like in this situation, it's a very good plant. We grow it. Well, let's sell it then. We have all of our goal cuts. It's like the goal cuts are everything that's bred in house and selected in house.

Michael Williamson: 1:10:37

Okay, so some of this stuff, we just recently opened it up to outside breeding. So people and we give props to those people. It's like, if I select something from seed that I purchased or seed that I found or something like that. Of course I'm going to give that breeder props because that breeder bred that plant. Yeah.

Michael Williamson: 1:10:53

What's part of the story, too? I think a lot of people not a lot, but I think the heads are curious to know the lineage, the story behind it. It's like knowing the connection or the history of something. It's interesting.

Michael Williamson: 1:11:05

Yeah. And it should be fun. I say inbreeding a lot of the times, I cannot breed everything myself that's inbreeding it. Seriously, is it's like as breeders or as cultivators? As anybody? You have to rely on other people for something. It's like and you need to work together because the product's not going to get any better if we're not working together. I want someone we had this conversation earlier, and as a breeder, my mentor, once again, I'm going to bring him up again. Usio Sakazaki, my mentor, he was the one. He was a person that was very against utility patents, hated utility patents. Why? Because why would you want to protect something so much that nobody can use it to improve it, to make it better?

Michael Williamson: 1:11:45

And the rationale is because it restricts growth.

Michael Williamson: 1:11:47

Because it restricts the growth of that thing. And so when we would breed these new innovative products, it's like, why not put them on the market, let another breeder buy it and breed with it and make his recreation of it. You never know what they're going to create.

Michael Williamson: 1:12:00

We've always thought of that as being one of the biggest compliments that a breeder can get. Beautiful is someone wanting to work with your work. But yeah, a lot of people do not feel the same way.

Michael Williamson: 1:12:11

No. And a lot of people in cannabis, we haven't got there yet. It's like we haven't reached that point of maturity where, like, even our own genetics, it's like the genetics that I breed, they're not sold on the open market. Now. Would I trade them? Of course I would. 100%. I would trade our best varieties with somebody. If I wanted to use your plant for breeding, there would be nothing wrong with that. And it should be open. You should be able to discuss these things.

Michael Williamson: 1:12:35

Well, in theory, if you collaborate with the right people and create something new that you can both mutually benefit from, if anything, it should stir excitement with the community.

Michael Williamson: 1:12:44

Why not?

Michael Williamson: 1:12:45

Because you're like, I respect this person. I respect this person. Oh, they got together and did a little collab here. I got to check it out.

Michael Williamson: 1:12:51

It's like the world right now, cannabis is kind of closed. It's like people are still trying to be the best, and that's okay. Competition is needed. It's like we need to have competition. We need to work together. It's like if we want to change anything for the better, we need to work together. But the reality is, I think, over time, things will change, and things will diverge in different ways.

Michael Williamson: 1:13:13

I like that you said everyone's trying to be the best because for a long time, everyone's trying to be the biggest, and the biggest players are falling out left and right. We won't talk about in multiple countries. I mean, it's a thing. These people went huge. I've worked in some of these houses, and they're incredible. You're like, oh, wow, it's a million square feet. This is such an incredible opportunity. And then, well, that's great, but you spent all this money on your infrastructure, and you didn't spend really any money on genetics, and you thought you could just grow whatever and, oh, by the way, your competitor is also growing whatever, and now you have no differentiator. I think it's really important to have a divergent portfolio, and it helps you when you have a divergent portfolio and these trends come, right? These hitters come, and it's like, this is the new Hype strain. But especially in California, it has a short window, and you got to be able to get on the train and then get off the train pretty quickly on the West Coast. Now on the East Coast, I've noticed I look at a lot of trends and kind of just like pattern recognition. That same Hype strain, it might only last maybe a year to 18 months. In California, you can ride that thing for three or four years over on the East Coast. So it's just interesting to me what a market leader and trendsetter California is for the rest of the global industry.

Michael Williamson: 1:14:29

And I don't think there's many people that will deny that.

Michael Williamson: 1:14:31

No, and I agree. Even the big guys backing out, the big guys backing out, they backed out of California a lot of the times first because it was so hard to compete with the smaller cultivators or with us, say so. Say smaller guys out here.

Michael Williamson: 1:14:44

Well, you have a culture that's so strong in California that it does not translate really well for corporate cannabis.

Michael Williamson: 1:14:51

No.

Michael Williamson: 1:14:52

Now, the East Coast guys, a lot of them don't have they lack cannabis culture, and they know it. And a couple of the good ones have come over, and they're trying to bring that traditional cannabis culture to their East Coast operations. And I was had a discussion with someone on a podcast, and it sounds like an easy thing to do, but it's not. It's really difficult because you're just kind of like a noob on a new state that really doesn't have a rich history with that space.

Michael Williamson: 1:15:18

No. And even it is, it is true. Like, even our market, how our market demands change so rapidly, we talked about this a little bit. It was one of those things where even as a breeder, breeding takes time. It always takes time. True innovation is not going to be a one year turnaround. It's like, can you find some cool stuff in a year? Of course you can. It's like if you sow a bunch of seeds, you're going to find something in there that you can grow and trial again and see if it still meets your needs. But even at Claybourne, we get demand for runts and everything else, too, because there's nothing wrong with the flower. It's like, maybe the plant doesn't yield well. The one selection, whatever the hell selection I'm growing or something like that, maybe it won't yield well. But it doesn't matter in the end, if that's what the consumer wants, it's.

Michael Williamson: 1:16:01

Your job to figure out a way to make it produce that it makes sense.

Michael Williamson: 1:16:04

Exactly. And that would be one of those ones that a breeder should be looking at and saying, hey, I have this runtz. It's beautiful. It smokes well. It finishes in 56 days. It's like, it's everything I want it to be, but it doesn't yield. That would be one of those perfect iconic situations where you're like, hey, I'm going to cross this with a white widow that I have that yields great, that has a same fruity profile and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, that would be that one where let's get it and look at it. Now you got to look at probably 500 of them, but it's the same indifference. And that's what we should be talking about and doing. The downfall is that it's hard to do. It's hard to do because what's happening is that runts is popular. Like what you're saying, Hype Strain is popular for about six months, and then it's not popular anymore.

Michael Williamson: 1:16:50

Well, commercial facility, if you get that cut in early, it might take you six or nine months to get it up into actual production. And by the time you do, you're like, OOH, I need the next thing.

Michael Williamson: 1:16:59

Yeah. And that's why even our own breeding our own breeding I try to focus on new, innovative products before I focus on improvements. We work with nurseries. I've talked about this before, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's great nurseries.

Michael Williamson: 1:17:10

There's some great nurseries in California, and.

Michael Williamson: 1:17:13

The reality is that they're doing good with what they have, and it's okay. It's like if it's product that I trust and know and I understand, there's nothing wrong with taking a product that somebody else has selected and putting it in a jar. You grow it well. There's nothing wrong with that. Now, true innovation, that's technically our goal cuts. Our goal cuts are true innovation. They're new products. It's like there's something that you haven't seen before, or it's something that's like a tried and true for us. It's like the Judge, for instance. The judge, yeah. Was it selected from a GMO background? Of course it was, but it's not GMO. It is our interpretation of this plant. It's like it was from our own clutch. It was from our genetic profile that we selected over time.

Michael Williamson: 1:17:54

And it's grown in your environment.

Michael Williamson: 1:17:55

And it's grown in our environment. It makes it that way. And for all I know, we put that somewhere else. It's not going to grow the same.

Michael Williamson: 1:18:01

Totally. And I think that's why multistate operators, or MSOs, really struggle when they're trying to standardize their portfolio across, like, 18 states. And it's like, it doesn't quite work like that. Oh, you're doing that in a greenhouse. You want to be the same as your indoor. And it's like it just doesn't translate.

Michael Williamson: 1:18:17

That's what that was. Really proven winners in a nutshell. It's like to put it into truth, it's like, that's what they did. They sold you royal Velvet was their blue petunia. I improved it when I left. And that plant was the number one selling plant internationally at the time. And it was one of those things where you took that plant, you grew it in a greenhouse, you grew it indoors, you grew it outside. Guess what? It's going to look like, that plant. Why did it do that? Is because I bred it took me seven years to breed it, by the way. It took a long time, millions of seeds to breed this plant. Millions of seeds. And then it was trialed internationally. It's like it and its siblings trialed internationally at probably 50 different locations.

Michael Williamson: 1:18:59

And guess what? The reason why it's so stable is because we trialed it at 50 different locations and found that it was stable. That plant is one of those things where it's like, genetically that is probably just a stable plant. It's sister siblings, not as genetically stable, which is kind of what we were talking about earlier. It's like, maybe they take a wider range or a lesser range, and then they get more diverse changes.

Michael Williamson: 1:19:26

It's interesting. Like, my background before all this was, like, neurology and working with Ms communities I told you about. And so I had this kind of patient focus, human component to what I was doing before and then switched over to plants. And when I look at both of them and the more I learned about plants, the more I realize they're just like people. Like, we're all the same. And so when you mentioned sister brother, and it's like, I think for people who are like, I don't really understand breeding, and then you mention, like, hey, do you have a brother or sister? And they're like, yeah, I got two. And they're like, do they look like you? And they're like, well, kind of one's kind of tall like me. And then one's kind of like, we have the same eyes. And then one of them, we think we call her the milkmate, the milkman's daughter or something. And it's just so interesting. It's all just trade expression and allele dominances. And so, yeah, whenever I'm struggling to understand the plant world, I find that there's a direct correlation with humans. And when we were talking about older and younger mothers, when people are growing really big old moms.

Michael Williamson: 1:20:25

The analogy I give them is I say plants are a lot like people. The older they get, the more susceptible they are to problems, to everything. So if you can hit that vigor curve and cycle them out appropriately, you will have a stronger stock down the line, and your mother sets a tone for your entire life how you're nurtured, how you're loved or not loved or how you're fed or whatever it might be. That that's the stage and the foundation for what you do in the rest of your life. And so the same, I feel, is true for plants. And it's interesting when someone has a struggling garden, and they're like, you got to focus on our flower room. And I'm like, no, you need to focus on your mother room and your propagation. Because if you can get really healthy moms really healthy propagation, the rest is I don't want to call it a coast, but it's a lot better than rebounding from sick moms and sick clones or attempting to because you're already restricted from day one one.

Michael Williamson: 1:21:15

Yeah. And it's the same thing with us. It's like you have to grow them to a certain age. It's the same thing as humans. It's like you don't want to be taking cuttings off of something that's a week old. It's like even though sometimes you can get decent cutting off of that, but it all links up. It all mimics.

Michael Williamson: 1:21:30

Well, I know that cannabis is a never ending conversation. I could probably talk to you forever, but we do have to wrap this up a little bit. But before we do, and I know that'll be back, and we can continue this conversation and get some of your other teammates in here. So it's not all on you, of course. Where can people find your products?

Michael Williamson: 1:21:45

Claybourne is in over 60% of the retail locations in California. Locally, it's always one of the things where I'm a big empire gardens fan locally, so it's like they're yeah.

Michael Williamson: 1:21:55

Do you have your your spots you want to shout out?

Michael Williamson: 1:21:58

It's like remedy room is another big one for us. It's actually on the way over to lax for you guys. Okay. Lots of good places to buy Claybourne products, and if you need help finding Claybourne products, you can actually go on the website. So Claybourneco.com, it's like, you can go on there. There's usually a way to find a shop if they don't cause problems. It's like instagram is not a good way to find anywhere to get anything.

Michael Williamson: 1:22:22

No, they're just booting you down. They boot all the good ones down left and right. But Claybourneco.com.

Michael Williamson: 1:22:28

Yes. Claybourneco. Awesome.

Michael Williamson: 1:22:29

Well, we appreciate you being a customer of pip and your time today, and look forward to talking to you again in the near future.

Michael Williamson: 1:22:34

Thank you for everything.

Michael Williamson: 1:22:35

All right. Appreciate it, brother.