This episode of The Ganjapreneur Podcast features Tara Rosenblum, an investigative reporter for News 12, who has recently released a compelling documentary titled “Cannabis Contest.” The documentary offers an in-depth look at the social equity aspects of cannabis licensing in New York City, showcasing the challenges and triumphs of hopeful licensees within the evolving legal landscape — including another previous guest on the show, Jeremy Rivera. With nearly two decades of investigative reporting experience in the New York City market, Tara explores the community dynamics and the critical issues affecting residents and aspiring entrepreneurs. This episode dives into the complexities of cannabis policy, personal journeys of license applicants, and the broader societal implications as cannabis goes from underground economy to regulated business. To listen to the full episode, use the player below or stream via your favorite podcast app! (Scroll down for the full transcript.)

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Editor’s note: this transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors.

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TG Branfalt (00:49):

Hey there, I’m your host, TG Branfalt, and this is the Ganjapreneur.com podcast where we try to bring you actionable information and normalized cannabis through the stories of ganjapreneurs, activists and industry stakeholders. Today I’m joined by Tara Rosenblum. She’s an investigative reporter for News 12. Rosenblum’s recent documentary Cannabis Contest was released last month and focuses on social equity cannabis licensees in New York City. How are you doing this afternoon, Tara?

Tara Rosenblum (01:17):

Hey, TG. I am excited to be with you. Thanks for having me.

TG Branfalt (01:20):

I am delighted to have you. I watched the series that you released. We’ll talk about that in a minute. Before we get to that though, tell me a little bit about you, your background, your career, and how your investigative work set the stage for this documentary.

Tara Rosenblum (01:35):

Sure. So I am a longtime news veteran of the New York City market. I’m now approaching my 20 year anniversary at News 12. Congratulations wise, when you’re having fun, right. But yeah, I got my start working at some of the national networks and I was behind the scenes, and then I wanted to be on camera myself and do some of my own reporting and did that steady parade through small markets throughout the country and then found my way to New York, worked at a couple of stations in New York and then wound up at News 12, 20 years ago. And since then, I’ve worn a lot of hats. I’ve produced, written, reported, I do a lot of politics hosting. I was an anchor for a majority of my time. And about five years ago I became a full-time investigative reporter. And I feel like that’s my sweet spot of journalism. I really, really get a lot of satisfaction out of being a full-time investigator.

TG Branfalt (02:34):

Well, and as a media studies professor, one of the things that I know and I’ve studied is that people tend to trust their local news anchors and local news outlets far more than they do national outlets. With that said, why did you choose to do this documentary and focus on this segment of your community?

Tara Rosenblum (02:58):

I think what has made my team, I think a majority of our success in recent years can be attributed to the fact that my team and I, we know the pulse of the Tri-state. We know what people are talking about. We know what they care about. We know what they think about, we know what has deep impact in their lives. And so my intuition kicked in when I heard about this story, and it felt like every time I went to the supermarket, people were coming up and talking to me about this whole cannabis legalization thing and what’s it going to look like in my neighborhood and what’s it going to mean for my downtown and is it coming here? And when you start to hear about that weekly, daily, we knew that this was a topic that needed to be covered in a more comprehensive way than just splashing out the headlines. And I decided to go for it and really go a couple layers beneath the surface here. And how do we do that? Well, let’s tell it through the lens of people who are going through the process.

TG Branfalt (04:00):

And that’s what I found really interesting about the series was that you focused a lot on New York state policy. You told the stories of the individuals who were being affected, at least a couple of them out of hundreds, and you didn’t editorialize, which I think is very important as we’re in the nascency of this industry. And we’ll talk about that too in a couple of minutes. But how did you identify the people to include in this documentary?

Tara Rosenblum (04:30):

And I think you touched on something really important, and I hope we circle back to that, is that whole editorializing of news in general and how we avoided that with this project, but how we found the applicant. So that was the biggest challenge. So I decided that I wanted to take on this project. As far as we know, we are the only news outlet that followed this process so intensely soup to nuts through the lens of the card applicants. And so how do we find those applicants? I obviously wanted to find people who are outspoken and passionate and deeply impacted by the social equity process. And so at that time, people weren’t putting it on social media. Hey, I’m a card applicant. There was no list. There was no database out there. And so I said, geez, how am I going to find these people? No luck. I went on Facebook, I went on Reddit. Wasn’t having much luck there. So what I decided to do is I spent a few weeks on making a list of every single cannabis lawyer I could find in the news.

Tara Rosenblum (05:35):

And started cold calling all of these big firms, Hey, I’m calling from News 12. Do you have any card applicants? And then at first we were facing people who were like, why are you calling me? Why do you need this information? And then when we walked them through the process, I told ’em about my unit, sent them other documentaries I had done, we were able to convince them to give us access to their clients, and then we wound up with more than we could have dreamed of. And it was a matter of finding the three that characters that I felt were going to be the most compelling to share this journey. And the other part was interesting about it, TJ, was that of course, it was a gamble. We had no idea whether these applicants were going to be successful or not. And how would a documentary turn out if I had three applicants and none of them made it to the finish line. So we just spent a lot of time getting to know them and their backstories, and I was really comfortable that we picked three people who came from really diverse backgrounds and just representing just three entirely different journeys.

TG Branfalt (06:43):

Now, do you think that maybe you hit some of those early roadblocks because of maybe some hesitancy among applicants on maybe interacting with the press? I mean, let’s be honest, the press, whether it be local or national or in general, hasn’t always been really friendly to the cannabis industry.

Tara Rosenblum (07:02):

And again, I came into this as a cannabis novice storyteller, so I was learning as I went. So I can’t speak to the national tone of cannabis coverage, but certainly it was very evident. One of my three applicants was a former female cannabis marijuana dealer on the streets of New York. And she told me from the get go, Hey, listen, this is a story that you are not going to hear frequently. I am one of very few female dealers who was going to share this story in such a public fashion. And when we asked her why that was the case, it’s because they had really, she said people like her have felt really disenfranchised along the way trying to get their message out.

TG Branfalt (07:49):

And you had said that you’re a novice covering the cannabis industry, and one of the things that really struck me is you and I believe it was Jeremy in this field of cannabis plants. What was that experience like for you as somebody who doesn’t have a background in the space of probably, have you ever toured a cannabis farm before?

Tara Rosenblum (08:08):

My first time was for this project and what an experience, right? Yeah. So that was a little daunting going into all of this. And I’m googling words and slang words after every interview. I really came into this as a blank slate. But I think that’s what made the experience so cool is you can see us going on that journey. We take viewers along and you can start out with me knowing nothing. And I feel like by the end of our documentary, you really have a strong taste of what this process has been like and what’s at stake. So we really just learned with every shoot and every interview and every day that we got to cover this story. But on the other hand, I say it was daunting, but that’s just what we do. I feel like every time I take on a big societal project, I come in at an elementary school level and graduate with a PhD on the subject.

TG Branfalt (09:03):

So you’ve been reported for 20 years, and obviously you watch just as much as everyone else, probably the coverage of a cannabis legalization in New York, it was a fraught process as you point out in the documentary. Then there was the rash of illegal dispensaries, especially in New York City that got a lot of sort of bad press. Could you tell me about how News 12 and maybe some other local outlets covered cannabis legalization in New York, and did you particularly see a focus on negatives or positives in that coverage?

Tara Rosenblum (09:41):

So you have to realize, ironically, TJ we’re having this conversation yesterday. It was the three year anniversary. Yeah, I saw that. And I was like, oh my goodness, it’s been three years. So you go back to 2021. And at three years since they passed the legislation to legalize marijuana in the state of New York. And so when you go back to three years ago, what were we dealing with in New York? We were dealing with the pandemic. We were dealing with significant protesting on all types of important issues. There’s been so much in the news cycle that unfortunately I feel like a lot of the cannabis rollout and the legalization process was never front page a one unless something catastrophic happens in the process or unless there was a major piece of legislation passed or when the applications opened. But after that, it was very much something that was thrown in a newscast here or there for 30 seconds. There was not a lot of comprehensive coverage of it because of all the pressing issues of the day. And so that’s why I felt even more responsibility to get this story and really give these people just the airtime that I felt that they deserved. They’d all been through so much and it was such a passion project for them.

TG Branfalt (10:59):

One of the other things I found interesting was the way that you framed it as this game. And because I speak to a lot of entrepreneurs, people who did get licenses, people who didn’t get licenses for a variety of reasons, and that’s a narrative that I heard over and over again that they feel like they’re sort of playing the lottery, playing a game. How did you come up with that sort of framing for the documentary of the license rollout?

Tara Rosenblum (11:25):

Are you ready for this? Absolutely. So I wear a lot of titles, but my proudest one is Mama and I have a daughter in elementary school. And this was all percolating in my brain that I really wanted to do a deep dive on this. And as I was walking through my daughter’s playroom, I saw a board game Candy Land, and at the top of it, I saw the castle and I saw a cannabis dispensary, and then I saw gummies and I’m like, edibles. And we were going to go more down that rabbit hole in our storytelling, but rightfully so, my managers and my team were like, let’s be more serious with this. This is really impacting a lot of lives. So we kind of ditched the whole, I had cartoons I was going to build in. We didn’t go down that route, but that was the genesis of how we called it cannabis contest.

TG Branfalt (12:13):

And what were some of the challenges for you not having the sort of experience covering policy or the industry and what parallels in investigative journalism helped you enter a new category of reporting that continues to serve up obstacles with no changes, with changes in policy, rule, legislation, et cetera?

Tara Rosenblum (12:31):

So as an investigative reporter, I live in data. I can’t avoid data, I can’t avoid freedom of information requests. We call ’em foil requests for people. I’m sure you’re well aware, tj, as a journalism teacher, I’m sure you’ve filed your fair share of foils in your day. We file foils every week. We have filed so many for the story, but this was one of the first investigative projects of my career where I took all the data and you know what I did with it? I kind of threw it out the window for this one. And I said, this is investigative storytelling. I really wanted our characters and not my voice to be the dominant voice in this piece. I wanted you to hear, we had just the most compelling, if we’re sticking with the game narrative players that we had selected to engage in this process with. And I gave them all the air time and I let them be the lens in which our viewers saw this whole process play out.

TG Branfalt (13:30):

And just to give listeners an idea on the length of time that goes into one of these, how long did it take you from start to finish to get this to market?

Tara Rosenblum (13:43):

What a great story, tj, because people see the half hour documentary that’s airing. It’s airing again appropriately. So on April 20th, by the way, if you missed the first one at seven 30 and 1130, so I hope people will get the chance to check it out, but a little shameless plug there for our news 12 re airings. But we, I’m sorry. Lost my, you know what? I completely lost my train of thought there, tj. We’ll do a re-edit there, but repeat the question.

TG Branfalt (14:11):

How long from,

Tara Rosenblum (14:12):

Oh, how long did it take? So I’ll start that again. It’s a great question, tj, because we, the full documentary that people see that went to our airs, and that’s airing again, by the way, for a repeat on April 20th appropriately so was a half hour show. But what people didn’t see were the hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage on our editing room floor. So we literally spent two years covering the story, two years staying in touch with our three applicants and going on dozens of shoots. And so it was very, very labor intensive to tell this story, but we didn’t want to miss a moment of action along the way. If there was a setback, if there was a success, we wanted to be there and we wanted our cameras to be rolling. And one of the beautiful silver linings of the pandemic is that we discovered zoom.

(15:10)
So the days when we weren’t able to be there in person, we were able to capture some of the magic over zoom. But a majority of it was us there in person from the Hudson Valley down to Queens, hyper-local in our local neighborhoods shooting this on the ground. And one of the daunting challenges for me when it came time when we finally had one of our card applicants successfully open a dispensary, we knew it was time to start editing. And I put my hands up in the air and I said, my goodness, this is going to be the challenge of my career boiling these hundreds of hours down to one 30 minute show with commercials. It’s about 22 minutes. So we were able to do it though it was difficult, but very rewarding.

TG Branfalt (15:54):

And you talked about the sort of localities, and you had mentioned that you do have people who come up to you in your role as an investigator reporter who’s on television. What other issues are you hearing from citizens about cannabis legalization in your conversations with them?

Tara Rosenblum (16:14):

So I think the one thing that I hear about all the time that’s really frustrated people are the explosion of these illegal shops. And so you see through our documentary, you learned how hard people had to fight to do this the right way. And I don’t know the count as of today, April 1st, we’re talking how many legal dispensaries there are because a few more have open since we did this documentary, but we know it’s a handful compared to the thousands of illegal shops that we know, not just down here where I live in the Tri-state, but all across the state. And so it is an issue that’s purple. We know lawmakers on both sides of the issue are upset about this. We know the governor’s upset about this. We know legislation has been proposed to tackle this, but is it going to work? That’s the next story. As journalists, we need to be along for that ride to see if it’s going to be enforced and if it’s going to do what it’s intended to do, because it is just really, really a huge detriment to the people who are doing this the right way,

TG Branfalt (17:22):

Way. And can you briefly maybe give me some insight as to your personal feelings about cannabis prior to doing this documentary?

Tara Rosenblum (17:35):

I leave, part of the reason why I think people trust us with their stories, be it cannabis or trafficking or any other societal topic we take on is I really leave my opinions out of it. And I fight really hard to do that because I want people to trust me who feel all sorts of ways about the issue. And it is such a polarizing issue in our local communities. And so I think if you watch, you referenced this earlier, if you watch my project, I hope you walk away not knowing what my personal feelings are. I pride myself on that

TG Branfalt (18:09):

And just watching it, you have these characters, you have this game narrative, if you will, which again, I think is what drives a lot of what made it really sort of fascinating in a way. Those, how did you sort of prevent yourself from editorializing? I mean, obviously you’re a professional and professional journalists don’t editorialize, but I’m sure even with the production process, the post-production process, how did you sort of walk that line? So well,

Tara Rosenblum (18:46):

And so we normally do a story as investigators, and we might work on it a few weeks or a few months. It’s rare that I spend two years

(18:56)
With a subject. And you could see there was a moment at the end and I debated whether to keep it in the show or not. Where you referred to Jeremy, he was the applicant that found early success in our project and was able to successfully open in Queens a few weeks ago. And you saw this moment where I walk up to him, and we had been together for two years doing this. I remember the day we met him on his front stoop and here we are. We had been there for his lowest of his lows when he thought that he couldn’t survive another day, that he didn’t have the finances to make this work after dumping everything. He had his heart, his wallet. He invested so much in this, and there were days where he was literally crying when we were interviewing him, and then we were there.

(19:43)
The moment that I was in, it was a great story. I was in Florida on spring break and I was supposed to not be working, of course, but my producer Jean sent me, we got the list and we found out that Jeremy was on it, and we were the ones that broke the news to him. And so I was zooming with him from my bathing suit in Sun Cap in Florida in New York, and we hopped on a quick zoom, and I’m like, Sherry, guess what? I remember it was around April. I remember saying to him, this isn’t an April Fool’s Day joke, but we found out that you made the list. And you see just his whole face. He’s like this proud macho guy, and you just saw him just completely the emotion overcome him. And it was a beautiful moment. And there we are two years later, and so I’m walking into the store and you just see us hug each other and he’s like, can you believe it’s here?

(20:35)
My favorite reporter? And I was like, do I keep that in? Do I not keep it in? And I kept it in because that was the realness of the journey. And so even though we’re rooting for them as characters and we care about them as people, it doesn’t mean that I have the strong opinion on the whole cannabis legalization process. Again, we were focusing on three characters and their journeys. And I think you cannot spend two years with someone who’s a really great person without rooting for them at the end. And I don’t think that makes me biased. I think it makes me real.

TG Branfalt (21:09):

I mean, it makes you human. That was a natural response. And to be honest, I noticed that very specific moment when I was watching it and I was personally touched because somebody who has that background who may not be trusting of authority and may not be trusting of the press and all these different things, I mean, it showed that he trusted you, which I think says a lot about your character and how you approach this. And the other thing I want to ask you is when I talk to people who are in this industry or have been covering this industry, we know the process. We know that it costs a million dollars and insurance policies and two months of getting rejected by landlords and so on and so forth. When you saw this process play out, as someone who didn’t know what this process is like maybe from other states, and I’ve been covering this since 2014. Oh wow. What was your reaction to this process?

Tara Rosenblum (22:12):

I think what shocked me the most was just how troubled this process was, how flawed it was, how frustrating it was. And tj, I’ll tell you, one of my early concerns between us was that, and your viewers was early on. I thought, okay, I have this great idea. I think it’s an important story to tell. Am I going to pick these three applicants and then they’re going to do a little construction, a little spackling, set up some shelves, and then they’re going to open and is that going to be an interesting documentary? I thought it was going to be this flat line, and I had no idea just the depths of the roller coaster ride. I mean from the lawsuits, from the setbacks to even early on, I remember we were with one of our applicants at a cannabis convention, a networking convention. He thought he was there to learn about mortgage and make other friends doing the same thing, and all of a sudden we’re in the hallway and he finds out that the funding that they were going to get for the setup disappeared and that the banks weren’t going to be loaning the money that they had set up.

(23:21)
And you had people who literally poured their last dollars and cents even to just paying for the application fee, and then they find out that they’re on their own to pay for the setup and just the trials and tribulations. I think the severity of the setbacks and the successes and how polar opposites those were, that’s what really took my breath away in this process. And that what people don’t realize, they might see a headline, oh, a dispensary opened in Queens today, or a dispensary in Westchester. But what people don’t know is the sweat that went into opening those dispensaries. It was a really intense journey. And so it was not for the faint of heart and the people who made it to the finish line were people just diehard passion for this industry. It’s not a profession, it’s a vocation.

TG Branfalt (24:12):

And to your point, somebody like Jeremy, for example, I mean, he had been incarcerated. I mean, he had started his own business. I had spoken to him a couple of weeks ago. But there is no, I mean, if this fails for these entrepreneurs, it’s game over. I mean, to keep it with the game sort of wordplay here. What surprised you most during the course of doing this documentary?

Tara Rosenblum (24:39):

I think it was that. I mean, I think it was just the severity of the setbacks. And we are seeing it now. Honestly, I just finished a documentary on the Downstate casino process, which is New York’s Gold Rush race. They’re saying it’s going to turn out to be the most lucrative economic prize ever awarded in New York State is which three casinos in the New York City area get a full scale Las Vegas style gaming license. And we’re seeing now that process drag out that now we just found out last week, it probably won’t be until 2025, the casino operators who have the world’s largest developers and gaming operators involved, and they thought that was going to happen last year. So it’s the same thing we saw with the cannabis rollout. And it’s not me editorializing here, the governor has called the process of disaster. And I thought that that was such a poignant moment when she said that. In fact, if you saw the documentary, the last line I put in the entire piece was, governor Hoel recently called to describe this process as a disaster. I don’t know how you could refer to it as anything else given the delays and the setbacks that the applicants had to go through, but hopefully now people are saying it’s better late than ever. The governor just issued a top to bottom review of the OCM. And so I think people are hoping they’re optimistic that that will finally streamline the process here.

TG Branfalt (26:12):

One of the questions that I really want to ask you, and this is more of an opportunity that I’d like to be able to share with my students. What advice would you have for young reporters who are interested in doing investigative long projects such as you’ve done in this case, and I’m sure many others

Tara Rosenblum (26:33):

Besides packing the patients? I think there’s a couple of tips I would give there. I think when we start out, and I know when I was starting out as an investigative reporter later in my career, I was always an anchor and political reporter. I always wanted to try to prove how smart I was by getting in the data. And I went and I stormed the castle and here’s my foil request and here’s a 50,000 line Excel sheet. Don’t be afraid to ditch the data sometimes and let the people tell the story, because at the end of the day, I always say, it’s not the press conference. You got to look behind the press conference and see who’s standing behind it. Those are the real, that’s the lens in which you want to tell a compelling story. So just giving up the ego and letting their sound bites tell the story. You hear very little of me in this piece. It’s the least I’ve ever put myself in a story as in cannabis contests because you just got to let those sound bites breathe. You got to let the characters tell the story.

TG Branfalt (27:39):

And what about advice for young reporters who are facing a changing regulatory legal social landscape as it not just relates to cannabis, but gambling, like you mentioned, potential psychedelic therapies that may be legalized and coming online. I mean, how are you adjusting to this sort of brave new world, if you will, and what might you tell young reporters who are also having to adjust?

Tara Rosenblum (28:04):

I think investigative is where it’s at. And I think I’m blessed to work at News 12, and my bosses are very big on hyper-local impact journalism. I say, we don’t do hit and run journalism. We don’t show up. And this is why as younger journalists pick shops that have this philosophy, we don’t just show up that old saying, if it leads, it bleeds. If there’s body bags after a tragedy or something horrific happens, that’s not the only day we’re in your community. We’re going to be that. We live here, we work here, we’re a part of the fabric of the community, so we’re going to stay on a story. In this case, it was a two year commitment. So young journalists find newsrooms who believe in investigative storytelling, who will give you the time and the bandwidth that you need to stay with a story and see it through.

(29:00)
And the other thing is, yeah, it’s great again to stay on your computer and Google experts and stuff like that. Get out in your communities, go out to your community boards. In this case, I found some of our applicants from going to the Harlem Business Alliance, and that’s kind of a New York City, a hubbub of where people meet and greet, and we’re working on this cannabis legalization process, the organic way and networking. So don’t stay behind your computer, go out and talk to people, join local forums and groups and stuff like that because there’s no substitute for grassroots journalism and storytelling,

TG Branfalt (29:39):

And it’s wild. We live in this big tech age where everyone sort of espouses the tools, the technological tools that we have. And you had mentioned you had struck out on social media trying to find sources, and it was the shoe leather reporting that got you the sources, which is commendable to a media studies professor who focuses on media bias and often and tells my students generally it isn’t. If it bleeds, it leads a sort of mentality. Where can people find more of your work and the cannabis contest specifically?

Tara Rosenblum (30:22):

Sure. I’ll give a little plug for our project and if anyone wants to follow my work and we’re going to continue, that’s the thing, just because the documentary aired, my reporting on the card applicants and the cannabis journey here in New York, which is first of its kind in the nation, is far from over. We stay with these stories and we want to find out where is Jeremy in a year from now? What kind of impact did those illegal shops have on him? Did he meet his projections? So we stay with stuff. So if you want to continue to follow my journey, I’m at Tara Rosenblum on Instagram and on Facebook, and the cannabis contest is airing on four 20 on News 12 regional channels and News 12 New York, and it’s also streamed because people say, if I can’t watch News 12 at home, where do I catch it? We’re also streaming on Optimum Stream, Samsung TV plus Pluto two B, Amazon Fire tv, LG Channels, local now, Vizio, tj. Is that enough places to catch us

TG Branfalt (31:23):

And more? Yeah, and more.

Tara Rosenblum (31:25):

And my best work, my most successful work has always come from people just walking up to me at the grocery store or shooting me a random message on social or email. I love the stories I get from our viewers because those are the experts of our communities.

TG Branfalt (31:44):

I’m very thankful that you are able to join me today and tell me more about the process S, excuse me, the process of producing the cannabis contest. Tara Rosenblum, she’s an investigative reporter for News 12. Cannabis Contest was released last month and will re-Air on Saturday, April 20th on News 12 regional channels and on the various streaming platforms that Tara mentioned. Thank you so much, Tara, for coming on the show today.

Tara Rosenblum (32:19):

Thank you so much for having me, and I’m going to be following your work closely. I think you did a wonderful job interviewing me, and I’m sure your students are super lucky to have you as a force in their early

TG Branfalt (32:33):

Careers. Some of them may disagree. You can find more episodes of The Ganjapreneur Podcast in the podcast section of Ganjapreneur.com and wherever you get your podcasts. On the Ganjapreneur.com website, you’ll find the latest cannabis news and cannabis jobs updated daily along with transcripts of this podcast. This episode was engineered by Wayward Sound Studio. I’ve been your host, TG Branfalt.

Brian Applegarth is the founder of Applegarth Strategies, an agency that operates at the intersection of cannabis and travel. He’s also the head of the Cannabis Travel Association, leads the Cannabis and Task Force for the California Travel Association and Destinations International, serves as an industry consultant, and holds a certification as a Ganjier cannabis sommelier—a man of many talents and extensive expertise. In this episode, host TG Branfalt connects with Applegarth to explore the evolving landscape of cannabis tourism, delve into the unique challenges and opportunities within the industry, and revisit how the landscape has transformed since Brian’s last visit to the show. Listen to the podcast below, or scroll down for the full transcript!

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Editor’s note: this transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

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TG Branfalt:

Hey there, I’m your host, TG Branfalt, and this is the ganjapreneur.com podcast where we try to bring you actionable information and normalize cannabis through the stories of ganjapreneurs, activists and industry stakeholders. Today I’m joined by Brian Applegarth. He is the founder of Applegarth Strategies and Agency specializing in the intersection of cannabis and travel. He’s also the founder of the Cannabis Travel Association and leader of the Cannabis and Task Force for the California Travel Association and Destinations International, an industry consultant and a certified ganji cannabis sommelier guy with a lot of titles, a lot of experience. Brian, how are we doing?

Brian Applegarth:

Doing great, TG. Thanks for having me on.

TG Branfalt:

Real excited, man. I mean, you were one of the earlier guests on the podcast, probably back in 2020, 2021, so a lot has changed since then. But before we get into that and how that’s affected the cannabis tourism industry, tell me about, remind listeners about you and what you do.

Brian Applegarth:

Yeah, I mean, essentially I’m a cannabis travel and tourism subject matter expert starting with data. So my work revolves around the cannabis travel audience in the United States, which as of last year accounted for about 72 million Americans. And I work with destinations. A lot of times I’m working with the travel economy, so typically destination marketing organizations will bring me in to help develop strategies that can really cater to this cannabis travel audience that exists today. So yeah, I’m pretty much just passionate about cannabis tourism and travel and moving that conversation forward.

TG Branfalt:

In the couple of years since we’ve last talked, what is new in cannabis tourism? I know different states have gone online and each have sort of different laws and have include any provisions making tourism easier. What’s been going on?

Brian Applegarth:

Yeah, well, I mean, I believe we’re at an inflection point of really the coming alive of the cannabis travel economy or the experience economy. And I really do look at cannabis travel and tourism as its own industry. For example, the travel industry in California is about 140 billion industry. The cannabis industry of California today is about a 6 billion industry. So as cannabis experiences start taking off in this new kind of legal landscape, what does that mean for the tourism and travel economy and how is cannabis integrating into that visitor ecosystem from marketing to hotels, to airports, to rental car companies and beyond? So really where we sit today are cannabis lounges. I prefer actually cannabis consumption spaces, I believe is more accurate. We do have, of course we have lounges. Many times people think in terms of smoking and inhalation, but the truth of the matter is it’s rapidly evolving with cannabis consumption spaces, including beverage bars, infused culinary dining.

There’s a cannabis spa that exists in California today. There’s different cannabis retreats, wellness retreats. There’s of course cannabis events, which are a really important part of travel. So it’s really expanding in a very innovative way. And the exciting part is you’re seeing this come alive in these more mature adult use recreational legal destinations, and you’re seeing buy-in from both the travel industry and now you’re getting in the cannabis industry. Some more sophisticated brands, shops, lounges and beyond that are really starting to buy into that tourism economy and understand the difference between a resident spend versus a visitor spend and why that matters.

TG Branfalt:

Well, there’s a couple of things that I’ve noticed here in New York. One, they do allow for sort of social use spaces, but haven’t rolled out any regulations or anything like that experiencing. Is that something that a lot of states and cannabis companies are experiencing these late roll-outs?

Brian Applegarth:

Yeah, I think people are finding their footing. I think depending on the destination and just depending on the landscape from a local state level, there’s this kind of patchwork, which we’re all familiar with in the cannabis space. I kind of call it the wet county dry county model and what that looks like for cannabis. I live in California, so here I would guess that we not guess, we have approximately, I’d say between 60 and 80 cannabis consumption spaces now in the state of California. And again, that runs the gamut from a cannabis spas to lounges, indoor places, outdoor places, there’s lounges that have food service, there’s lounges that have this little oasis area with ponds and parrots in the back, ones that have, there’s a lot of stages. So you’re seeing programming starting to come alive, like with everything from poetry to music performances to burlesque to comedy and beyond, which is a really exciting space to watch, evolve.

You see a lot of lounges that are trying to figure it out. There’s a lot of focus still on the transactional side of cannabis, and we understand why. Obviously there’s a lot of taxes and barriers right now to having a successful business, but we are seeing learnings and people starting to develop more compelling models to really serve that visitor experience. And as that happens, you’re seeing the travel economy with the massive size and reach starting to wrap their arms around not all cannabis businesses, but the cannabis businesses and brands that are investing in that visitor economy into the travel economy. And they’re looking at themselves not just as a retail shop selling weed, but as an attraction, providing an experience. And that obviously dips into this consumption lounge space, but then it goes into the private kind of models where people are having these getaways, these infused culinary dinners, which is a really exciting kind of space as well.

TG Branfalt:

And you had mentioned marketing and it’s very limited, and I’ve just had this discussion with another operator on this podcast about marketing and how disparate state laws create a sort of challenge for businesses to market. How are cannabis excursions just the sort of destinations, if you will, how are they marketing within these frameworks?

Brian Applegarth:

So I mean, the most sophisticated people that are engaged in this visitor economy strategy space are one, starting with the data. Who is the cannabis travel audience? What are the four different archetypes? And the four different archetypes that I’ve been measuring in partnership with MMGY travel intelligence since 2019 are the canna curious traveler, the cannabis wellness traveler, the cannabis connoisseur, and then the ceremonial traveler. So people that use cannabis in specific ritual and ceremony, which is a really fascinating archetype. I believe that’s the biggest differentiator for cannabis as a travel experience product in the long term because it really focuses around wellbeing and what does it mean to have an entheogen and be microdosing cannabis to enhance that destination travel experience. So it starts with the cannabis travel audience data, and then it’s understanding that you have these standalone cannabis experiences which happen in cannabis shops and lounges and cannabis, let’s just say those three are kind of the three temp poles right now.

But then you have of course, these private events that are also kind of these confused, culinary, et cetera. But then you have cannabis as it integrates into the greater destination brand and the greater destination experience. So the more sophisticated cannabis brands and operators are looking at what destination am I in, what is the power of the travel economy and what is the destination brand, right? Because every destination has a brand that they promote for visitation, like in Palm Springs, it’s find your Oasis in San Francisco. It’s got a different bend in Sonoma County or in Mendocino County. It’s got a different brand with literally brand guidelines. So the more sophisticated cannabis brands and operators are starting to look at what is the community I’m a part of? What is the brand, what is the tourism ecosystem, and what does it mean for me to play a part as part of that community?

And what are all the benefits? And it’s really exciting to see this happen. If you actually look at the history of prohibition with alcohol, and you look at the brands that really excel, it was brands that invested in visitor economy strategies, travel industry strategies, look up the history of the alcohol bottle on the trains and what that did for Jack Daniels, Jim Beam and some of the big brands today. And it’s that cross industry strategic partnerships and marketing strategies where that visitor economy, it’s not just the travel audience, it’s all the partnerships that exist in the travel economy that are going to propel the brands that have the appetite for that kind of investment and attention into building that. So as far as that standalone experience, now, another way that cannabis is integrating into the travel economy, the data is showing as of last year that the cannabis travel audience, about a third of ’em, are really starting to understand the concept of pairing cannabis with destination experiences while in market.

And this trend is increasingly known as effect pairing cannabis, essentially pairing cannabis effects with food, art, nature, et cetera. So it’s cannabis as a precursor to your setting or to your environment or to your travel activity. And increasingly the sciences coming out of those cultivars that have an abundance of lemonene versus myrcene and what that means for the consumer, the traveler, as a precursor to a hike on the coast or a precursor to a Michelin star meal. I often say cannabis is the new vermouth, right? Cannabis, the right kind of cannabis can accentuate your palate flavor, taste, and fixture, as well as stimulate your appetite. And that’s not all cultivars, that’s only certain cultivars. So those are increasingly going to be the pre-dinner aperitif. And I believe that we’re entering into that era of not just cannabis experiences and lounges and events, but the notion of pairing cannabis to enhance your travel itinerary or your travel experiences. So that’s really exciting.

TG Branfalt:

What of consumers are you seeing? Is it predominantly young people? Is it predominantly older people? What does that look like?

Brian Applegarth:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, the cannabis travel audience, the short version is when you look at the cannabis travel audience versus the average active leisure traveler, the cannabis travel audience travels more often, stays longer, and spends more while on a destination. And this is something that the travel industry is watching closely, right? Because this is economic impact at the end of the day, and on the cannabis through the cannabis lens for shops and lounges, this is an opportunity to capture that economic impact. And I’ll tell you, when you’re in a visitor mindset of when in Rome, you’re going to drop that extra spend because you want to smoke that blunt from the Emerald Triangle with the best weed in the world, or you’re going to buy that premium hash and you’re going to sit and look at the ocean and smoke some weed while the sun goes down, or you’re going to get a great cracked beverage that is locally made.

So it’s all about placemaking. Also, the average spend that we’re seeing with the average cannabis traveler is about 2,500 bucks a year. So that’s kind of the money on the table. As far as the generational breakdown, we see a very strong attraction to this with Gen Z, right? Surprise surprise, where about 70% of Gen Z say they have an interest in participating in at least one cannabis related activity while on vacation. No kidding. So they’re choosing destinations where cannabis can be a part of that destination experience. About 56% have kids about 28%, which I think is an interesting data point. And again, we’ve been measuring this audience since 2019 with MMGY Travel Intelligence year over year. It’s part of their report that’s the portrait of the American traveler. It’s one of the modules that we consistently are working with. So as far as interested in cannabis activities, what they’re looking at this cannabis interested travel audience, again, in the US it’s about 72 million people, about 37% of the active leisure travel audience.

Number one is they want to visit a dispensary. They look at visiting a modern day cannabis shop as an attraction. And I work with Planet. I kind of cross over with Planet 13 because Travel Santa Ana is one of my clients. And when I visited their shop out in Vegas, I chatted with some of the staff out there and they were saying that 30% of their visitation will come in and not even buy, but they’re just there to look at the scope of what exists. So the then becomes how do you convert a spend from those people and not leave that money on the table? A perfect example of visitor economy strategies and how to capture that. So visiting a cannabis dispensary is the first activity of interest. The second one is trying A THC infused edible. The third one is trying A CBD infused edible, really, right?

Which shows that can of curious, that can wellness traveler. The fourth one is visiting a cannabis lounge or consumption space. And then the fifth one is having a spa treatment. What a concept to actually visit a cannabis infused spa. And I don’t think it’s surprising because the best highest form of cannabis travel and tourism today is going to reflect the capacity and the capabilities of the cannabis plant itself, which is a therapeutic ancient medicine plant that manifests in all kinds of ways, from topicals to beverages, to edibles to culinary, to the nutrition of a hemp seed, and yes, premium hash and amazing flour. So it’s super exciting because I still think on the travel side and on the cannabis side, people are finally starting to wake up to the expansive toolkit that cannabis and quite frankly, hemp is, and how that’s going to integrate into the global travel economy, which is an incredible industry to tap into if you’re a cannabis brand shop lounge event that has that vision and that recognizes to integrate into a mature industry is going to benefit your growth. So that’s where my agency works is at that intersection.

TG Branfalt:

And so what about, you mentioned the sort of worldwide and growth in the tourism industry. How are you and others focused on tourism connecting with non-cannabis businesses to get them on board? What have been some successes and some challenges in that role?

Brian Applegarth:

Sure. Well, I mean, I jumped into this in 2013. I just hit like 10, 11 years in focusing on cannabis travel and tourism, and it went from crickets in the room to now today. Well, that last kind of seven year stretch, six, seven year stretch was all about case studies, basic education about what is cannabis, really kind of debunking all the reefer madness stigmas and talking in a very fact-based way about cannabis and how it was part of the US medical Pharmacopia, and it was found on pharmacy shelves talking about the research and study of O’Shaughnessy and what those findings were early on when cannabis was studied over in India using ancient kind of cannabis case studies to reframe and actually bring out the truth of what kind of this plan is capable of and why it matters in travel and tourism today. So a lot of education data and case studies, the data really hit an inflection point in 2019. That study we did at the national in the United States, it was a national scale, was the first ever study globally on the cannabis travel audience, which is where the conversation begins. So now there’s an audience to reach, how do they choose their destinations, how do they spend and how do they move about a market when they’re visiting a place? So it’s an industry, it’s a business about how do we engage this audience and how do we evolve to meet the moment and to integrate these experiences within the travel economy.

Obviously the evolution of trends like this effect pairing trend and the data showing that the audience has this IQ that goes above and beyond, Hey, let’s go to a cannabis event, where now they’re looking at it as it gives you a dotted line to the other segments of travel, like arts and culture. So now there’s data that shows that cannabis has a relationship that drives economic impact and interest to other parts of the travel economy, whether it’s arts and culture or restaurants and culinary, right? It’s that cannabis as a precursor to the Michelin Star meal, which is very different than the cannabis infused dining experience where you’re sitting there with the plant being integrated into the meal. So understanding how those are different is a really interesting development of trend. The beautiful part is policy is slowly inching along too. In California this year, it looks like we have two bills that could really move the needle.

We have the Cannabis Cafe bill, which will basically bring in some food capacity as well as ticket sales and a few other things that really elevate the retailer above and beyond shop or a lounge above and beyond a lounge where you have to kind of play and figure out creatively how to make this interesting. So hopefully that Cannabis Cafe Bill will pass. We also have the Cannabis Catering Catering bill that actually the origin of that bill is the Cannabis Travel Association. We worked hard to look at the Alcohol catering license in California, and the first draft was doing a cannabis version of that. And the reason that that is so important is because it gives the hotel industry of California and the hospitality industry of California the ability to have a relatable license where they can be like, okay, I understand that that’s a very clear legal pathway to having cannabis catering at a wedding on my property.

So it kind of takes all that guesswork and that gray area out and normalizes cannabis and makes it accessible so we can keep normalization and create a new distribution point in hospitality and tourism specifically. So the policy evolution’s awesome. A lot of my work in the past four or five years has been with what I think, well, I mean probably biased because it’s where I live and breathe day to day, but it’s with destination marketing organizations like San Francisco Travel Visit Oakland, visit Mendocino County. I’ve worked with about 20 destinations at this point doing different scopes that all center around the cannabis travel audience and what is the strategy. And typically, there’s a few phases to that. There’s of course, the foundational education data. Let’s go ahead and get everybody singing, understanding what this is in a real factual way and the data behind it, and then there’s some destination development that needs to happen.

Sometimes that comes in the form of an experienced product, like if you look@thecannabistrail.com or if you go to the Visit Oakland website, you’ll see a trail that is an expanded version of the cannabis trail itself. You could look at Visit Modesto has a cannabis passport. So you see these different experience products where the destination is investing. Now, unfortunately, the cannabis industry and a lot of ’em are buried and stressed and trying to figure out how to survive, but they haven’t been able necessarily to really show up and meet the moment. There’s a handful that do. I’m kind of surprised with all the complaints about marketing and cannabis when these opportunities come with this powerful partnership that shops and lounges don’t make the space to really understand the gravity of what that means. Interesting. But there was a big inflection point this year where now we have the first ever cooperative marketing campaign happening in California between three different destinations that are coming together to market and to promote and to uplift the cannabis trail, which is a nine county trail in Northern California.

That is a cultural trail that kind of celebrates how cannabis has been part of California history and culture. The last thing I’ll mention that I think is exciting is, and I don’t think a lot of cannabis brands and businesses know this, but about two or three years ago, visit California basically awarded a poppy award, which is a big deal in the travel industry of California to visit. Modesto was a top three finalist for basically a marketing strategy that had to do with the cannabis passport last year visit. Oakland was a top three recognized destination for their cannabis trail and their cannabis program, specifically their campaign that was this four 20 choose equity travel, the Oakland Cannabis Trail, and that was a US travel award. So you’re seeing whether the cannabis industry is aware of it or not, the travel industry is picking up on this and understanding the importance of integrating and guiding and supporting the growth of cannabis brands, businesses, and experience creators that have the IQ and understand the travel industry and want to be part of that as an attraction. And that’s not everybody. So it’s figuring out, is your cannabis brand business interested in tapping into that tourism economy?

TG Branfalt:

And I do want to ask you, I know that organizations like Visit Modesto and Visit Oakland. Those are run by municipalities, but do you get any pushback or anything like that from say, chambers of commerce that in many states initially push back against cannabis legalization and oftentimes, typically don’t want to work with cannabis businesses once it is legalized?

Brian Applegarth:

So I mean, I’ve witnessed some of this in my world too. I mean, reefer madness is real, right? And there’s some super conservative people and some super conservative destinations. That being said, I think that I always approach it with meet ’em where they’re at and bring the data, the fact-based education and the case studies of people that they can look at their peers of the industry. And that is the formula that I have found in travel is that moves the needle. So it’s not about me trying to convince ’em, it’s me being a resource of information. And then as they continue seeing this evolve, they’re going to step into it when the time is right or they won’t. And I mean, I would argue that that is a poor decision as a destination because you should be promoting public safety, and that just doesn’t mean visitor safety.

It means safety of your hospitality industry. You should be supporting your hotel frontline staff, your hospitality frontline staff with understanding how to respond when visitors show up, or if visitors have potentially over-consumed, what’s your best practice as a hotel? This is like, I think it’s essential from a travel hospitality industry point of view to invest in the safety of your destination. I actually equate it to what happened during Covid Covid destination stepped in and took an amazing role in providing information on what was happening, how to deal with it, what are the guidelines today, all the masks, the little window shields, all the non-touch. There was a huge exercise in serving as a public service to your destination stakeholders. I believe at the most foundational level of cannabis travel and tourism, that information provider and public safety role is something that every destination, if you’re in a legal cannabis state, that means people are using consuming, buying, carrying cannabis, which means that your hospitality, your travel economy needs to be ready for whatever that means, right?

And we all know cannabis has this altering effect for the THC rich products. Yeah. So that reform, madness, stigma, it doesn’t bother me. I understand it’s there. I just think you got to be in service and really just bring the fact-based information and data to help move the needle. And then you’ll have the destinations raise their hand that really see cannabis as a differentiator or something that’s really going to become part of their destination brand visit. Oakland is a great example of this. So is Visit Mendocino County. I’ve also started working with Humboldt County Visitors Bureau, so the Emerald Triangle is obviously key. I’ve done some work with Hello Burlington, doing some education out in Vermont. So these destinations are definitely starting to look at this audience and the opportunity, and I think it’s a great time for any cannabis brand or business listening this podcast to start really thinking about what’s your plan?

There was a study that came out, a data point that came out from Whitney Economics. Beau Whitney does great data, and essentially it came out through Forbes in May, 2022. So it’s a little dated, but I think it’s worth bringing up here today, basically of the 25 billion of cannabis spend and revenue in the United States back in 20 22, 4 0.5 billion of that. So let’s just say 2020 5% was attributed to the visitor spend. Now, what’s interesting about that is for every dollar spent in the travel world, we talk about an incremental multiplier because visitors, they’re going to restaurants, they’re going to art galleries, they’re going on canoe trips and rafting, and so they are experiencing the destination and they’re spending in a very different way than a resident. So for every dollar spent in a cannabis shop, Bo quoted that about $2 and 80 cents multiplier is injected into the local economy. That’s significant, significant man. And it means that the cannabis tourism opportunity was a 17 billion opportunity for destinations. So if you’re a retail shop, knowing how much of that spend is a visitor spend and making some sense around that and how you’re going to partner with the travel industry and keep growing that and or maximizing the basket size in your shop that already exists. These are all strategies worth considering today because we are at an inflection point here.

TG Branfalt:

I do want to ask another question about barriers, because in many states, if you are a tourist or even countries, I go to Canada quite frequently where cannabis is legal for adult use, but there’s no real great place to consume. You can’t go into hotels, motels, even some RV parks that I’ve been to get a little salty when you light a joint. Are you seeing any evolution on this front with regard to just hospitality, just your sort of mainstream hospitality organization or companies?

Brian Applegarth:

Yeah, I mean, I really, I promote having a plan, right? Because there are people that like to inhale, whether that’s smoking or whether that’s vaping, which are both a little bit different. And then of course, all the other products that are beverages, edibles, all the other ways to consume topicals, et cetera. So I encourage hotels and resorts to say, are you cannabis friendly? And if so, what does that mean? Are you inhalation friendly or not? Do you have a dedicated place on your property where you can communicate in a very clear way to your hotel guests so they know what is and isn’t allowed? I’ve worked with a couple hotels where we’ve actually done bespoke programs where they offer cannabis delivery as a service amenity in their hotel.

And some of these hotels, the menu that we curate for the hotel approved menu are products that are five milligrams or less, and they’re all non inhalation. So now you have a product, and instead of turning it into a weird conversation where it’s all about where do I smoke? And now I’m cleaning the room and there’s an extra fee and it’s a negative, maybe there’s a bad Yelp review. This is all brand tarnish from a destination brand perspective or a hotel perspective. So if you work with a hotel to actually have a clear plan, partner with a lounge, make sure you pick a lounge or a shop in town that’s on brand for your hotel guest. I’ll remember one hotel I was working with, I was in there kind of secret shopping and talking to the valet and being, Hey man, we can I get some weed? And he was recommending a delivery that was unlicensed. And then of course, and this was before I worked with them, so I was identifying all the risks and gaps.

And the worst thing is you have a hotel where you have your frontline staff recommending a black market delivery or underground delivery that’s not licensed delivering untested products. I would actually say that the risk for you in that capacity by putting your head in the sand is your risk is exponential and unknown. Because if that unlicensed delivery is now delivering untested products to your guests that was recommended by your staff and something happens there like vape gate, how does that play out for you as a business that serves guests? Another problem I saw was you have deliveries show up where they walk in the lobby shop and they’re off brands. Let’s just say that they’re not part of a four or five star hotel and they’re parking their car in front of valet and throwing the hazards on. There’s no, so not having a plan is a route you could take.

I would argue that the risks are exponential and unknown, including brand tarnish on your hotel as well as your destination and potentially the health of your guests. So at what point do you start making a plan to be train your staff in this kind of thing? So yeah, I mean, those are some of the things that I saw. Another thing I saw was you’d have people that would use the cannabis in the room and they would leave their products on the table or whatever, and then of course, housekeeping or somebody would eat the chocolate, and all of a sudden you’re dealing with, so having a disposal program where you clearly tell people, if you don’t use your cannabis products, make sure you please dispose of them in the trash in this way or in this container is just another thoughtful way to put up the guardrails to make sure that you’re ensuring a safe place of work, a safe visitor experience, and you’re kind of mitigating all the risks and negative impacts that can come when you don’t have a plan or you’re not addressing it.

TG Branfalt:

So on your website, you have endorsements for many travel industry CEOs, you’ve mentioned many of them, such as Visit Modesto, visit Oakland, hello Burlington and Travel Santa Ana. Was it an uphill climb getting those organizations and organizations like those on board with cannabis tourism?

Brian Applegarth:

I wouldn’t describe it as an uphill climb. I knew that it would come. I just didn’t know when. So when I started in this, when I started jumping into cannabis travel and tourism, I knew that I was one of the first, if not the first, doing this in the travel side of the industry especially. And I knew that I needed to follow where leadership directed me, where they wanted me to apply my energy and my efforts and my brain power. And that was data and information and education. And over years, I’ve been attending travel industry conferences and been supporting the travel industry in navigating the cannabis and hemp discussion for 10 plus years now. And over that time, you develop relationships and trust. And also I understand how that industry operates, right? It’s very different than the cannabis industry, the travel industry. They literally have an annual marketing framework that the whole industry looks at through Visit California in this instance.

And the destinations international, they have membership from around the world, from Japan, a lot through North America, plenty of representation out of Canada, all across the United States. And they literally roll out a cannabis, or excuse me, a travel industry lexicon every year to talk about what’s being said at the national and international level. And this is because it’s a mature industry with leadership at the top that’s steering a really big ship. The legal cannabis industry is nascent, burgeoning, and still trying to figure out what we do as an industry to help guide the cannabis industry voice, and what is that connective bridge or that connective thread to an industry like travel where that cannabis experience economy is intrinsically linked. And you even see this in manufacturing. I want to bring this up too. I think that the cannabis industry will be able to have better representation and more influence if we have more and more beyond shops, consumption lounges, consumption spaces, sampling rooms, spas beyond all those kind of very, there’s also this manufacturing capability. Think of the Coors Brewery factory in Colorado, or the Launi has an amazing tourism strategy in Sonoma County,

TG Branfalt:

Ben and Jerry’s outside of Burlington.

Brian Applegarth:

There you go. So I used to live in Sonoma County, and when I was up there, I sat down about five, six years ago with the team up there, and they told me they put through about 30,000 people a year that by swag, they go on tours, they become evangelists and walking, talking billboards of the brand and the culture, and they enroll, they subscribe. It becomes part of that consumer identity through travel and tourism and experience creation. So I think manufacturers starting to think in these terms. Lounges starting to really think outside the box as consumption spaces. And how do you curate that experience where, I mean, just imagine it’s a 90 minute experience when people leave there, they feel full of information and surprise and delight moments and joy. Think of how can we start creating an incredibly robust cannabis experience economy that serves the plant, all the capabilities of the plant, and how do we work together to make sure that we’re building that in a way that is really sustainable and we’re kind of letting it be its highest expression. We’re being guides and stewards as an industry, as cannabis industry, to bring this forward in a way where we’re really partnered with the travel industry in a very strong way, and we’re serving, again, the plant in the ground. I find that with my work, typically if you look at the biology of the plant, you understand the history, the case studies, there’s a lot of tools there that you can help bring today into the current kind of tourism and travel ecosystem.

TG Branfalt:

The other thing that I want to really sort of get at is you are the leader of the cannabis and hemp task force for the California Travel Association. Is there a cannabis and hemp task force in any other state travel association that you know of?

Brian Applegarth:

The only other one I’m aware of is the one that I run similar. It’s called the Cannabis and have task force, and it’s for Destinations International. So the task force members there are all pretty much CEOs of destinations, whether it’s Hello Burlington, whether it’s their leadership level, travel industry, CEOs that are trying to learn about this and also listen to each other of what are the fires, where are the pain points, where are the success stories? And those peers trade information, and I’m kind of their guide. I sit here with data information. If I hear something said that’s not accurate, I just kind of bring up some other fact-based education for it. And then I’m really excited now that of course, me and my team are being brought in to create cannabis programs and strategies and even manage marketing budgets that are dedicated toward that cannabis travel audience, which is maybe different than the wine traveler or a different travel segment. Actually, let me actually correct that. The data actually shows that the cannabis travel audience skews higher as a wine enthusiast than the average active leisure traveler, which is another myth I see a lot of battling between the wine and the cannabis industries. And I’m like you guys, we’re catering to a similar audience here. It’s people who love good food, they love good weed, they love good wine, they probably like craft beer. These are people that enjoy being on vacation and enjoy imbibing with effect products that really color out that experience in that way.

TG Branfalt:

Well, I mean, not for nothing. There is some evidence showing that alcohol consumption rates of wine and craft beer have gone down in states that have legalized cannabis. Do you think that other adult use states should have somebody like you a cannabis culturist on these boards? And how do we get individuals into these roles? I mean, you do a lot, but I don’t think you can do it all there, pal.

Brian Applegarth:

Yeah, I would totally advocate for that. I think that having representation is important. I mean, for me, having a well-rounded, well-balanced round table where you have all of your community represented that are business license holders and taxpayers. Now what I would warn the cannabis industry, what I’ve seen been the kind of Achilles heel is it is man, it’s cutthroat. And people are showing up with just their success in mind. They’re not, for some reason, the cannabis industry has a problem sitting down and putting the hat on of, I’m going to represent the cannabis voice in this room and not just my business or my brand. So you got to come at it from a way of stewardship representing the cannabis piece of the pie in the travel vertical, in the travel ecosystem. And I find that that’s really hard for cannabis people right now, cannabis business holders and brands because everyone is fighting in this foundational level still of this young industry.

So I would encourage people that are community minded and that have the time to gather up your data. Feel free to email me, find me on my website@brianapplegarth.com, get some data, get some case studies, and become a resource for your, let’s just say it’s your marketing committee under your destination marketing organization. Understand what that means. A great way to get started is to start following your local destination marketing organization on Instagram and go to their website. Usually you can download their strategic plan, their brand guidelines, start thinking beyond just your brand at least 20% of the time. I mean, looking at the data that Beau put forward, I would argue that, I mean, if you’re a shop, at least 20% of your attention, awareness, marketing budget should go toward tourism travel and the visitor economy and the cannabis travel audience strategies. I did an economic impact study on cannabis travel and tourism in the visit Greater Palm Springs region in partnership with tourism economics.

And they found that certain shops and lounges in this valley up to 50% or more were tourism spends. Now, if your shop is getting 50% from visitor, you better be focused on not just the cannabis travel audience marketing and why that’s so different than resident marketing, but also that travel industry partnerships like in the visit Greater Palm Springs region where I live now, part of the year, the travel industry is an $8 billion industry. It’s a bigger industry than the entire cannabis industry of California today. So if you’re a shopper lounge in this valley across nine cities, Coachella Valley, so get educated, study your DMO website, father Instagram, look into if they have a marketing committee, and make sure that you’re doing it authentically for the greater good of the cannabis industry at large. And again, you can hit me up on the email if you want some collateral that might help point you in the right direction of getting started. But you got to look at yourself as part of an ecosystem that includes airports, hotels, rental car companies, attractions, resorts. Think of yourself as a cannabis attraction, a cannabis experience creator, and do it in the spirit of supporting your whole industry with understanding that in a deeper way.

TG Branfalt:

Is there a way for somebody to maybe do this outside of some sort of official system that allows them to work with legal businesses in providing similar sort of experiences, be it dining excursions? Is there any great advice you would have for anyone who isn’t interested in doing that?

Brian Applegarth:

Let me make sure I understand your question. So people who are interested in starting to create to create their own experience offering, is that what

TG Branfalt:

You’re saying? Yeah, working with other businesses to do that sort of thing without the backing of maybe their local travel organization.

Brian Applegarth:

Yeah, no, I mean sometimes I use the phrase the coalition of the willing and isn’t in terms of if you find those restaurants, those art galleries, maybe it’s an event that’s coming to town that’s not cannabis, but it has this data-driven dotted line. For example, let’s just say it’s a food and art festival where you’re like, man, cannabis food and art that pretty on the nose. I like that. So then you reach out to the festival producer and you start exploring of how can we collaborate around this? And the beautiful part about that proactive approach as well is if you’re marketing it and messaging it correctly to the travel industry stakeholders of your destination, the destination marketing organization will take note. They’ll see the cannabis brands and the cannabis experience outposts, or whether that’s a shop or a lounge or something else that are actively integrating with the community in a way that’s very experiential and very storytelling rich.

And as you become one of those trusted partners, you will enjoy the benefits of that, which is increased foot traffic from the cannabis travel audience, increasing your spend in shop. If you’re investing in your internal, in shopper, in lounge strategies or in consumption space strategies, you’ll have really amazing partnerships that very few other cannabis brand shops or lounges or partners have. And as long as you invest in continually being one of the shining kind of lights for the experienced storytelling, you’re going to widen your kind of cards in your deck when it comes to creating a successful business. And I would argue that there are cannabis shops and lounges and consumption spaces where it is vital that you integrate. And if your travel economy is the biggest economy in your destination, then you better be looking and giving that attention and investment and thinking about real sustainable replicable strategies year over year where you could continue to grow and engage the travel industry in that way because that’s going to be a differentiator that sets you apart.

TG Branfalt:

I think that’s really, really astute sort of advice, and I appreciate you answering the question. I do want to ask switch gears a little bit and ask you about being a cannabis sommelier. There may be a lot of people listening to this podcast who have no idea what that is or what you do in that role. So could you explain that a bit?

Brian Applegarth:

Absolutely. Yeah. So basically I took the GANJI certification, which is a cannabis sommelier course that was developed in California with about 25 just luminaries. And that’s what got my attention was twofold. I was very aware when it was in development. The people that developed the Ganji, the crew that they brought in to do this was very well orchestrated. And also, obviously a cannabis sommelier is an incredibly important role in travel and tourism. So I knew early on once this thing got launched, I wanted to get the certification and understand what it was because it is an absolute bullseye when it comes to tourism and travel, and I don’t think I have to expand beyond that, but just think of Napa Sono wine Country wine sommeliers and how robust that is in tourism. So basically it was a course that was very rich with education, everything from cannabis history and culture to the ability to analyze and assess concentrates and flower.

You use a jewelers loop to see how ripe the trichomes are, and then of course, being able to analyze and assess terpene profiles, cannabinoid profiles, assess trimming, the quality of the trim, and then of course the effects of the smoke. So it’s really understanding that raw flower. We also do get into topicals and some of those things as well and how that’s used. So obviously with cannabis, there’s a lot to unpack. I would highly recommend that people look into the ganji. It’s a fantastic knowledge base. And what I really like about it is I see all the other Ganji graduates that we’re a part of, and each one has their own specialization and expertise. And there’s some people that are super hardcore concentrate people and other people that are more into beverages and edibles, and now there’s people being hired to be reviewers and other people are trying to more to be in charge of purchasing in cannabis shops to really assess the quality and kind of price, the price of the, and what the consumer is getting.

So yeah, I mean, for me, my kind of niche in that ganji world is I am definitely a culturalist and kind of an amateur historian. I love telling that story of cannabis as a plant that has co-evolved with human beings and pointing to the biology of the endocannabinoid system and the flower and how it’s one of the most evolved intelligent plants that we have access to and how we should be utilizing that. I also am more of a flower guy. If I’m smoking, it’s straight flour and hash. I don’t like it infused with anything I like, either nice, pure hash or pure flour. I’m definitely a sungrown person. I want my flour grown outdoors in an Appalachian, in a terroir, because for me, with travel, it’s all about placemaking. And if you could tell a story about a farm and not just a farm that maybe was running from camp during the war on drugs and has an amazing cultural, historical past of legacy, but also today is growing terroir, microclimate, sungrown, beautiful cannabis flowers, and why that makes that specific place or that specific slope or ridge or that soil special that is tourism.

So definitely drawn to more of the legacy regenerative outdoor sungrown craft, and then the craft products that are made from that sungrown flower. And if you look at the science as far as the cannabinoid expression and the terpene expression, if you look at the full spectrum of sungrown, it’s impossible to replicate the sun, the wind, the natural elements, and the way that the cannabis expresses itself will show you that. So in my opinion, sungrown is the highest quality, and it comes down to the science and having the fullest spectrum of therapeutic properties and compounds.

TG Branfalt:

I mean, you can absolutely, I’m not a sommelier or anything, but you can absolutely tell the difference between something that was grown indoors and something that was grown outdoors. To your point, what to you is the most exciting thing about the maturation of the industry?

Brian Applegarth:

I mean, the most exciting thing for me is I really do feel like cannabis and hemp are coming forward at a critical time in human evolution and the evolution of a global culture. We have technology at our fingertips in the last a hundred years. We have airplanes and transportation, and now we have this ancient plant that has all this capacity to help be a vehicle to facilitate hopefully a more sustainable, tolerant, compassionate, healthy world. And in my instance, I look at travel and tourism as my platform to try to do my best every day, to be a guide for the plant, to be recognized for what it is. Really, it’s just being a vessel and a vehicle to make sure that cannabis travel and tourism as it gets adopted and integrated into the global travel economy, that we’re not just thinking about smoking weed and lounges.

We’re also thinking about how hemp integrates into hotels and into the travel economy to uplift sustainability. We’re thinking about flowers of cannabis that are grown in a regenerative way, right? We’re thinking about what cannabis meant and the war on drugs meant for urban communities that were negatively impacted by the war on drugs and why equity license shops is a really important lesson that we should look closely at and not forget the roots of and why restorative justice is a pathway toward a more sustainable global culture where we all are able to work together to really make a better, healthier, happier world and a more tolerant, compassionate, global society. And it’s a really interesting time through a lot of flowery words out there, but that’s genuinely what drives me is I do believe that hemp and cannabis have immense power, and we need people at the top of the cannabis industry and the travel industry and other industries where there’s intersections that are doing the right things for the right reasons, that aren’t just driven by more is better, and that are just focused on certain gains that are not having long lasting impact on really making things better for people.

And planet.

TG Branfalt:

Brian, man, it’s been a couple of years. You’re even more somehow a fountain of knowledge than you were during our first episode a few years ago. And I really appreciate you taking the time, coming on the show again and updating us on the state of cannabis travel and tourism and the whole thing. Where can people find out more about you and all of your many hats?

Brian Applegarth:

Yeah, absolutely. The best website, well, there’s two websites. One is brian applegarth.com, that’s Brian with an I and the other website I would encourage everyone to take a look at who’s interested is the cannabis trail.com. That is a project that’s near and dear to my heart. I’ve been working on that for about six, seven years now. It’s a nine county trail and it’s really coming alive, and we’re creating an app at the moment that we’re going to be launching next year. So the cannabis trail.com, check it out. And if you want to learn more about Apple Garth strategies and what myself and my team offer for services for destinations, but also cannabis brands, we are starting to work with cannabis brands and businesses that want to start investing in the visitor economy and the travel economy. So if you see something that has interest, check out those websites and reach out to us and we look forward to hearing from you. And tg, I really appreciate you bringing me on. Thank you so much for what you do.

TG Branfalt:

It’s always a pleasure, man. Always a pleasure. Hopefully next time it won’t be a couple of years between us connecting. It’s Brian Applegarth. He is the founder of Applegarth Strategies, an agency that specializes in the intersection of cannabis and travel. The founder of the Cannabis Travel Association, leader of the Cannabis and Hemp Task Force for the California Travel Association and Destinations International. He’s also an industry consultant and a certified Ganji cannabis sommelier. You can find more episodes of the entrepreneur.com podcast in the podcast section of entrepreneur.com or wherever you get your podcast. It’s on the entrepreneur.com website. You’ll find the latest cannabis news and cannabis jobs updated daily along with transcripts of this podcast. You can also download the entrepreneur.com app in iTunes and Google Play this episode with Engineered by Wayward Sound Studio. I’ve been your host, TG Branfalt.

In this episode of the Ganjapreneur podcast, host TG Branfalt connects with the multi-talented Ngaio Bealum. Ngaio is a true cannabis renaissance man—comedian, musician, writer, actor, and activist—known for his work as a host of numerous events and shows, including the International Cannabis Business Conference, and the Emerald Cup. In this engaging conversation, Ngaio shares his journey from performer to cannabis advocate, discussing how his background in activism and entertainment has shaped his approach to cannabis education and advocacy, what role entertainment plays in educating the public about cannabis, and more. Listen to the episode below or in your favorite podcast app, or scroll down for the full transcript!

Listen to the episode:

Full transcript:

Editor’s note: this transcript was auto-generated and may contain typos/errors.

TG Branfalt (00:09):

Hey there, I’m your host, TG Branfalt, and this is the Ganjapreneur.com podcast where we try to bring you actionable information and normalized cannabis through the stories of ganjapreneurs, activists and industry stakeholders. Today I am real excited to be joined by Ngaio Bealum. He’s a comedian, musician, writer, actor, activist, previous host of the Cannabis Planet and host of the International Cannabis Business Conference and Emerald Cup. How are you doing this morning, my good man?

Ngaio Bealum (00:37):

I’m awake, which is the first step. We wouldn’t, it’s first step to most days last night. Yeah. Yeah. Wake up every day is a good day if you’re awake and relatively free.

TG Branfalt (00:50):

Relatively free is–

Ngaio Bealum (00:51):

Relatively way to describe it. We all have minor hangups and problems constraining our true freedom, but we’re doing our best.

TG Branfalt (00:58):

So before we get into your role as basically a cannabis renaissance man, tell me about yourself. Give me a little bit of background on how you ended up the entertainer, the host, the sort of human being you’ve become.

Ngaio Bealum (01:17):

I’m an Aquarius, six foot three. I like long walks from the beach. Any kind of good music, I don’t know, man. I was a comedian and a street performer and I started smoking weed and really looking into why weed wasn’t legal and it seemed like bullshit to me, and I come from a long line of activists. So we just started activating and you have to offer what skills you have, and it turns out I’m pretty funny and I’m good at handling crowds and disseminating information. And so it just worked out like that. So I posted, I host the Oregon Hemp Fest and the Arizona Growers Cup and the Missouri Growers Cup and the old Seattle Hemp Fest and a bunch of different things. I’ve done some High Times Cups, I do the Emerald Cup every year. I do the International Cannabis Business Conference series. We do Berlin, we do Barcelona, we’ve done Zurich and Vancouver. It’s just really nice.

TG Branfalt (02:14):

So first off, what role do you think that entertainers or people in that sphere should have in activism, specifically in cannabis?

Ngaio Bealum (02:26):

I mean, I think every entertainer should be way more, not every, but a lot of entertainers should be more active activists than they are now. I mean, I think that’s just part of the thing you do. You know what I mean? And so for me it’s just kind of a no brainer. And entertainment and education kind of go head in hand if listen to old Ks one albums, the whole ed, if you think of Rocks edu, if you think of even things like, so we were supposed to be entertainment every day and we’re supposed to learn every day, so why not combine the two?

TG Branfalt (03:08):

And a lot of the standup that I’ve seen, it’s very smart, and I think all good standup. I mean, you look at George Carlin

Ngaio Bealum (03:15):

Like standup in general, or my standup in particular?

TG Branfalt (03:17):

Your standup in particular

Ngaio Bealum (03:19):

Did a lot of me standup. I seen, I was like, I’ve seen some pretty dumb standup, which is also great.

TG Branfalt (03:25):

But I think

Ngaio Bealum (03:26):

That I like stupid standup as well.

TG Branfalt (03:28):

The stuff that I really enjoy is the sort of smartest side. Like I said, Carlin, I really enjoy what came first for you. Obviously you probably used cannabis before you were an entertainer, but how’d you work that into your routine?

Ngaio Bealum (03:46):

You talk about what you know, right? That’s what they always tell writers. Talk about what you know. So I have two albums. One is called Weed and Sex, and the other is called Weeder and Sexier, which means, of course, weediest and Sexiest will be probably coming out sometime this year. Next

TG Branfalt (04:03):

What comes after Weediest and Sexiest?

Ngaio Bealum (04:06):

Lemme just get high and look at it. No, so I mean, that’s just how it is. I wanted to spread the word of cannabis legalization and activism and give people good information about cannabis in a fun and entertaining manner. And it just happened to work out like that. It’s interesting because when I first started 30 years ago, everybody was like, oh, well, we already have teaching ch, we don’t really need another pot comic. All he does is talking about pot, which is not true. But now that 30 years later, cannabis is legal in some form between the six different states, and we Why, and Germany just decriminalized now they’re like, oh, we need more pot comics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you could have listened to me 30 years ago, I’m not bitter,

TG Branfalt (05:03):

But 30 years ago, I mean more than 30 years ago, we had Cheech and Chong, right? In my sort of lifetime, the big movies were Friday. And so how has legalization changed?

Ngaio Bealum (05:18):

A lot of times, and this is just a thing for me, a lot of times in a lot of those cannabis movies, the stoner’s not the hero, right? Chris Tucker’s not really the hero in Friday. Anna Ferris loses all of her stuff in her stoner movie. Even the Afroman song, he fails repeatedly because he got high, which was bullshit, right? I was going to clean my house, and so I got high not, but then I got high, and so I got high because I had a nice sativa, helps me clean shit, and that’s how I feel about it. You think about Half Baked, he had to give up weed to stay with that girl. So we are trying to make cannabis users the heroes and not just tattoo have problems until they give up weed, which seems to be bullshit.

TG Branfalt (06:04):

Is there anything sort of contemporarily in the mainstream that does in your estimation, paint cannabis consumers as heroes?

Ngaio Bealum (06:13):

Cabin in the Woods? The stoner is correct the whole time.

TG Branfalt (06:19):

It’s not something I’ve ever seen actually.

Ngaio Bealum (06:23):

It’s a good horror movie, but he sees through the whole conspiracy, so he knows the whole, he figures it out right away.

TG Branfalt (06:30):

Wouldn’t that raise some questions though, that cannabis consumers are conspiratorial and thinking?

Ngaio Bealum (06:37):

Well, it’s not conspiracy if it’s actually true.

TG Branfalt (06:41):

That’s true.

Ngaio Bealum (06:43):

And the movie rules, so he just figured it out.

TG Branfalt (06:48):

So you’ve been a journalist For a long time. And currently you’re penning a Dear D column.

Ngaio Bealum (06:58):

Oh man, I haven’t written that one in a minute. So I’ve been a cannabis advice columnist for the Sacramento News Review. I did some for I think the Alternate, and I was the weekly columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle for a long time. And yeah, I think I did. Dear Gabby, for Leafly, shout out David Downs. We just did San Francisco Weed Week. I was the host of mc for a bunch of events out there, and it was fantastic.

TG Branfalt (07:25):

What were some of the challenges to penning a cannabis advice column?

Ngaio Bealum (07:31):

Make sure you have good advice. Call the experts.

(07:37):

That’s really the deal. Being a cannabis advice column columnist is almost like, let me Google that for you, but also I know a lot of people, so somebody has a good question. I’m like, oh, Ed probably knows the answer to that. He grows weed, or Lisa probably knows the answer to that. She wrote a whole book about weed and sex, or you call your homies who specialize in these things and you look up the news and you call an elected official or a police officer or two, and you’re like, what is the real rule on this? And sometimes you just go with your own personal experience, right? Like TSA doesn’t really give a shit. If you have a small amount of cannabis. If you bring a bunch of cannabis and try to be a little sneaky asshole about it, they’ll fuck with you. But if you got a few grams here or there that you can reasonably argue personal use, it’s not going to blow up the plane.

TG Branfalt (08:25):

What intrigued you about doing an advice column?

Ngaio Bealum (08:28):

Advice? It was not really my idea. I was running West Coast Cannabis magazine and it was falling apart. I don’t want to talk about it, but my homie who was working at the Sacramento News and Review, because I called him looking for work, I’m like, Hey man, I need some work. Let me write some stories for you. He was like, Hey, why don’t you do a weed column? And I was like, yeah, why don’t I do a weed column? That’s a good idea. And so we started out with the Ask 420 column of the Sacramento News Review, and I did that for five, six, let’s see, 2000, shit, I did it almost like 10 years, like 2010, 2011 to the pandemic.

TG Branfalt (09:09):

Is there a question that you were asked during your tenure doing that that sticks out to you as just kind of super weird?

Ngaio Bealum (09:18):

No, there’s no weird questions, only weird people.

TG Branfalt (09:26):

Is there any weird people that may stick out to you during that tenure?

Ngaio Bealum (09:33):

I can’t really think of anything. I mean, it’s just the usual, how will this cannabis affect me? I feel weird buying weed for my grandfather because he’s sick and I’m a super deep Christian, but this cannabis is really helping him, and I dunno how to reconcile that. Can I stick this medicated lollipop in my ass? These aren’t, it’s not rocket signs. Yes, you can.

TG Branfalt (10:03):

Not going to hurt in the long,

Ngaio Bealum (10:04):

You probably want one with a different shape. It’s the shape of the lollipop that’s the problem because you want one with the tapered in,

TG Branfalt (10:11):

So you have to mold it in that way for,

Ngaio Bealum (10:14):

You don’t want to get it stuck. So really you should just buy a different, anyway, a different device.

TG Branfalt (10:21):

So I mean, in your role as in entertainment, you had cooking on high, which was on Netflix. How can these sort of new mediums do you think help to maybe challenge the previously held cannabis stigmas? The ones that A, B-C-N-B-C-C-B-S, right? And all these sort of legacy news channels really opposed

Ngaio Bealum (10:42):

Shit, man, they still really oppose it. I mean, YouTube doesn’t like weed that much. Instagram hates me. Snapchat is kind of cool. TikTok is really strict about it. You can’t even say weed, you have to spell it. O-U-I-D. Wait for real, right? Oui’d, like your French. So I mean, I don’t know if we’ve really overcome a lot of propaganda. I’m Ngaio420. I built a lot of cannabis followers because I was on Netflix and all these other things. If I post a picture of cannabis or talk about a brand, Instagram gets super upset. I mean, I guess it’s okay to smoke weed or if I post a little stupid funny cannabis meme, Instagram loves it. They spread that one all around. But if I post some shit like, Hey, here’s some new rules, or here’s the new law, or here’s a new strain I just tried from these guys. They’re like, oh, you can’t do that. That’s promoting for use, and yet there’s people drinking the whole time. It’s still in uphill battle battles never state won.

TG Branfalt (11:44):

So when you post the stuff under your name and it gets, like has your account ever been banned or anything over?

Ngaio Bealum (11:56):

I’ve been shadow banned for sure. I think it’s stemming from the time I tried to raffle off a bong, which, fair enough. I was pushing, I was pushing the envelope a little bit on that. I don’t think I’ve ever been, I think I was locked out of my account for a couple of days once until we figure it out. But I’ve never, they threatened to ban me and I have friends who get banned, not all the time, but they’ve been banned a few times. I try to keep it pretty cool. I’ve tried to follow the rules, but it’s hard because I just want to talk about, that’s my whole thing. If I find some good weed, I want to spread the word. You know what I mean? Or if I find some bad weed, I want to spread the word. Or if I have some good cannabis advice, I want to spread the word and they won’t let me do it.

TG Branfalt (12:40):

So I’ve read,

Ngaio Bealum (12:42):

And it’s weird because if you have a smaller account, you’re kind of under the radar. You can do almost anything you want. But once you get to a certain point, then there’s scrutiny until you get to an even bigger point, and then you can do almost anything you want to hear. So I need like 400,000 more followers. If your listeners are listening, I know you have 400,000 listeners, have them all,

TG Branfalt (13:05):

But then you’ll get real banned because they’ll know what you’re doing.

Ngaio Bealum (13:10):

No, it’s not buying followers.

TG Branfalt (13:14):

No, no, no, no. But because then you’ll be I’ll beg and they’ll know underground anymore. You’ll sold

Ngaio Bealum (13:21):

Out. Listen, high times gets to buy ads on Instagram, and yet I can’t smoke a bong. It’s just the weirdest thing. I don’t understand the rules. I feel like the rules are arbitrary and capricious, and depending on which federal agent you have watching your Instagram account at any particular time, that’s how far they’ll let you go.

TG Branfalt (13:43):

They’re definitely watching everyone’s accounts,

Ngaio Bealum (13:46):

Even as we speak.

TG Branfalt (13:48):

Even as we speak, there’ll be privacy. They’ll be writing this by hand, transcribing this by hand,

Ngaio Bealum (13:52):

Privacy is dead, discretion is forever.

TG Branfalt (13:57):

I mean, it’s given me convenience or give me death sort of atmosphere at this point, right? We’re totally happy to be tracked as long as they’re selling us Nikes, right?

Ngaio Bealum (14:07):

No, I don’t want them to sell me Nikes. They sell me golf things and advice on how to meet thick women apparently is what Instagram thinks that I’m all about. Here’s some golf apparel and here’s some cute, thick girls.

TG Branfalt (14:21):

Are you a good golfer?

Ngaio Bealum (14:23):

I like to golf.

TG Branfalt (14:26):

I like to golf badly On nice days.

Ngaio Bealum (14:31):

I just like to golf. Sometimes I’m halfway decent for a hot minute, and sometimes I’m not a very good golfer at all.

TG Branfalt (14:37):

How does weed help your golf game? I

Ngaio Bealum (14:38):

Still enjoy it. Weed does not help my golf game. I wish it did. I keep trying to find the right strain because I used to warm up and then smoke some weed and then see it goes and try to lock it in. I think it’s better for me if I get a little high on the way to the golf course and then let it smooth out by the time I get to the golf course. But I can’t just smoke weed constantly, then the overthinking starts. That’s the thing about golf. You have a lot of time to think to yourself, and so then it’s like, oh, I want to put my elbow here and my knee here and the thing. No, shut up. Hit the fucking ball. Quit thinking. I

TG Branfalt (15:12):

Do like driving the cart though. Stoned. It’s pretty great.

Ngaio Bealum (15:16):

Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, listen, I like being stoned on the golf course as well. It’s very nice. But if I’m trying to take it seriously, if I have to beat my brother, then I have to pay attention to what’s going on. If I’m just mucking about it, if it’s a practice round, then sure, whatever practice round

TG Branfalt (15:31):

Every round for me is a practice round. My man. I’m terrible.

Ngaio Bealum (15:34):

Amen.

TG Branfalt (15:36):

So I’ve read on the internet every

Ngaio Bealum (15:37):

Day is a practice round get you in on,

TG Branfalt (15:43):

I’ve read on the internet that you have a love for Sungrown cannabis.

Ngaio Bealum (15:46):

I love.

TG Branfalt (15:48):

So tell me about that preference.

Ngaio Bealum (15:53):

I personally think it tastes better. I think it’s better for the environment. The sun is relatively free. Cannabis knows what to do. And I understand we’re doing sungrown. You can get one. I mean, if you’re doing greenhouse now, you can get 2, 3, 4 light death. You can get 2, 3, 4 harvest a year. And I understand people are like, we only get one harvest a year. Some shit happens, blah, blah, blah. But I don’t know. I just like it. I like the whole vibe, right? I’m here for the plant. I’m here for the hippie farmer action. And a lot of times you go to these states where they’ve just legalized weed and it’s all indoor facilities, but you could tell it tastes like commercial pressure. It tastes like we have to get this done in eight weeks. We have to stay on the schedule. What if your cannabis needs a little longer than that?

TG Branfalt (16:42):

Do you think that consumers would be willing to pay more for the stuff that’s harvested once a year, sungrown small farm? Because

Ngaio Bealum (16:52):

You would think, but no, they won’t. We really need to work more on, how would I say, cannabis appreciation classes like cannabis tasting. You do wine tasting. A lot of people just look at, ah, I just want the shit that’s 31% THC because I’m trying to get fucked up. I’m like, well, you’re going to get fucked up, but it may not be the high you want, right? Look for what’s it smell like? Look for the terpene profiles. You, you might do better at something at 19% because then you could smoke that whole joint while you watch the sunset as opposed to just two hits and then one of your friends is freaking out because he’s a lightweight, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think more understanding of what to taste for, what to look for, how to vibe with cannabis. The problem of course is people want to treat it like cigarettes, right? Comes prepackaged. Now it’s more like pipe tobacco or a fancy cigar or a fancy wine. Sure, you can get two buck chuck, but you should also be able to buy some bordeaux la fu or whatever.

TG Branfalt (18:06):

Yeah, I mean, I’m pushing 40, right? I consider myself a mature cannabis consumer, and that’s what I look for. Do you think that that’s sort of a demographic thing? Us we’re not 20 anymore. You think that that’s the route that we’re just going to go to? The people that your friends, your friends are probably sort of higher class smokers too, but are you seeing that sort of trend? Personally,

Ngaio Bealum (18:30):

I definitely hang out with a bunch of weed nerds for sure. But I’ve also smoked,

TG Branfalt (18:35):

Maybe it’s just a weed nerd

Ngaio Bealum (18:36):

Swag. I don’t know. I mean, I’ll buy a six pack of Budweiser. Well, I won’t buy a six pack of Budweiser, but I’ll buy a six pack of regular beer to go to the party, but then when I get home, I got to Sam Adams or get it, you know what I mean? So I think it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re just going to show up at a party with a big half ounce, two half ounce of weed so you can roll blunts all day, that makes perfect sense. I try not to make fun of people for having weird tasting weed or for liking chain restaurants that are actually horrible, but they grew up in a small town and that was the fanciest place. I really had to stop making fun of people for that. That’s not their fault. So education more than ridicule at all times.

TG Branfalt (19:25):

And you do a lot of the education kind of focused events, the Hempfest and things like that. And is the response different among crowds as a comedian? Is that response, is that hosting gig different when you’re around those types of crowds than maybe other just standup stuff you do for regular standup crowd?

Ngaio Bealum (19:53):

What I’m hosting, it’s not always necessarily about getting the jokes off, but about creating a vibe and getting some jokes in. But also you can target it more So if you’re doing a grower’s festival or a hemp festival, all your jokes about trimmers, everybody knows what you’re talking about. Whereas if I’m just doing a regular comedy club show and I talk about getting a repetitive stress injury from trimming, it may not be the same. It may not be the same. So I don’t know. You can get deeper into it when you all have the same kind of base of cannabis knowledge. But funny’s funny man. You just got to find a way work.

TG Branfalt (20:37):

So has your, I don’t want to say routine, but how have you been able to adapt your knowledge to hosting in that sort of thing? In the wake of legalization? I understand the repetitive injury from trimming thing that wouldn’t have really made a whole lot of sense 25 years ago

Ngaio Bealum (21:00):

Right now. But also I do different jump now. One of my things is about now that that cannabis is legal and you can have a job in the cannabis industry, that means that it’s not so bad when you show up at the parent-teacher conference smelling a little bit like weed. I just got off work.

TG Branfalt (21:22):

And you do talk about cannabis consumption as a parent?

Ngaio Bealum (21:28):

Yes. Weed made me a better parent for sure. My kids, my adults are awesome.

TG Branfalt (21:35):

Now, I don’t have any children myself. And so I do like to ask this question because I grew up with, it was very open. My mom openly consumed cannabis and she gave me my first bowl as a matter of fact. I mean, truth be told. Nice. I’m 15 years old. Here you go. You don’t know how to roll, take this fucking brass pipe. But what was it for you raising bras?

Ngaio Bealum (21:56):

Bras, pipe.

TG Branfalt (21:57):

Oh yeah, the fucking brass pipe. Boat,

Ngaio Bealum (21:59):

Bro. Pipe.

TG Branfalt (22:00):

That’s exactly what it was. I shit you not I shit, you die

Ngaio Bealum (22:05):

Shit.

TG Branfalt (22:06):

Exactly right.

Ngaio Bealum (22:09):

I had always been on my kids. Some things are for adults like drinking and weed and drugs and some things are not for kids, and that’s just how it is. So you should wait until college and that was kind my whole thing. I always like, if you want to do drugs in college, once you get your shit together and prove that you can be a somewhat semi responsible young adult. If you want to start experimenting with things like smoke some weed, be careful with alcohol, stay off the pills. That’s kind of my whole advice the whole way. Do some mushrooms every once in a while if you really want to, but do it mindfully. Don’t just be taking mushrooms and fucking off white boy. Wasted is a form of privilege.

TG Branfalt (22:46):

That’s very true,

Ngaio Bealum (22:48):

Right? Because you just think everything’s going to work out. It doesn’t always work out like that.

TG Branfalt (22:52):

No, I mean, I also grew up very rurally, so I mean doing, you

Ngaio Bealum (22:57):

Kind of have to get fucked up when you live that

TG Branfalt (22:58):

Far. Yeah, and get away with it, right, because the cops would show up and they’d just tell you to go fuck off. Right? That’s not what happened when I moved to cities and stuff. The disparity is fucking real,

Ngaio Bealum (23:12):

Real, real,

TG Branfalt (23:13):

Real, real. What is your preferred method of consumption? I see you spoke a lot of joints.

Ngaio Bealum (23:20):

I smoke a lot of joints. Shout out DaySavers. I’m asking those white guys for a job, so shout ’em out. They make great rolling papers. I like bones. I like the blunt. Every once in a while, dabs make me quiet. So I don’t always do ’em at public because I can’t be at a hosting a festival. And they’re like, dude, these dabs, they’re like, well, they’re paying me to talk. They’re not paying me to sit in the corner eating snacks, making up backstories, random people that I see. Just in my head, that guy looks like he used to be a senator. He’s probably a high school coach. Good to see you Reverend.

TG Branfalt (23:56):

Has legalization changed your methods of consumption?

Ngaio Bealum (24:05):

I smoke in the street more often. I dunno what you mean by changed my methods of consumption. I mean, I still

TG Branfalt (24:11):

Smoke. Well, prior to legalization, for whatever reason, I didn’t smoke as many joints and then weed was legal. It was relatively cheaper. Somehow I live near a reservation. That probably helps. That

Ngaio Bealum (24:21):

Probably helps.

TG Branfalt (24:22):

And so now I just predominantly smoke joints. Don’t know.

Ngaio Bealum (24:26):

They’re also very convenient. A pre-roll is very easy to buy these days. You can just get a joint on your way. You can roll a joint. I mean, I like joints because they don’t break if you drop ’em.

(24:39):

Right? That’s true. And they’re scalable. If you have a small pipe and there’s 15 people in the circle, but you can just roll a bigger joint or roll three joints and pass them around. You know what I mean? They’re not the most efficient way to smoke weed probably. But also putting a cloud of weed in the air is still a form of civil disobedience. It’s also a call to fellowship. You understand? If you are walking down the street and you smell some people smoking weed or whatever, you see the circle odds are you can step inside, at least say hello, say what’s up. Maybe if you brought a bowl too, you’d be like, Hey, now you made new friends. Right? You stand in the circle. It denotes equality. It’s like peers.

TG Branfalt (25:21):

This interview is coming on the heels of you seeing a phish show in Nevada,

Ngaio Bealum (25:27):

Vegas at the sphere,

TG Branfalt (25:30):

The big ball in the middle of the city.

Ngaio Bealum (25:33):

The big ball.

TG Branfalt (25:35):

Yeah. It’s been Memed a lot. What was it like in Nevada? Are there consumption lounges? Are people smoking on the street?

Ngaio Bealum (25:47):

You’re not supposed to smoke on the street. People don’t really smoke on the strip. They have a couple of consumption lounges now. New W has a lounge. I think Planet 13 has a lounge behind Resorts World. World. The Artisan Hotel has a cannabis springy smoking wing of their hotel now.

TG Branfalt (26:09):

Really?

Ngaio Bealum (26:10):

So you can book a room? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s kind of funny. Even though cannabis is legal and you can get a smoking room in a hotel, a lot of hotels don’t want you to smoke cannabis in the smoking room, which is weird because I always think that weed makes smoking rooms smell better. If you’ve ever got a smoking room in a hotel, they smell like nicotine and regret. But sometimes you can make it smell like weed and sex, and that’s better. That’s better for me. So I mean, I think it’s easier to hang out in LA now that cannabis is legal, even though I don’t feel like as much of a dangerous outlaw as I used to. But it still, it’s probably better as we get older and mellow out. It’s still a good time.

TG Branfalt (26:55):

Do you ever miss that

Ngaio Bealum (26:57):

They do a lot of weed things. I do miss that feeling. I miss that feeling. Sometimes I go to Idaho and carry weed around just so I could be nervous again.

TG Branfalt (27:07):

I also miss that feeling quite a lot actually.

Ngaio Bealum (27:12):

But I also got to say, I got to say, maybe you just hot box your car and now you’re standing in the Starbucks and a bunch of cops walk in and it’s not a problem. That’s fantastic. Right? I was smoking a joint on K Street waiting for the bus in San Francisco, and three sheriff’s deputies walked by while I’ve smoking this joint, and it was just like, Hey, what’s up? Oh yeah, hey, what’s up? And that was it.

TG Branfalt (27:33):

I still sometimes get, I got pulled over and I had an ounce in my car, and I was a little nervous still knowing that I’m in New York, I’m straight. Right?

Ngaio Bealum (27:47):

You’re all good. It’s a whole different feeling, man. It’s a whole different feeling. I was just in Berlin for the International Cannabis Business Conference and we’re staying at the extra hotel. And apparently the weekend before our conference, there was a lot of stuff going on in Berlin. There’s all these protests. There’s a big soccer match. So they had brought in some cops from out of town, a bunch of cops. We look like a fucking police convention at the hotel I’m at. And at first I was like, oh, Jesus Christ, this is not what I need right now. But then I realized, hey, they just decriminalized cannabis in Germany and you can actually smoke in the street. That’s part of the rules. I think it’s like before 9:00 AM and after 6:00 PM So while everybody’s in working that’s supposed to smoke in the street, be responsible. But after that, if you’re just walking around, you can smoke. And so I was standing outside the lobby doing my thing and it was not a problem. It was fantastic.

TG Branfalt (28:46):

And you were there right after they passed the bill? It must have been.

Ngaio Bealum (28:51):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They passed the bill April 1st and I got into Germany April 8th.

TG Branfalt (28:59):

Or what was the atmosphere like among the attendees of the conference?

Ngaio Bealum (29:04):

Everybody’s very excited. But here’s the thing. A lot of the stories you read will say that Germany legalized cannabis and they didn’t really, they just super decriminalize it. So now you can carry 25 grams in your pocket. You can have 50 grams at the house. You can grow three plants per person wherever you live in all the counties. Bavaria has to fucking do it as well. And they can’t, Bavaria can’t be all square like Texas. They have to go along with it, but you still can’t really find a place to buy it. You still got to go to Gritz or Park. It’s so funny, I was at this one nightclub and people kept walking up to me and trying to buy drugs, weed or whatever. All these drugs is Berlin. And at first I was like, man, I think y’all are kind of racist. But then I realized what, I’m also in a town where I don’t know anybody. I also look for a friendly dreadlock person, try to buy drugs from, so sometimes sweeping generalizations to be effective.

TG Branfalt (30:07):

That is actually the exact, I

Ngaio Bealum (30:10):

Lost you. Hold on. Oh, there you go. What’d you say?

TG Branfalt (30:13):

That is actually the exact demographic in which I bought weed from a DJ in France.

Ngaio Bealum (30:19):

Friendly dreadlock person, correct? Yes.

TG Branfalt (30:24):

It was great weed too. It was cheap.

Ngaio Bealum (30:28):

The odd on your side, the on side. I’ve bought good hash with some friendly dreadlock people all over the world.

TG Branfalt (30:36):

Why haven’t we seen a lot of black hash post legalization? You think

Ngaio Bealum (30:44):

A lot of black hash you said?

TG Branfalt (30:46):

Yeah, black hash.

Ngaio Bealum (30:48):

You mean like the old tool, like the Moroccan style?

TG Branfalt (30:50):

Yeah. Yeah.

Ngaio Bealum (30:51):

Go to Europe, bro. Bro. It’s all, all solventless handmade chara style. This is fresher Morocco. This is the Morocco style. This is the French he kno style. They smoke that stuff all the time. They throw it in a tobacco cigarette. Those guys love a little hash. Lisbon loves hash. Spain loves hash. Germany loves hash. London loves hash.

TG Branfalt (31:13):

But it seems a little strange that we have legalization in the states and black hash is still really kind of hard to find. I find

Ngaio Bealum (31:20):

That strange because the weed nerds live rozen, bro. It’s all the terpenes, bro. This is 92%. I’m low temps. I’m a low temp smoker. You’re going to burn off all those vital fucking terpenes, bro. If you’re, your temperature are too high, listen, different terpenes. What strain is it? Because my heat temperature signature is very specific to the strain that I’m smoking at this point. Because people like to nerd out. People like to be fancy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You can smoke regular good old fashioned Moroccan style hash all you want, but some people are like, oh, this is a live resin razin whip. Check out the diamonds, bro. I’m coming in at 98.65% THC.

TG Branfalt (32:10):

Can you fuck with that?

Ngaio Bealum (32:13):

Like I said, it makes me quiet. I don’t do it. I fuck with it one time. I tell people all the time, the more dabs you do, the more dabs you’re going to do. Right? It makes your tolerance a little wild. And so that’s how people get super up deep into it. I’m like, dabs should always be a sweet, not necessarily an everyday thing. At least for me. I don’t judge anybody for how they use drugs as long as they’re responsible adults.

TG Branfalt (32:40):

I’ve learned from being in my mid twenties when diamonds started emerging and dabbing diamonds and the fear, man, the fear was real. I couldn’t do it.

Ngaio Bealum (32:53):

You can definitely smoke yourself into a panic attack. But I mean, one of my favorite things that we’ve learned from cannabis over the past 15, 20 years is that THC is not the end all be all of cannabis enjoyment, right? There’s C, B, D, there’s CDN, there’s C, B, G, there’s all the cannabinoids, all the terpenes and the entourage effect work to make the experience more pleasant. And so I think that’s the deal is you want to find the combination that works for you as opposed to just being, oh, well this one’s 35% tt. It’s obviously way better than this one is 29% TT it. It’s not necessarily true. I put out a line of three roles one time and they tested it like 18% THC, but I would tell everybody, I was like, don’t let that label fool you because you’re going to be high as hell. You’re going to be high as hell off of this. And then they would kind of laugh at me and then they would take two hits and they’d be like, dude, I’m really fucked up right now. I was like, I told you, because it’s not just about the THC content, what the terpenes do, how they all interact.

TG Branfalt (33:57):

Are you referring to the mothership farms line?

Ngaio Bealum (34:01):

This was the Green Shock Farms line. Oh no. It did come off of mothership. Yeah. So green. So Greens Shock Farms was the farmer. Shout out Mark and the crew. And then Mothership was a distributor. So when mothership presents, when Guile four 20 presents, green Shot Farms’, a lot of hands.

TG Branfalt (34:22):

And I’ve always had this question, how much of a sort of role did you have in choosing the stuff that had your name on it?

Ngaio Bealum (34:30):

Bro, the biggest role. It’s got my name on it, but my whole concept was I’m going to go out into the woods and I’m going to talk my homies out of their head stash. Not the regular shit that they grow for everybody. Like, Hey, I only got two pounds of this, dude, I need a pound and a half of it. No, you can’t listen. I need a pound of this. The people have to smoke this, right? We’re only releasing 600, 700 of these. Because I had to talk about, I almost had to wrestle him to get him to let go of some of this weed that I think you will all enjoy. I’m not just letting you throw some shit out there. I’m calling my homies. I’m going out into the woods and smoking with my boy sticky and smoking with my boy mark and smoking with my other homies. Can I get some of this pink Tanzi cross? No, man, I get it. Come on dog. I got to have so, but people need it. That’s my whole thing. I like to Go ahead.

TG Branfalt (35:20):

If you were looking for, if were going to release another product, would you sort of take the same approach to find another partner? Or would you maybe track down some good stuff that you had maybe not encountered in the woods, if you will?

Ngaio Bealum (35:35):

Well, there’s a couple ways to do it, right? If you have a good distributor, they probably know some people, so you can look at who they’re working with and talk to those guys and be like, I want to introduce one of your, what’s your favorite shape? Maybe not necessarily you’re the best seller because people look for certain names as work, but what’s something you think people would really get a kick out of? And then if I enjoy it, then I can spread the word, Hey, this is my shed right here. Try this chocolate hashberry, try this, whatnot. Get into it. And I think that’s a good way because I don’t know, it’s so tough. Everybody always wants to make a new strain. Everybody wants to be the next cookies or train wreck or things like that. And I think it’s great, but I also think we need to remember to hold on to some heirloom strains. Where did the champagne go? What happened to the AK 47? Where’s the Blue City diesel? Things like that.

TG Branfalt (36:29):

I always tell my friends, and I don’t know if this is something that y’all had in California, beers

Ngaio Bealum (36:36):

BC Bud.

TG Branfalt (36:37):

That’s where it allegedly came from. I missed that shit, man.

Ngaio Bealum (36:41):

Allegedly.

TG Branfalt (36:42):

Allegedly. Of course, it’s allegedly.

Ngaio Bealum (36:44):

It came from there. Those BC Bud used to come flooding that, especially with when the Los Angeles cannabis dispensaries really started to take off in the two thousands. I wouldn’t say the market was flooded with BC Bud, but there was a lot coming down because the supply and demand was crazy at that

TG Branfalt (37:04):

Point. I always really liked that shit. And it’s like gone forever in the ether.

Ngaio Bealum (37:11):

It’s still in British Columbia now. Nobody needs to smuggle it down here anymore,

TG Branfalt (37:17):

But I’m going to go smuggle it down here because I miss, I do. I miss it town.

Ngaio Bealum (37:24):

Go to Vancouver. Go to Vancouver. S smoke some weed. You’ll recognize it.

TG Branfalt (37:30):

I go as far as Toronto,

Ngaio Bealum (37:33):

I love Toronto.

TG Branfalt (37:35):

I also love Toronto. I mean, so Canada’s a civilizes country and all.

Ngaio Bealum (37:40):

I like the all night Montreal bagel place in Toronto.

TG Branfalt (37:44):

Yes, that is a very good place. Post legalization.

Ngaio Bealum (37:48):

There’s a place I’m talking about with the wood oven. Yeah, they got the wood oven. They’re open like 24 hours. And you get that Montreal style bagel,

TG Branfalt (37:55):

That Montreal style bagels. Legit

Ngaio Bealum (37:58):

Bra. Bra. I’m here for it.

TG Branfalt (38:01):

And one more question, sort of going back to sort of strain names and weed nerd stuff. Do you foresee that’s where the industry goes, that we move away from strain names and we start going and buying stuff by like, all right, I want the X amount of this cannabinoid, so on and so forth, and move away from strain names.

Ngaio Bealum (38:24):

I don’t know if the testing is going to be that exact for that. I think what I see, because we were moving away from the deli style where you go in, used to go in, they have all the jars and open the jar. Yeah, that’s the one that they pull out a couple grams for you because the smell, right, the terpenes make your body react. Because weed loves us and wants us to be happy. All the different terpenes have different smells. So you get to, oh, I always like to smell for black pepper. Or if that’s pine trees, then that’s the one for me. Everybody does that thing, so they don’t really do it like that anymore. I mean, they have the little jars you can over, but you can’t always get the full effect. I think really people are going to have to lean on brands.

(39:03):

You have to know that fig farms always puts out good shit, you know that connected almost always puts out good shit. Wild makes great edibles because you can’t smell the weed for yourself. So you really have to trust the brand. You have to find a budtender who smokes like you. Right? When I was a budtender in la, there were definitely some people who we kind of smoked the same. So when some shit came in that I liked, I knew that they would like it. And there were also some people, they didn’t want to be served by me because we had vastly different taste of weed, but they liked my homeboy. They smoke the same and they’re like, oh yeah, dog, this is mine. You know what I mean? So that’s how it goes. So rely on the professionals, find a couple of good, consistent brands you like and grow your own weed. That’s my advice.

TG Branfalt (39:50):

Is there a smell that you know that this is for you? What’s that for you?

Ngaio Bealum (39:57):

Feet, cheese, skunk. I also like pine trees. I like lemons. I like all that. Tropical. Tropical cherry is nice, but it makes me sleepy, but it’s delicious. So I smoke it at night and then I pass out, but it’s so tasty.

TG Branfalt (40:13):

I could Smells like basements,

Ngaio Bealum (40:17):

Dan.

TG Branfalt (40:17):

Yep.

Ngaio Bealum (40:19):

Yeah, yeah, yeah, man. Burning tires, all that shit. I like a stinky weed.

TG Branfalt (40:25):

They say in Nevada that it has the highest miene content among all of the legalized markets. Yeah, that makes

Ngaio Bealum (40:34):

Sense. That makes sense. Because everybody likes that cush. They like that cush. They like those cookies, they like that runts. That’s all that me. Scene action. Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. Everybody out here is a baller and a gangster, so it’s Vegas, bro. We’re bling, slightly bling almost for

TG Branfalt (40:54):

A day,

Ngaio Bealum (40:55):

Right? By the next

TG Branfalt (40:56):

Day you’re balling

Ngaio Bealum (40:57):

In a totally different way, just one day, right? There’s a difference between B-A-L-L-I-N-G and B-A-W-L-I-N-G.

TG Branfalt (41:06):

Yeah, you’ve lost all your money and can’t buy any mercene in heavy weed. So last question I have for you, man. What advice would you have for young entertainers, people who are maybe thinking about being a cannabis centric entertainer?

Ngaio Bealum (41:26):

First of all, that’s my job. Find your own spot. No, I’m kidding. There’s plenty of space in the world. The pie is always big stop thinking of things as finite. The planet is infinite, and we have to stop creating bullshit, scarcity. There’s more than enough to go around for everybody. That’s just general philosophy in terms of that. Dude, I wish I had taken a marketing class when I was a kid. Interesting. When I was a young college student, I studied music and theater, but I didn’t study marketing or search engine optimization. Well, we didn’t have search engines, right? I was a college in 1990 or goddamn business, but

TG Branfalt (42:11):

Still typewriters?

Ngaio Bealum (42:15):

We had computers, sir. The Tandy, TRS 80 were programming shit in Basic 25 if then, but that

TG Branfalt (42:29):

Class stopped

Ngaio Bealum (42:31):

And have fun, be polite, smoke weed. I don’t know what to tell you. I just kind of hustled my ass off and we got to where I’m, but I’m still hustling. So that’s how it goes. Have fun. Be yourself.

TG Branfalt (42:45):

Where can people find more about yourself and the things that you do and watch you smoke joints on the internet?

Ngaio Bealum (42:53):

Fortunately, there aren’t pictures of me at the post office. You can follow me on the Instagram N ao. I’m also on the Twitter or the X-N-G-A-I two. I have a Patreon that I’m going to start dumping shit into any minute now. There’s some stuff up there, but we’re going to put more stuff up there this week. And then I just started my substack as well. And I will be, I’m traveling quite a bit. I’m doing more travel here. So really the Instagram is the best way. I should get my website. Back up. What do you know about WordPress? Anybody know anything about WordPress? Call me up.

TG Branfalt (43:28):

We use WordPress, at Ganjapreneur, but I only write things in host podcasts. You should go look at my record store website, but it’s basically just three links. I can’t be of any help at all

Ngaio Bealum (43:38):

That’s all I need. I can’t figure out this WordPress ui or I would do that.

TG Branfalt (43:44):

There’s a guy somewhere in this organization knows how to do it. I’m not that guy.

Ngaio Bealum (43:50):

I understand. I’m not that guy. Now. Know your strengths. Play to your strengths.

TG Branfalt (43:55):

Ngaio, this has been a lot of fun.

Ngaio Bealum (43:59):

TG I had a great time. Have me over anytime.

TG Branfalt (44:02):

Most fun. Well, we should do this again next time. We’ll do general philosophy though, because you sort of scratched the surface there now. I’m really intrigued.

Ngaio Bealum (44:11):

Let’s get into it. I’m here for it, man. I’m down. I’m super down. Lemme know brother.

TG Branfalt (44:17):

Our guest is Ngaio Bealum, comedian, musician, writer, activist, actor, Renaissance man,

Ngaio Bealum (44:27):

Friend of small animals,

TG Branfalt (44:28):

Guy who likes Kush. And you can find more episodes of the Ganjapreneur.com podcast in the podcast section of Ganjapreneur.com. Wherever you get your podcast. On entrepreneur.com website, you’ll find the latest cannabis news and cannabis jobs updated daily along with transcripts of this podcast. This episode was engineered by Wayward Sound Studio. I’ve been your host, TG Branfalt.

In this episode of the Ganjapreneur podcast, host TG Branfalt is joined by Dr. Sean Myles, an associate professor of agriculture at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who brings a wealth of knowledge on plant genetics. While Dr. Myles has made significant contributions to the study of plant varieties in apples and grapes, today’s focus is on his groundbreaking work in cannabis research. Within the unique intersection of agriculture, genetics, and the culture and policy of cannabis legalization, Dr. Myles sheds light on how cannabis labeling, genetic diversity, and breeding practices are shaping the future of the industry.

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TG Branfalt:

Today we’re joined by Dr. Sean Myles. He’s an associate professor of agriculture at Dalhousie University. He’s done countless, countless studies on cannabis, agriculture, a lot on apples, which I find very interesting, but that’s not where we’re here to talk about today. How are you doing this morning, Sean?

Sean Myles:

Doing great. Thanks for having me on.

TG Branfalt:

I’m real excited. We have a lot to talk about. Before you get into it, man, tell me about yourself. Tell me your background and how you ended up a doctor, associate professor, and all that good stuff.

Sean Myles:

Sure. I’m really passionate about food. I think that’s kind of where it ended up sending me is to learn more about where our food comes from, how it’s produced, how it gets to the table and gets on your plate. I studied genetics, so I look at DNA for a living, and I did my PhD. I actually worked in human genetics and human medical genetics kind of stuff first, but switched gears there in order to chase my wife. My wife is a winemaker and I always figured if I wanted to live somewhere where she lives, I should probably just study grapes. So we figured that out. I started a postdoc in grapes at Cornell and continued on that path. And then we moved back here to, we live in Nova Scotia in Canada, in rural Nova Scotia. It’s a beautiful place to live, and we’ve got lots of apples here. So I switched my research to focus on apples after a while and working on plants and genetics around the time when cannabis was becoming legalized in Canada. It was a real obvious choice to go and start looking at cannabis because such a fascinating crop.

TG Branfalt:

So what interests you most about genetic research in general, whether it be human genetic research or agricultural genetic research?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, I think a lot of my interest stems from an interest in better understanding our past, knowing where our food came from, how domestication and breeding has really taken place and shaped the food that we consume today and what effects that’s had on the food that we eat. It’s a really fascinating thing to be able to do, is to sort of read history by looking at DNA. You can learn quite a bit. So we’ve learned a lot about what we are and how we became human from looking at DNA and fascinating stories by sequencing genomes of Neanderthals and all that kind of stuff. It’s not that different when looking at the DNA of food so we can learn things about where our food comes from and how the different strains of cannabis, for example, are related to each other and how much diversity there is for us to use, which is tremendous. And then that gives us a guide in a way of where we should be going in the future. So the other portion is what do we do with this information and how do we more efficiently and effectively breed new varieties of food that are going to require less chemical input to grow and are going to be healthy for you? So that’s the real motivation.

TG Branfalt:

So we’re talking about the past, I mean cannabis—because of prohibition worldwide essentially—we don’t know a ton about it. And so, what big questions did you set out to answer when you started researching cannabis?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, in general, we were interested in knowing what we call as sort of the general genetic structure of cannabis. So one of the big questions of course, is how different are hemp and cannabis that’s consumed for psychoactive effects. And so one of the first things we did was we collected, we got our hands on some samples of hemp and we got our hands on some samples of cannabis psychoactive cannabis, and we took a look at that. There’s been a lot of theory and theory and hypotheses about, well, hemp is just basically cannabis that doesn’t have any THC, so it’s probably just like one gene that’s turned off, but otherwise there’s a lot of overlap in the way they look and the way they behave. But when we looked at it, we actually found that the hemp and what we call marijuana in the paper, but I believe more appropriately is just called cannabis for, what do you call recreational cannabis, if you will, or medical cannabis.

Yeah, there’s differences. There’s systematic differences across the entire genome so they can be sort of understood as two kind of different genetic groups. So that suggests it may be worthwhile if you see a trait in a hemp line that you’re interested in and you’re a cannabis breeder for recreational purposes, it may make sense to cross it with some hemp at some point and try to use that genetic diversity in your breeding program and that kind of thing. So those are some of the, and just in general is the big question that kept coming up is the use of the terms indica and sativa because these are botanical terms that have been kind of co-opted by the recreational users to mean something, but it’s not really entirely clear what indica and sativa really mean and people have different ideas about it. So we thought looking at the DNA of these large diverse set of samples could shed some light on that.

TG Branfalt:

Do you think that we’ve sort of adopted those terms or accepted those terms as cannabis consumers and the industry at large due to the sort of lack of research and lack of understanding about the planet?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. I think it’s become unclear what the terms mean because the industry has operated in a clandestine fashion for so long and underground. So there haven’t been the kind of controls and policies and strict protocols in place that you would see in other crops. For example, in a strawberry, when they release a strawberry to the public from a breeding program, you can’t just say that it’s this kind of strawberry. I mean, it has to be that kind. You can’t put in a bottle of wine a bunch of Cabernet Sauvignon and call it pinot noir. That’s not allowed, and you can’t get away with that. But in the cannabis world, in the underground cannabis world, you can get away with a lot if you want to sell the stuff and the person walking in, they like indica, all of a sudden your stuff is indica. So I think it’s been kind of co-opted and got a little messy, even though cannabis sativa and cannabis indica originally are kind of terms from botany where that described the structure of the plant its use today is arguably not a very good indicator of the genetics or the chemistry of the plants is what we found in our research.

TG Branfalt:

So tell me about the results of the 2021 paper. Cannabis labeling is associated with genetic variation in terpene syn genes. I’m probably mispronouncing that penultimate word there. And additionally, 2015 genetic structure of marijuana and hemp study. Tell me about each of these and it is one sort of link to the other in some way.

Sean Myles:

Yeah, so I think we’re trying to address similar questions in these studies, and the very first study in 2015 was one of the very earliest studies of a genetic analysis of cannabis. And in that study we took a look. We got samples from one of the earliest licensed producers in Canada who were growing cannabis for the new burgeoning industrial market that was opening up in Canada because it’s been legalized. So that was early days. And all of these licensed producers, they were like, okay, where are we going to get our seed? Where are we going to get our plants? And it was basically find people who are growing it underground and bring it into the legal market. There wasn’t some gene bank they have in other crops that you can just go order up a whole bunch of seed and start out. So this one collaborator we had, they had a decent amount on the order of a hundred samples or so, or 80 to a hundred samples of various lines, and they were named.

So you can see in the paper there’s the lemon skunk and white widow, Alaskan Ice, Bubba Kush standard strain names with, and each of them, they have a reported percent indica or percent sativa. So I think they were either like a hundred percent indica or 25% or 50 50 hybrid or the other way, a hundred percent sativa or 75% sativa. So we had a good number of samples, and then we had a bunch of hemp samples too. We wanted to see if hemp was different from the cannabis. They were growing for the legal market here in Canada. So we did that genetic analysis and what came out was that the genetics don’t really align very well at all with whether they’re labeled as indica or sativa. So whether something, if you look at how closely related things are, for instance, a cannabis strain that is labeled as a hundred percent indica is frequently more closely related to something that’s labeled as a hundred percent sativa than it is other indica labeled strains.

So we know that then the labeling isn’t matching up with the genetics so that the label of indica or sativa is a very poor indicator of what the genetics of the plant are, which suggests that it’s also a poor indicator of what the plant actually looks like when it’s grown, which means that this isn’t really telling you much. So that’s the first indicator we had of like, okay, this whole legal market is going to explode in Canada here coming up. And one of the main things these marketing departments are using is this label of indica and sativa because it’s so widespread its use in the underground world. That’s how people identify their stuff and they have strong beliefs about whether sativa is uplifting and indica is supposed to give you couch lock and a lot of that. So we wanted to see does that really line up?

And unfortunately from our sample, we can’t say for everyone, but from our sample, the genetics were not a good indicator of the indica and sativa labeling was a very poor predictor of the genetic identity of the plants. So then we thought, fine, maybe labeling them as indica and sativa doesn’t tell you much, but does it tell you much if they say it’s lemon skunk? Does that tell you anything? Is white widow really a unique genetic identity, which in the other worlds, like a Honeycrisp apple is a unique genetic identity. Every single honey crisp apple tree is genetically identical to every single other one. And that’s what we do in horticulture. This is the way it works in strawberries, peaches, pears, plums, apples, cherries, all of it, right? You breed new varieties, you release them to market. And the ones when they end up on the shelf, if it says Pinot noir on the bottle, it’s pinot noir grapes in the bottle, and we’re finding that we’re getting white widow from one producer and we’re getting white widow from another producer and we’re looking at their genetics and they’re not the same at all. They’re not even closely related. Often one of them is more closely related to a strain with a different name than it is to a strain with the same name. And about a third of the cases we saw, so the strain names, the strain names are also not reliable indicators of what you’re getting. So you think you like white widow, but every time you’re getting white widow, you’re getting something different. So it is not really telling you much. Basically the conclusion is it’s a goddamn mess.

The whole thing is a mess. People are telling you things that are not true, and as a scientist, it’s our responsibility to say, okay, this is how not true it is. This is the degree of untruth in here and for an agricultural crop, it’s through the roof. With cannabis, there’s no bigger mess of any crop on the planet.

TG Branfalt:

There’s no sort of effort by the Canadian government, which has federally legalized cannabis to fix this at all. In your knowledge?

Sean Myles:

No, my words are generally ignored and that I’m not a policy pusher. I’m not the guy who goes and stands before parliament and tries to get things changed. Look, if people want to call it indica and sativa, whatever, naturopaths give you all sorts of sugar pills too, and then people believe in that. So I think you got to pick your battles. And we’ve published in the literature, we talk about it on podcasts, we’ve let people know that the evidence so far suggests that these labels that we’re applying to products are highly misleading when we talk to the marketing. I’ve had conversations with people who work in marketing and promotion in these cannabis companies too, and off record, they’re fully willing to admit, it’s like when we come out with a new strain, we just ask the breeders, just ask the marketing department, should we label this one incar or sativa?

What do we need more of? Right? There’s no holy shit. Yeah, there’s very little. So we wanted to see whether this was really the case across the board. In science, we always have a sample and we make an inference, but that doesn’t mean that it applies to everything in the world. So if you go and you measure how much people like bananas and you’ve got a sample of 12-year-old kids in Hawaii, it’s going to be different than how people like bananas elsewhere. So was our sample representative. So we got another set of samples in the 2021 paper. We went and worked with Bedrocan. It’s the biggest medical cannabis producer in Europe, and they’ve been collecting strains from the Dutch coffee shops for ages and propagating. And so that they would have this sort of base of genetic variation to breed from, and they were great to work with.

And so we also had over a hundred different strains, and they’re all, not only did we look at genetic information, but we also chemically analyzed them so that we could see, especially for these terpenes and these aromatic molecules, what kind of differences are there among all these strains? And so the same conclusion comes out in general that indica and sativa labeling are not good predictors of the genetics. They’re also fairly poor predictors of the chemical identity of the plant. But there are a few things that are correlated with the labeling, and they do line up with what people believe the differences are between indica and sativa. So generally people believe that indica strains are a little more sort of dank and skunky, little more forest floor kind of aromas kind of stuff. And we do find actually that on average the indica strains had higher levels of mercene, and that’s a molecule that’s often there’s an earthy aroma attributed to high mercene content.

And there’s also some evidence that there’s a sedative effect to mercene, which would go along with the couch lock that people talk about when it comes to indica strains. So there’s a little bit, the signal’s not strong. Look, there’s lots of sativa strains, things labeled as sativa that had high levels of mercene, and there’s lots interesting, lots of things labeled as indica that had very low levels of mercene. But on average, in our sample, we did find that the things labeled as indica, the more indica you had on average, you had more mercene. So that does line up with what people believe is also like indica labeling was correlated to with the amount of guil, gamma ol and beta ol. So if you had more of these, and those are also, they’re associated with plants from Afghanistan actually in original botanical literature, which is considered the region of origin cultivars.

So that kind of lines up too. Then on the sativa side, we looked at the sativa ones tended on average to have more bergin, and they have sort of tea and fruity aromas. They’re associated, those molecules are associated with fruit and tea, which is also in line with what people believe sativa cultivars to possess. So the first study basically said, this is a big load of hogwash and everybody should ignore the labels. The second study was like, ah, you know what? There are a few chemicals that are associated with whether you’re indica or sativa, the signal is not strong, but maybe that’s driving people to label the cultivars in the first place. You’re breeding stuff, mixing stuff up, like doing crosses. You get one that smells pretty skunky, you’re going to call it indica.

That’s basically what we’re saying is that the labeling is probably driven by a small number of aromatic molecules and their concentrations and what people associate with that. But it’s not the genetics of the plant in general. It’s not like there are two populations of plants, indica and sativa and never will the two mix, or that’s not the way it is. It’s probably that we’re labeling them because you sniff it, you go, whoa, man, this is skunky. I’m going to call this indica. Or Hey, this has got a bit of both. I’m going to call it a 50 50. So that’s what came out of those.

TG Branfalt:

Did the findings surprise you? Because for me, as somebody who’s come to the industry for 10 years, it’s not surprising to me. I did a podcast one time with a guy who went and did mass spectrometer analysis of cultivars, found blue dream in one dispensary in Las Vegas, Nevada, and then another dispensary in Las Vegas, Nevada, and found these are not even close to the same plant. But for you did, was it surprising to you?

Sean Myles:

No, I think it lines up with what we understand from the history of cannabis breeding. It was interesting though. I did present these results at CannaCon in 2020 maybe or something like that. I was at this cannabis conference, and of course there’s a whole bunch of people there have been involved in breeding cannabis for a really long time, and I got one of two responses. The one response was from people like you who were reasonable, rational people who were like, yeah, of course. I mean, we’ve been shuffling this stuff all over the place forever, and this indica sativa thing is probably, there’s not much to it. And then there were the others, or strain names too. They were like, ah, strain names. I wouldn’t trust them. But then there were quite a few people who found that the results of our study upsetting or disagreed with it so much that they approach you afterwards and they’re like, dude, I have the real white widow man. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I have the real white widow, and was like, that doesn’t make any sense, man. White widow isn’t a thing. We just demonstrated. I just showed you that the name white widow is associated with all sorts of different genetic profiles. So there is no original white widow. I don’t know. Maybe there was at some point or something, but you wouldn’t be able to prove it. There’s no plant breeders rights. There’s no patents. There’s no way of verifying this stuff. There’s no genetic marker that you can use to go and say, this is that we do in other crops. So I found it funny, and I don’t think that also indicates that it makes sense that the amount of confidence they have in their breeding material is inversely related to their ability to keep track of their material.

You can’t, as a breeder, if you don’t really keep track of things very well, of course you’re going to come out and say you’re super confident about what you have, and it almost goes the other way. The people who are the best breeders in the world and tracking huge corn breeding programs and stuff, you talk to them and they’ll be like, yeah, no, we expect about 5% error rate. We get things mixed up sometimes, for sure. Of course you do. So I found it funny that there was such an enormous amount of confidence about not mixing things up, and you’re like, dude, you’ve been breeding in your basement for 25 years on your own smoking weed. I figure you’re probably making some mistakes, right?

TG Branfalt:

Are you a cannabis consumer?

Sean Myles:

Yeah. Yeah.

TG Branfalt:

So when I go to dispensary and they say, do you look in? I really look at them and go, string names of bullshit. Give me something that smells like this. Right? So how do you sort of buy cannabis with this knowledge?

Sean Myles:

It is disappointing. I mean, the first thing they ask you every single time you go to a dispensary here, it’s sold by the government. So we have government stores. You walk in and there’s someone there, and the first thing they say is, do you indica or sativa? And I’m like, man, there’s no difference. You just wish you could say, I was like, so it would be nice. And some of them do do this. They’re starting to put on the packaging what the quantification of those compounds. I was talking about those monoterpenes, like mercene and guil and different things that people care about bergamot and farine so that you have an idea of like, is this a fruity tea like one or is this a dank kind of earthy one? And that’ll give you an idea. But then there’s that next step they take, which is all about this one is uplifting and this one is sedative, and the jury is definitely out on that. There’s no strong evidence anywhere from the literature that is the case

TG Branfalt:

Isn’t it all individual brain chemistry as well.

Sean Myles:

Pardon me?

TG Branfalt:

Isn’t it all individual brain chemistry as well?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, I mean, there’s differences between human individuals in the way that we’re going to metabolize these different compounds and have experiences that differ in the population. So yeah, it would take a lot of work to figure that out. And it’s true. You’ve pointed out that we are a little behind, right? With cannabis as a given that it is a medicine and it’s consumed for recreational use, our understanding of the plant is still lags far behind plants that are of equivalent economic value worldwide. This is a huge economy. It is just that it’s been underground for so long that we haven’t been able to pay as much attention to it as scientists and government scientists or university scientists because we don’t have access to it and we don’t have, or it’s been challenging to get access. So this is all opening up now, and I think over the next decade we’re going to learn a lot more. I guess the challenge is going to be whether this ever translates into any kind of policy change or any kind of change on the ground, because we know already that indica and sativa labeling is not a good way of labeling cannabis, and we also know that the old strain names are also not accurate, but we’re still using ’em and they’re still out there.

TG Branfalt:

So what could a post- indica/sativa marketplace look like to be more accurate in your opinion?

Sean Myles:

No, I think it could mimic the wine industry, except that these breeding programs would come up with new strains. These new strains would have a name. They would vegetatively propagate them, clonally propagate them properly, so that when you get a package and it says it’s this strain, it really is that strain. So when you buy a bottle of pinot noir, it really is pinot noir. I think it would also be helpful to, I don’t think you really need to quantify the amount of guile and mercene and all that kind of stuff on the back of a bottle of Pinot. It doesn’t tell you how much of these particular aromas there are. They just describe it, right? They say, this pinot exhibits nice aromas of earthy aromas and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and fresh fruit on the nose. You’re like, okay, great. And I could see the cannabis world moving in that direction where let’s not worry about the indica sativa thing. Let’s just focus on what does it taste like and what’s the name of the strain? And if they can get the strain sorted out so that give them new names from these new producers, new breeding programs that can keep track of their material and actually verify that it is really that strain, then that would be a big step forward, I think, for the industry.

TG Branfalt:

Going back to broader research, how is cannabis research different from the other agricultural research that you’ve done, or even just different from more non-cannabis agricultural research in general?

Sean Myles:

Yeah. I mean, a lot of agricultural genetics, research and breeding, it ties in with the breeding, a lot of the breeding targets. What you want to achieve as a breeder in a lot of crops is shelf life ability to be shipped long distances. Rarely is it, it’s almost very rarely is it aroma, right? Whereas in cannabis, it’s like cannabis has a fascinating profile of aromas. If anyone who’s had the opportunity to go and actually smell diverse strains of cannabis at flowering nice and fresh, it is unbelievable how different they can smell. And it’s not that different from grapes. If you taste a muca grape, a fully ripe muskat grape and compare it to a fully ripe Shiraz, oh, they’re just worlds apart. It’s just completely different. And these are all these metabolic pathways that differ because of the genetics of these plants that breeders have sort of been mixing and matching over time.

It’s really fascinating. So aren’t a whole lot of crops in the world where such an enormous amount of attention is paid to that fine sort of aroma bit where the breeding target is actually an aromatic profile and not just how do we make it last on the shelf longer, which is kind of a more boring kind of thing to target. So yeah, I think that’s what attracted me to it, is that it’s a little bit like we work in apples and grapes and apples and grapes are kind of those kind of crops, right? It’s got to be something special about the crunch of the apple or the taste of the apple or the smell of that wine, that kind of thing. And cannabis, it’s highly similar, right? It’s unlike a carrot. The thing is, there’s really only three crops in the world where we actually name varieties.

And those varieties or that variety names are well known to the public. When you buy a carrot at the store, you don’t know what variety of carrot it is. Nobody tells you, oh, this is the Caesar carrot. Nobody cares. It’s a carrot. And in potatoes, you’ve got a little bit like you’ve got the Yukon potato, you got the russet potato. There’s a bit in tomatoes, they have shapes and sizes, but you really don’t go with the, you got the cherry tomato in the Roma tomato, but you don’t have names of tomatoes. But in wine, you definitely have names. And Pinot noir has been grown for a thousand years. Clonally propagated for a thousand years, Cabernet, souvignon and convert, and Riesling and so on. All of these names are named varieties. In Apple, we have ’em, honey Crisp, Macintosh Gala, so on. And in cannabis we do, but name another crop in the world where we’ve got that it belongs to a very special subset of things that are so intimately tied with our culture and that we have associated names to specific genetic identities. Unfortunately, that all got screwed up in cannabis where it’s not actually really associated with the genetic identity, but we want to, there’s a desire to, and that’s really unique. It stands on a platform with only a couple of other crops in the world where people really do care which variety they get. That’s something to tap into. That’s amazing. It sits in a very, very unique group of crops, for sure.

TG Branfalt:

A lot of people that I’ve spoken to have sort of projected that the cannabis industry should, and as you sort of mentioned already does in many ways mirror the wine industry. There’s cannabis sommeliers now, for example. Is it the estimation as well that this will ultimately be the look and feel of a sort of mature cannabis industry, especially in Canada, which is obviously going to be decades ahead of the US?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, I think I have a very poor ability to predict the future, but if I were to express a hope, that would certainly be my hope that it would move in that direction. So that strain names were reliable indicators of what’s inside your package, and that the description of the kinds of experiences that you would, or the aromatics and the type of flavor that you would get from a cannabis strain are accurately depicted on the package as well.

TG Branfalt:

And I want to ask you, did broad cannabis legalization in Canada change the landscape for cannabis research in the country?

Sean Myles:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No. If you think about how cannabis research gets done in the United States, in fact, I was in the United States when I started investigating the potential of doing some cannabis genetics research and quickly discovered that it was going to be impossible to do anything in

TG Branfalt:

Was at Cornell.

Sean Myles:

I was at Stanford at the time, actually, and that was impossible to do. And so I contacted a Canadian up in, at the time was in Saskatchewan doing research on hemp, and they said, yeah, no problem. I mean, we’re growing the stuff here in our federal research station, and it’s going to become legal soon, so this is going to blow everything up. This is the perfect time to get into this. So since then, yeah, I mean, when you want to do research, especially as an academic, like me, a professor at a university, you want to do research into a crop. Generally, your first step is to go and develop a relationship with industry. And previously you couldn’t do that with Gs, right? You couldn’t say, oh, yeah, well, the new sponsor of my research on this next project is the guy down the road.

You can’t do that. So now that there are real industrial players on board, there’s a lot of industry academic research collaborations that leverage government funding. So the government is putting money into investigating all sorts of things about cannabis, a lot on the medical side too, and the effects that it has, and on the public safety side. So at what age, when should people be consuming? What does it really do to your brain? What levels are dangerous? These sorts of things. And this is all necessary. This is good. So I think it’s good for an industry to do that stuff to get ahead of the ball and make sure that you’re the ones pushing that agenda of, we want to know more about this crop, and we want the public to be aware of what it is. And I think that will all lead to more precise information being given to the consumer, which is, that’s the goal.

TG Branfalt:

What are some of the holes that still persist when it comes to the agricultural side of cannabis research?

Sean Myles:

I think better sampling for sure. We’ve done a couple of these small studies. There’s a couple of other studies that have been done on diverse samples of cannabis to get an idea of what the genetic structure really looks like. How well does the labeling actually reflect the genetic identity of the plants? And these sorts, do strain names make any sense anywhere. Just because we do it in a couple of samples, one from the Netherlands and one from Canada doesn’t mean that it’s the case everywhere. So I think just more broader sampling for sure. And then the next step is to implement those kinds of insights that we’re getting from breeding to generate novel varieties that perform better, that require less chemical input to grow. So one of the big things is to try to introduce powdering mildew resistance into strains. There’s a lot of disease damage in cannabis and a lot of challenges growing in indoors like that and spider mites and things like some kind of resistance to some of the main pests. And then there’s also like auto flowering and things like that. But could we get a better generation time? Could we get more energy in the plant going into the bud rather than vegetative growth? So all these things, those are going to be like the breeding targets of the future going to be how, because it’s become industrial, it is going to be very much, how do we generate more cannabis per square foot?

And I think that’s going to be aided by a lot of this genetics research that’s being done.

TG Branfalt:

And finally, what advice do you have for researchers interested in exploring some of these cannabis topics?

Sean Myles:

I think talk to industry members and find out where the need is, right? It’s nice to be able to do academic research for the sake of doing research, and that’s great. If you got money to do it and it’s all from the government, that’s great, but really, you got to find where the itch is and then go try to scratch it. So if you talk to industry members and they say, look, our biggest problem right now is X, then what can you do to go and try to address X? And that’s the next steps are going to, that’s where the big wins are going to be over the next decade.

TG Branfalt:

It’s really fascinating stuff. There’s, again, not a lot of people really on the forefront of answering these questions, so I really do appreciate you taking the time to come and explain some of these things and really sort of enlighten people. I think about this sort of dichotomy, as it were. Where can people find out more about you and more about the research that you do?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, we’ve got a website for the lab. We’re cultivatingdiversity.org. Dot org. You can check us out. We’re a small lab just doing our thing up here in Canada, and all of our publications are listed there. Most of what we do is work on apples, you’ll see. But it’s good to dip our fingers in the cannabis every once in a while. I mean,

TG Branfalt:

The studies that we’ve done have been cited hundreds and hundreds of times.

Sean Myles:

Yeah, yeah. No, it’s obviously it’s a popular plant to work on. If I did this stuff in quinoa, I don’t think anybody would be very interested. So when you do something, you do research on cannabis and reveal something that’s of interest to the public, then it inevitably produces some public interest. Right.

TG Branfalt:

Well, this has been Dr. Sean Myles. He’s an associate professor of agriculture at Dalhousie University. I really, really appreciate your time coming onto the show, man, and can’t wait to see what else you produce in the future.

Sean Myles:

Yeah, thanks, Tim. Thanks for the chat. I appreciate it.

TG Branfalt:

You can find the episodes of the Ganjapreneur.com podcast in the podcast section of Ganjapreneur.com or wherever you get your podcast. On the Ganjapreneur.com website, you’ll find the latest cannabis news and cannabis jobs Daily, daily, along with transcripts of this podcast. You can also download the Ganjapreneur.com app in iTunes and Google Play. This episode was engineered by Way Sound Studios. I’ve been your host, TG Branfalt.

 

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