Episode 52 – Steve Philpott – Cannabis and Science

In this intriguing episode, I engage in a compelling conversation about the intriguing intersection of science and cannabis with Steve Philpott. Our discussion navigates through the fascinating landscape of the cannabis industry’s marketing terminology, shedding light on crucial distinctions like hemp versus “regular marijuana” and dissecting terms like “sativa” and “indica.” Join us as we unveil the intriguing disparity between these commonly used industry terms and their alignment with scientific precision!

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getting a joint rolled up too while I do this this is the Cole memo I’m your host Cole Preston every episode is released in audio video and transcript format to find the transcript audio or video version of any episode please refer to the description of the episode that you’re listening to now within that description you can find a link that will take you to our website which will display the transcript for this episode and the platforms where you can find this episode in audio and video formats if you’re unable to locate that episode description on whichever platform you’re listening from Simply note the episode number and visit the co memo.com from there you can find the corresponding episode and then you’ll be able to access the audio video and transcripts you might also find any links that we reference during this episode so that you might be able to do your own research that’s always encouraged if you’re not listening to this episode of the co memo on patreon then you’re listening to this episode later than our patrons to become a patron go to the memo.com patreon once again that’s the e Co memo.com Pat o n it’s a great way to directly support our show if you didn’t know our show is supported by listeners like you uh but of course one of the best ways to support our show is free subscribe to or follow our show leave us a positive review from wherever you’re listening to us from favorite this episode give it a thumbs up your engagement and support is appreciated today is January 19th 2024 and I am rolling up a joint at long last with uh a friend I I think somebody who’s going to become a friend of mine Steven Philpot now is it stepen or Steve I should have asked you before I came on air no you’re good my name is Stephen but I go by Steve cool Steve thanks for uh sitting down with me today why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to my audience yeah absolutely um I guess real quick I am um born and raised in Chicago um went to high school out in the in suburbs home of Flossmore High School um After High School I went straight to the Marine Corps um served in the Marines for four years um was going to do a career but actually broke my leg while I was on deployment um ended up having a bunch of surgeries and um you know when you get surgeries that you get screws in your legs they like to give you opioids that’s right um and at the time I was very fortunate because I was in as soon as the NFL started talking about concussions and tbis the Marine Corps and Military were also talking about it at the same time a lot of people were exposed to explosions while they were deployed and I was in an artillery unit so explosions was like part of the job description yeah you shoot cannons um but it was really um really really eye openening when they gave me those opioids um I had some pretty wild nightmares solution ations just you know you take it says take as needed so the first perco set you’re like um I can tell it reduce the pain but I need more the second one you’re like this is good but a third one would help me sleep and at the point that you’re taking opioids to help you get to sleep when it’s time to come off of them it’s just really difficult so long story short man I knew a guy who overdosed on the same pills that I was taking um recovering from my surgery and it kind of just the I don’t know the concept just freaked me out like I know I know it’s legal but he died taking something that was legal and I’m not interested so uh one of my buddies best friends business partner um Earl Lawrence um he had cancer when he was younger and he was the first person I knew to consume and it was for a medical reason because he had cancer when he was younger um and I had like done the the I didn’t I didn’t inhale before um but this was the first time he was like no man if you don’t like those opioids like try this and six foot bong gravity bong like gas mask joints and honestly like as crazy as it sounds to people for three days I didn’t take um peret and I had a metal plate that had been drilled on my leg so this was real pain um yeah and that kind of sent me off like that was the aliceon Wonderland like all right now I need to know more um so yeah this was 10 11 years ago I got out the military 2023 wow well thank you for your service and I’m sorry that that that’s you know something that you came out of the service with but I am glad you found cannabis along the way you know absolutely and that it was able to help you um which is always the hope well um I was reminded we have been chatting for a while about doing a show and I was reminded of your name when I was in a Chicago normal meeting the other day I can’t remember exactly how it came up up but I guess it was one of your students they said yeah my professor uh Steven Philpot and I was like why does that name sound familiar and I like started searching through my phone and I was like oh I’ve been talking to this person but um and that’s why I messaged you was like Hey I just heard your name in this meeting so in case you wanted more context on that that’s oh that that’s pretty awesome I mean we’ll get more into like I gave you my background but my cannabis experience was like a 180 yeah it was it was a pivot in the right direction and part of it was was bringing students with me like anybody who wanted to know education every time I learned something every time I read like a new research paper I was like hey you know that stuff I just taught you all last semester research came out and as a professor like I’m open to change I’m like hey the stuff we learned last semester there’s more information now and they were like oh we’re still learning I’m like so now you see why the industry is in such flux because it’s not stable so I’m glad that my student uh had something good to say yeah yeah no for sure and uh why don’t we yeah talk about how uh so you basically just told us how you found cannabis but yeah do you mind running us through how you got professionally involved in cannabis I feel like that’s a cool story yeah absolutely so um once I got out the military um I was interested in Fitness obviously because when you break your leg and get a metal plate in your leg and the peak shape of like military Fitness a lot of changes like I gained weight you know what I mean I felt very different um and I just wanted to know it’s all I wanted to know so I took my GI Bill the first thing I did was I got my associates and fitness and exercise became a group trainer personal trainer um I worked with senior citizens in like special populations all the way to like young athletes who were training for like college and stuff um after I got my associates in fitness and exercise I was like I’m a little more curious if there’s more to exercise there’s something deeper about health and wellness and mental health like just as a black man growing up we hear a lot of our like African traditions and stuff and drum circles and you’re like H I don’t know about these drum circles and now you get older and like you can pay to go get sound healing with drum circles right so um I got my bachelor’s in kinesiology and a minor in nutrition so Kinesiology is the study of human mechanics how the body works like how do you walk like all the way down to the physiology of like your inner workings what makes your heartbeat your circadian rhythm um I did that for six to eight years coached D1 Sports um coached an NCAA coached Pro Sports I was a sports scientist where I used to travel around the country and collect data on athletes so I would get to sit on the sideline with an iPad and I’d see like all right you know your point guard has run three miles you know your Center hasn’t run more than so we had numbers on everybody live in sports and we would help people essentially reduce their stress and increase their performance that’s the number one thing athletes want to do reduce stress increase performance well one I found out that no matter what the data shows mental stress will decrease your performance even if you’re in Peak Physical I mean like Prime you have prepared for this your entire life for this one moment and if you’re undergoing mental stress your numbers will actually drop your body just will not respond um so I got super interested in that concept obviously haven’t been injured before um and during covid I know it sounds crazy when covid hit um I decided to make a change and we had just legalized um I had already been consuming I did the like from CBD to like vaping to like flow to like the appreciation of flow kind of blowing my mind mind open and turn it into something else I got certified through the triome institute in 2019 and shout out to Max montros and then after that um I decided to apply for a job at a dispensary now you know this and this is the This Is The Stuff we’re going to get into this is your investigative uh journalism uh that I like so I was getting calls from people I never met before essentially saying hey are you a veteran hey you’re black right okay do you live in a community that’s disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs I’m like damn that last one was real specific like what and people would be like um do you want to have majority ownership in the Cannabis company and I was just like okay like you know I was born at night but not last night so what’s the catch and they’ be like oh no you know there’s no catch and I’m like why are you calling me to offer me an opportunity and and then I started reading the laws and it was like oh if 50% of the people who you employ right are of this certain designation you get the designation whether right you are of social Equity or not right um so I was like you know I’m not going to do that but I do want to work in the industry because I if it if it’s going to be legal I don’t know anybody who’s going to get a business this is before we knew what a MSO was we were still just going cool it’s going to be legal people in California Colorado were telling us guys look out you’re going to see a grandma okay she’s really a wolf she’s going to be dressed up like a grandma though so um all that to say the first company to hired me they didn’t actually tell me their name until I got there and who it ended up being I was an inventory manager and agent in charge AIC for a pharmacan for ver life so I started off working in the in the suburbs they have a dispensary in the suburbs I forgot what it’s called that was a medical facility that they had bought and changed so it was half medical half wreck as soon as we went wreck and then eventually the medical went out and it was all recreational so I saw that happen like month by month I saw all the changes that were going on when we legalized it was very unstable um so from there I helped them open the store in Rosemont there’s one out by the airport you know there’s a little Plaza by Rosemont um ver life has a dispensary over there beautiful dispensary um but the issue you know we were saying is very corporate it looks like an Apple Store um and then the dispensary that ended up being my home store was downtown in River North so in my mind I was like if I’m a dispensary manager downtown River North come on man like you telling me we can’t make enough money to where all the employees can you know get bonuses and we can hit our numbers first off our store was like not labeled right because it was a dispensary it couldn’t be you couldn’t identify it you couldn’t find it m yeah so it was just like that and you know the culture was very very washed out of everything if you ever seen Pharm can labels they have the most unexpecting like you know it just it doesn’t catch your eye there was not a lot of marketing and stuff to it so we had issue keeping up with our competitors and I think what kind of did it for me when I wanted to definitely move along is when the inventory I realized was from all of our competitors so when you see the Manifest that you’re getting as an inventory manager you can see every shipment of every company and I’m like okay we’re farming can but we’re getting this from Cresco we getting this from GTI so we all sell the same stuff at every dispensary that’s more of a Walgreens than that is like a California or a Denver dispensary that’s a rinse and repeat so I met the CEO my company he was really really cool actually to be honest I don’t know who he was I don’t remember his name but because we were down town you know their headquarters is downtown and they they would often come over there and eat lunch in the dispensary I’m like hey I don’t think they’re supposed to even legally be in the building like but the thing was like they would come over there and they were chilling and one day I told the CEO and I were talking about like the science of cannabis and stuff he was like man you’re super smart you’re not going to be here long and I was like what he was like yeah yeah no you’re not going to be here long because like this is ret he was very transparent he was like it’s retail like he didn’t sugarcoat it he didn’t beat around the bush he was just like this is retail and like the stuff you’re talking about is very very very high level he and I were talking about intermittent fasting that’s what we were talking about yeah and I was talking about how the Cannabis that we sold downstairs was related to like metabolism and human physiology he just kind of looked at me like bro what right yeah no no you’re gonna you’re definitely gonna want to go somewhere else because this is retail so that’s when I enrolled um in a master’s degree at Chicago State and um in environmental biology yeah to your point there I like that he they were so honest about it because it is at least in Illinois it is very much like that and an analogy I can make is like you don’t have to be a medical expert from what I understand to work at like GNC or one of those like health supplement stores you don’t have to be you don’t really have to like be certified or or be a mechanic to work at AutoZone but people might approach you at that job and ask you like a [ __ ] really nuanced question and you’re just supposed to be like bro we sell oil and the tools like you got to figure that [ __ ] out I’m not like a mechanic so but to your point that’s how they’ve structured these stores in Illinois where it’s like it’s just a retail front and really like all of that Nuance that you were like discussing and thinking about and like trying to help people with he like very quickly and bluntly was just like yeah dude that’s way above what we’re trying to do here we’re just trying to give people boxes get them in get them out make some money yeah I mean I was like I was trying I had um local artists and I was just like hey you know we have boring designs I’m trying to talk to corporate and see if we can get cool designs that are driven like writt you know um marked up by local artists we can highlight like local like that would be a great partnership don’t you think this giant business might look better and just disappeared they were like we have so many other things to focus on you think we care about that and I’m like you don’t understand the revenue that you’re looking for the culture is part of what you’re missing and after a while I was like oh I’m not even this isn’t the place for this like right I can do this other places so while I was enrolled in my masters doing my own research I also taught at Olive Harvey so you’re talking about my student um Olive Harvey when we went wreck um they got a license one of seven colleges received a license through the Illinois Department of Agriculture um through the vocational College cannabis program something like that yeah um but the license gave seven colleges an opportunity to grow uh to cultivate manufacture extract test process and transport cannabis and when I heard that I was like yo Olive Harvey’s like 10 minutes from Chicago State and I I called them I was like whatat are you all doing with it you have this amazing license and they were like we’re not really sure what to do yet but I knew that they already had like donations from the msos you know what I mean um they already had donations from Cresco GTI for that that Greenhouse that was behind the school um and part of through part of my research I knew researchers that were getting like State funds to do hemp research yeah so originally the license was to do marijuana research I said if you do marijuana research on a state like campus like a academic institution that’s funded by the state and the federal government you lose your Fasto right and they were like oh I said yes it’s still schedule One funds like so what you can do is you can grow hemp and you can use it as a proxy like Flor like as a biologist cannabis the species is one species there’s no hemp there’s no marijuana so what we did was we registered in the Midwest H database program and the cult of our check program I have like 15 students um that came into the greenhouse every day after class and they were some of the first students to grow hemp at an academic institution in the city of Chicago and I taught them about you know physiology I taught them about living soil Hydroponics humidity uh UV radiation like we got so in depth um I think a couple three or four of my students actually have life licenses now um so it was a very very impactful class I really liked it and to be honest you know I won’t go too in depth but if it wasn’t for you know traditional Academia and politics like that program could have really been something um from what I’ve heard they haven’t been growing since that Greenhouse is still there you can go see it right now um but yeah all everybody who taught in the department with me no longer there the only person left is is the dean so um yeah damn yeah like I Googled it looks like it was called the Illinois Community College cannabis vocational pilot program lot of words yep that’s the one yeah but the other seven colleges you know the purpose of that that bill was the reason it’s community colleges I learned this community colleges are made to increase Workforce they’re not like Bachelor and graduate programs so if you go to a community college it’s for you to get a skill to get a job so when the state put that clause in there it was for those seven community colleges to help people get jobs in this new industry that’s supposed to be worth a gajillion dollars right but what we found out is the turnover rate is insane hourly workers in cannabis when I was an inventory manager we were constantly hiring for our hourly salaries because people weren’t trained to the standards of what they needed to work in such a regulated retail store like yes it’s retail yes everybody likes to you know consume but this shit’s retail like this biotrack Stu all this stuff like there’s specific protocols there’s Sops and there’s like somebody who was a marine I worked in an Armory so working in the cage in the vault it made perfect sense to me like you got to close certain doors you got to open them a certain way like their standards and a lot of people would be like come on man yeah come on and I’m like do I really have to close the door type of thing right yeah and it’s just like hey you know if I tell you that the state police do random inspections how’ you feel about that and it’s like oh [ __ ] okay so a lot of people complain about like the legal cannabis side but they don’t have the experience so I was fortunate enough to as a disabled veteran be a homeg grower so I was all you know I know you I know you’re a big big guy hom grow yeah hom grow was kind of like gave me the confidence to go back to school nice on my own property right so while I’m in school researching I’m like well if I have a license I can grow my own stuff that is not hemp at home legally I was like that’s genius I can grow at home so everything I was learning in school I would apply immediately at home so I grew I would clone and I would do like hydroponic versus soil in the same grow environment same genetics and stuff like that so I could also teach my students and that pipeline just kept going um and once it was done you know I finished my masters got recruited to go to Cornell University where the USDA can his germ plasm collection is um or North Carolina State and I ultimately chose North Carolina State but I do still do work with um with Cornell frequently so yeah what was that thing at Cornell that you mentioned so the the USDA germ plasm collection so that is the largest and oldest collection of cannabis seeds that the US owns they have genetics from uh hemp for victory cool when the USDA was paying farmers to gr hemp um they have genetics from other countries they have genetics that have been bred at universities like Cornell and University Wisconsin and University of Kentucky NC State they have all those genetics so that’s what a germ plasm collection is it’s a seed bank essentially um and that is one of the sources that I have access you know at this University that I’m now attending very cool very cool well that’s that’s awesome um I’m not I’m trying not to take us on too many tangents just your experience uh your experience is like oh what do makes me want to ask what do you think about this what do you think about that but I want to get through your story first like chronologically like how we got to where we are today uh was that I I was trying to follow along did you did you kind of lead us to where you are today or was there more no no that was it so after I finished my master’s degree I published my research got recruited by those schools I finished teaching um at Olive Harvey and actually moved to North Carolina last uh last summer so now I’m doing my PhD at NC State and I actually switched over from what I call as a scientist floral cannabis um I’m now working with fiber um and grain cannabis because to me I want to be knowledgeable on every form that exists um I realized I knew a lot about flow but there’s more people with fiber experience than my flow experience so people who don’t know about fiber you’re excluding a large part of the same plant that you’re just saying you don’t care about and if I could maybe there’s more to it than this so please you know piggyback off of me here but would the the main difference between floral and fiber cannabis be that like floral is probably more like you know for human consumption but fiber might be more for like industrial purposes like making hemp creep or something close % exactly what you just described and it’s just a matter of resources so plants can only allocate their resources so much towards one goal so there are certain plants that have been bred where it looks like they have a um a gene that’s essentially inactive so the gene that would make cannabinoids it looks like that Gene is inactive and so those plants are just more they produce more fiber they don’t produce canono on that same uh high concentrations like we would see in FL oral cannabis also when we when we use Fiber cannabis we only use vegetative growth so we actually Harvest at flowering as soon as we see flowering we actually Harvest that makes sense I always wondered why I was actually about to pull up hemp for victory to show like what some of the old the hemp looks like in the the footage because it just looks like tall and stocky and bamboo um interesting that is yeah so I mean if you think about um so like one of the labs or one of the trials that we work on you know in in my lab one of my one of my Lab Partners Sam she did a density trial and you know just for one variety this doesn’t go for everything right but there was one variety that she found you know it grows well at 1 million plants per acre so if you just consider like 1 million plants per acre that’s extremely dense yeah it’s like bamboo like you can’t see through the plots floral cannabis you can never do that right because it needs exactly like this yep so yeah I mean we have plants that are 12 to 15 feet in 120 days with no irrigation no synthetic fertilizers yep and you want them about pencil thick wow y so somewhere between a Sharpie and a number two pencil which is about what those are yeah they self thin organic don’t need a lot of water they do really well in drought um so I was interested in in you know learning about fiber and grain as well too because grain is another one you know people don’t really know about um like using it for like animal feed would that be the idea there or yeah so you know for the BD that we consume we want high cannabinoids so in order to do that we want unpollinated female flowers yeah if those female flowers get pollinated will duh right we get seeds those seeds right can actually be used to press cuz they’re super high in fats like healthy fats and that’s how you get HP seed oil right they’re like super rich in omega-3 fatty acids or something like that yes so exactly what you just said so if you crack the shells and you take the actual hemp part out what they call it that they feed to animals and the um like chickens it actually increases the ratio of omega3 to Omega 6 in their EG which increases the value of eggs for for Farmers so Texas just approved um hemp seed for poultry fee nice so there’s a lot of stuff going on but every state operates itself individually and it’s very very difficult to keep up with different states policies when they have one towards hemp and one towards marijuana and one towards medical and you got 50 states right and that is one of the topics I was trying to keep my hold myself back on when I saw your credentials and I saw you had so much experience in hemp and one of the things that you specifically said that I wish I could remember exactly what you said but you said something to the effect of from a scientist’s standpoint they’re all the same genus or what did you say something like that yeah so um so species so you want to just let’s you want to just do this now just hit this this conversation yeah so uh Indica sativa my favorite favorite to talk about because you can sash the narrative in 45 seconds yeah so who came up with terms Inda and sativa that’s the easiest way to squash the conversation Carl anaus the guy who made taxonomy like when we use like genus species species real quick for people Homo sapiens for example that’s genus species y exactly yeah so great example so Cannabis sativa right so um Carl is the person who made that whole system um he was a scientist who studied plants so cannabis was one of the plants he studied now this was in 1753 and the Cannabis he discovered was in Europe so farmers were already using this for fiber so he called it Cannabis sativa because the word sativa or sativum is Latin for cultivated there’s tons of plants you can Google and they have the word sativa afterwards it’s not because they’re in and give you a head it’s because the word sativa means cultivated so that’s all it means now almost 30 years later John Baptist Lamar was in India and Lamar also was like oh this looks exactly like cannabis it’s the same flowering structure but it’s a lot shorter it’s a lot bushier and the Indian people aren’t making fiber from it they are using it for Spiritual purposes they are consuming it they are there’s a medical aspect to it so he named it cannabis Indica Indica is obviously right it means of India and the only the only place that’s actually found is in Greek literature um Greek and Latin literature um so very easy Inda means of India sativa means cultivated they don’t mean anything else everything else we added to them is our opinions yeah and I want to give you more space on this but just real quick I’m sorry uh I know I feel like and I could Google this right now and I will but I feel like I Know Carl lus from learning about him in human bio in high school he was the guy that did stuff with bean plants they conveniently never told us about his experience on cannabis plants but I believe he did like Gene genetic testing on bean plants am I wrong on that I’m Googling right now I always you might be thinking about mindle Gregory mle yeah I am Gregor Mell I always get I always get them mixed up now why now my second question again I’m sorry for jumping in the middle of this but why do I know the name John Baptist L Mark U so he was an evolutionary biologist um thank you and he like I said he was the one who so this is what I love and this is why cannabis has such bigger conversations these people it’s not like some random person was like who came up with the word Cannabis sativa the person who made taxonomy that’s the one who came up with the name Cannabis sativa all of that so it means something right so let’s let’s take 30 seconds out to learn that okay so now telling you that they had this was in the 1700s what you just said about DNA we didn’t know about DNA till 1860 so there was no way when the word indica and sativa were used it had anything to do with genetics it is impossible just based on a timeline so that’s why as a scientist it’s very fun to just look up facts and you have to piece them together but indica and sativa came from assumptions so if they were cultivating it guess what that was more like what Industrial Hemp that we were talking about yeah and it is crazy how these cannabis companies one of the questions you asked I thought you were going to go in a different way you you gave the factual answer when you asked earlier who came up with indica and sativa I thought I was going to go the dispensaries somebody in the dispensary came up with the idea to push it that’s who remixed it that’s that’s who remixed it yeah but but think about this it also you kind of see where it started right so if hemp or Cannabis sativa that was cultivated was in Europe and indica was in India and they were using it for medicinal purposes there likely was originally some type of difference where one was more sedative and one was more energizing however the researchers that I know that have published these well cited papers sativa and indica have no genetic reliability when you look at the DNA there’s and the DNA is what makes canab noid and turpine so that’s what matters the DNA says sativa and indar are just words that we use and there’s no genetic reliability you’re better off looking at chemicals and chemical like profiles yeah well said well just back to the broader topic that I feel like we were about to touch on just kind of In The Same Spirit of misconceptions I feel like right now and I did actually kind of quote you yeah there’s this confusion that hemp and what I’m smoking right now is different and I say that because there will be products like this I bought this it’s a thca product and I’ve had some people understand that this is just weed but then I’ve had other people comment and they’ll be like why you smoking that synthetic stuff that fake weed and I is that frustrating for you for you to hear as a person that knows the the difference and by difference I mean lack thereof yeah I mean let’s hit on the Delta 8 and thca at the same time because I think it gives two very good contrast um as a researcher it’s actually infuriating because these are chemicals right and they actually mean things and somehow we’re widely misinterpret the purpose of them let’s start with the purpose right cannabis uh is a flower it is in the category of angiosperms which are flowers all the flowers you love roses some flowers same right um same group of plant with that being said all of those plants when we smell right you smell those those pungent odors those are actually stress responses right so all the plants you love to smell the smell that you are that they are protruding out into the atmosphere it could be for pest it could be for herbivores it could be for response to high humidity they are producing these molecules as stress response now what’s interesting is when we consume them what do they do in our body stress response right it’s pretty wild there’s not a lot of molecules that a plant and human use the same right make sense yeah so when we’re talking about a flower we’re talking about these molecules it’s producing thca the purpose of thca is a UV protectant that is its biological purpose we know because if you think about a rainbow right everybody talks about LED lights and full spectrum lights uh Dr Bruce bugby out of Utah State University has a really good study where he showed that more red light which is lower energy and a longer wavelength it makes the plants grow taller because they think they’re in shade it’s lower energy so the plants grow a lot taller and have a higher biomass so you would say hey I want to grow in red light because I got a higher bio biomass higher yield guess what lower canabo profile the ones that they grew in more blue and more purple lights were way way smaller but guess what higher can avonoid yield so that’s why full spectrum with both of those type of Lights is undefeated it is the most optimal all that to say thca is a naturally occurring it is the naturally occurring form of THC I tell people THC itself isn’t even you know produced by the plant the plant only produces acidic cannabinoids because cannaboids are toxic to plants that’s why they put them in tricomes see what I’m saying so t CA is natural not only is it natural it’s the preferred form that plants make and when humans consume it it is not active because it still has that a on the end we all know once it’s decarbox it’s just THC Bing the loophole issue is the government made the mistake not us they said hemp good marijuana bad and people asked over and over again when the Delta a stuff popped up we were like hey this is technically hemp CB dominant flower that’s been washed with solvents and now converted into Delta 8 and they were like hemp good marijuana bad we were like even Delta eight and then you saw hhc THC and I was like oh [ __ ] CU if that’s the case then hemp and marijuana are the same thing and you you’re saying it thca is the proof that now it’s all the same thing so yeah people are always like thca is synthetic no thca is the natural occurring form of THC and this loophole or great area right now is that if it’s not decarbox it’s hemp because the definition hemp is based on a number that’s the you see what I’m saying that’s the issue but the truth is I was like if that’s the case then all hemp is legal like all marijuana is legal until it’s lit on fire or decarbed right or as this m i mean right as this meme says wait it’s all phca always has been oh man that’s good is that from uh what’s that movie oh man I can’t remember I can’t remember I just see it as yeah yeah the in or what Interstellar yeah yeah I’m not sure if that’s what it’s from but I that Meme format is just funny oh trust me that’s it I’m a big sci-fi sci-fi fan but uh but yeah um so I that’s just been an interesting thing for me and just to kind of put it back to what you said just try to explain it again shortly for maybe a Layman like if you’ve ever had to make pot brownies the reason you have to decarbox as you just said that’s the key word there folks if you didn’t know what that word means that means to activate the THC in your your product um and I I’ve personally made the mistake of not doing that um and then you find out like why aren’t these brownies giving any effect well I didn’t have and let’s be clear let’s be very clear still a ton of health benefits to consuming raw flour like one of my things you know that I talk about is by definition cannabis is a superfood so superfood isn’t a legal definition it’s an arbitrary word we use for stuff that’s rich in like antioxidants vitamins minerals so think about it all the fads we’ve seen in our lifetime pomegranate avocado like every year there’s a superfood of the year it was beats a couple years ago like uh asai berries right so like by definition not only does cannabis qualifi but it’s more diverse than all of those all of those have a very specific like pomegranates don’t have a 100 different flavor profiles pomegranates are pomegranates cannabis has all these flavor profiles which means it has various benefits a lot of various benefits we thought we were crazy like oh cannabis fixes my grandma’s rheumatoid arthritis but also my little cousin’s epilepsy and also my anxiety it’s like okay it doesn’t fix everything it’s like it doesn’t have to it produces enough versatile compounds where if we did the research we could learn a lot more instead of just going more THC please it’s like hey there’s there’s 200 compounds we should stop focusing on THC and I think a lot of people right now that’s kind of the phase they’re in they want to know more about turps and quality and right they don’t like that H they’re like people say yeah I smoked something and they gave me a headache and I ask them where they got it from I asked them if it’s Delta 8 and they’re like oh yeah this is I took the th000 milligram delta8 gummy I’m like oh man what that’s funny um yeah so it’s just interesting how it started now I guess I should ask you about that um but I want to I’ll complete my thought really quick but I’ll round it out to a a question that you just brought up and I feel like you might be able to actually drop some knowledge on um that that I don’t know the answer to like so this whole I feel like debate at least in Illinois got really contentious and I felt started with this story about students actually purchasing Delta eight and as the story went they overdosed and such um and it’s constantly people point to this story of these kids that that purchased the delta8 somehow and uh I’m so the way I saw it was that it started as like a public health safety concern but then when hemp operators came out and said hey we’re willing to meet those standards that you’re concerned about like in other words we will test our products we will require them to be age to have an age limit on them we will even pay taxes if that’s another thing you’re concerned about that we’re profiting more than than the other operators and then instead of it being a conversation about the health concerns cuz the hemp operators basically addressed that it became a a debate about open licensing and limited licensing I don’t mean to get into that right now what I wanted to ask you about is are there any health concerns and maybe we don’t know all the answers right now but like look I would never prefer to to do Delta 8 but I’ll be honest the first place I ever tried Delta 8 was in an Illinois dispensary and this was in like 2019 when I had my medical card um and so you know that that’s a easy anecdote for me to bring up um but I’m just curious like Delta a any of these canabo that you’ve heard about are there um health concerns that that are actually like legitimate because I don’t mean to downplay them um yeah uh I would say yes and I hate using sugar as an example but sugar is one of the best examples I can use you ready and the reason is because because you can have raw organic sugar cane super healthy for you super organic you can have the refined purified bleached chemicalized version of that and then you can have the super processed version which is high fructose cor syrup that’s essentially where we are now you have raw cannabis you have Delta 8 which comes from raw cannabis but is you you know they use chemicals to make it and then you have thcl like you have the synthetics like the k2s and they have the same effect like if you look at that scale from raw sugar to refined sugar to high fructose corn syrup the quality goes down it’s cheaper to make more and the health effects the health risk go up so same thing raw cannabis versus d8 versus hhco and K2 and those things the risk go up every time you’re adding solvents because there’s no testing like as a scientist you need to remove those solvents I’ll tell you this more of our food goes through Sol use than you’d probably like to know but the truth is they have standards to make sure that those solvents are removed from our food before it goes out and hemp right now that that residual solvent testing isn’t mandatory um so if you’re you know if delta8 is legal because it’s hemp but it also contains residual solvent the Delta eight is not what’s killing people it could be the solvent right so that’s like what chemical did you use to convert this CBD structure to THC and did you get it all out when you were done using it and who’s making sure that you do before the I told people I’m not even saying delta8 that’s what I’m saying Delta 8 to me is the refined sugar right what is there more of the market raw organic sugar or white refined bleach sugar bleach sugar that’s the most common form of sugar so a lot of us are like I want pure solventless I’m like okay so sugar ain’t solventless coffee ain’t solventless like those get wased by chemicals before they go out like you know we’re learning a lot of this stuff about our food now and I think it applies to cannabis yeah um I was just trying to find the the P the pen that I had tried just because I don’t think I’ve ever shared it and it it’s interesting because they were selling it in another state but that it doesn’t look like they are right now um but I get I get what you’re saying like if we don’t even have tests to like if there are ways to make these substances like thco or whatever that we don’t even have tests to kind of check and balance to make sure that the chemicals that were used in order to make that conversion are indeed no longer in the conversion right um so that that’s actually a very interesting point that I’ve never considered and it goes just way above my head honestly um but here’s the Grassroots pin it was like a 300 Mill gr uh delta8 oh yeah pin and I mean this is a cannabis company that’s still active in Illinois and at least within the last year because I took this picture on September 15th 2023 and I found it from an outof State dispensary so at least until last year they were still selling products like these and um that that’s why when this whole thing came up I was like Delta 8 why do I know Delta 8 I feel like I’ve tried Delta 8 and they were talking about it like it was Satan himself and they’re like you’d never find anything like that in a dispensary and I was like but I found exactly that in a dispensary like it was pushed on me in a dispensary in Illinois yeah I remember the first time I saw it in dispensary and I don’t know if we carried it while I was there but oh you know what at the time I think it was there was a different canabo that was popping up in pins um and see this is I don’t mean to cut you off but when I got my card in like 2019 or 2018 or whatever it was I remember going to the dispensary and seeing the posters of all of the cannaboids and tpin and then there would be like little lines saying what they might do and you know why they might be used and I was like oh my God we’re living in the future you know so sorry what what were you saying that’s why I just felt like so excited about it now it seems like there’s a list of demonized canabo yeah so like you know I’m actually working on an event right now with some um some of my you know um I guess I’ll call them companions now that are pro-athletes in the industry um I’ve been very very blessed and fortunate to spend a lot of time with Ricky Williams um just getting to know him doing yoga and 115 degree temperatures in the mountain like just really getting to know like what makes you know Ricky tick and just kind of getting closer to him you know I find out that a lot of people share the very same experience even these big high level like yeah you know people and Brands um but what you find out is they’re also interested in like what am I putting in my body what is this Delta 8 what is Delta 9 what is hydroxy 11 what is Delta 10 like what are the differences between these things and they have Brands so they would like to know when people are pitching to them yo you know this canono this new canono dude this new canabo is going to be amazing so the event that we’re focusing on is to teach people about everything that’s not THC and the wellness benefits of those because I know people whose children have you know seizures or Autism and they’re using you know pretty a broad spectrum I hate having to use these words because they don’t mean anything broad spectrum by definition meaning full spectrum with the THC removed um but still contains all those other compounds tpin flavonoids people who use those you know as like a you know like some type of live um extract and and they have a lot of benefits from it so I want athletes to start talking about those not just THC because our laws are finessing Us by taxing more for higher THC by focusing the consumer on THC when the benefits that we’re looking for are in these canab noid that we’re not learning about sorry I was muted uh one thing that I had uh sent to you beforehand which I’m curious just to kind of do another shift of Gears um so well just to quickly close that Loop the reason I even went into that was not to be like I had Delta eight in a dispensary just for my listeners I had Delta eight in a dispensary so you can’t say it’s not bad I’m not saying that it’s good or bad I personally wouldn’t I don’t think ever prefer to consume it again but I also don’t think that it should be like banned or crack CRA you know like I mean I guess if you if like you are making the argument that maybe we need to refine our testing on it I could be open to that to make sure that some of these like harmful chemicals aren’t in my Delta 8 gummy if I happened to choose to purchase one um but but again just to round out the point the reason I even brought up that stuff and I’m glad you recalled other products you know other canabo you know focused products is because when I first was introduced to legalized cannabis it was this idea that in the new age of cannabis you do embrace the whole plant and there are so many different uses for all these different canabo and it’s just so weird in this debate it’s gotten very contentious regarding hemp and cannabis how again I feel like there’s almost a list of demonized drugs and like let’s say there is a way to create clean Delta eight and it works very well for certain conditions I’m sure there’s still going to be Damage Done from the stigma that has been raised maybe rightfully so because you brought up some really interesting points uh but I I always think that I just wish that when people in the broader policy had these conversations that they had them to the level of nuance that we’re having it right now you know what I mean you’re not criticizing the comp as a scientist that’s my number one desire is that does does our policy govern what type of science we can do or does our science govern what type of policy we end up writing yeah and to put it in a bottle it’s like you weren’t you we aren’t criticizing the molecues itself we’re not also put it lifting them up we’re simply saying that like they should just be safe if you’re going to consume them you know yeah and my thing is like absolutely I agree with everybody if the whole world had access to plants and it was always safe and it was unregular yeah that sounds great but realistically based on like what we’re seeing now it’s like okay so Walgreens is going to be certified if they go schedule 3 to possibly right have some type of synthetic derivative um because the three forms of cannabis that are legal right now epidox sax and Marinol those three those three FDA approved drugs they’re synthetic right right and those are what are prescribed now so I think like I always have my dream world but I have to be very objective as a researcher like if the FDA has approved three synthetic drugs they’re not adverse to synthetics the way you know those of us who are like I love the plant we love the plant but the government’s like syn synthetic drugs that’s an industry it’s called Pharmaceuticals like I mean kind of started your story with it the how you were kind of pushed into I mean that’s it right there you know because arguably and I know this is a completely different tangent so I don’t want to take too long on this I want to actually talk about the Entourage effect here in a second um which I don’t know that I think people are going to find that conversation interesting um but um damn it we were just talking about oh uh I was going to say that you know arguably maybe I know this might be a leap for you and maybe you didn’t expect this so you know but maybe if you had access to like actual opium instead of [ __ ] pharmaceutical like you just said with the sugar analogy like what’s better the the plant or the synthetic form and opium has been used sacramentally uh or as a Sacrament rather for for ages you know and it seems to be maybe coming back but it it it has endured a lot of stigma due to heroin and fentol and everything else so I do do you get my point that I’m trying to make there yeah no absolutely and I mean I think the entire point that interested me in doing research in cannabis was when I found out like hey most of the information you’re given is drug information we’re not giv a lot of plant information on cannabis so when we hear THC right we’re talking about THC from a human consumption standpoint which is drugs but we’re not talking about from this plant standpoint like hey I had indigenous uh you know I’ve heard indigenous Farmers say you know poppy was just fine and then you all started trying to synthesize it Tobacco was just fine and then you all started synthesizing nicotine so they were like every time we have a crop that’s okay you all monocrop it Mass produce it and then try to synthesize and and non-organic version of it and people start getting sick and then the crop gets oh tobacco is evil technically no it’s really not they are indigenous people that have used Tob they have hallucinogenic tobacco that they use for like spiritual ceremonies I heard this I was like uh is that true yeah tobacco has nicotine and you have nicotine receptors in your body naturally but when you start adding all that other stuff to send cigarettes guess what now you got your hhco you got your right that’s the super synthetic version so that’s why I’m just like no matter what happens we need to keep quality in mind we need to keep there are certain people that can’t take the health risk right so we do need to have the organic certified hey this grow is not exposed to any pesticides no herbicides like I think those Growers should be protected by the USDA they protect heirloom squash and tomato Growers why not protect heirloom you know cannabis Growers yeah exactly well said well to start this next conversation I want to play a clip uh and I sent you the the podcast I don’t know if you got a chance to see it beforehand if not it’s oh you did cool um I’ll just play like a short moment of this um but I want to preface this with my beliefs just so that people don’t like click out like misunderstand so I I and I think I can speak for Sam as well I actually ended up having the chance to have lunch with Sam and in Denver and um it’s not that we dispute the precense of the presence of uh tpin in fact I really love like lemony strains I love like gassy strains like I’m always looking for like the the the oldfashioned just skunk like the offensive like yeah I totally get it and I value it and I love it when my weed tastes what we’re talking about though is like the effects that people often attribute to those tastes and smells I I think is a good way to to at least frame this this clip and so uh I’m going to play the clip and then I’d love to hear your uh thoughts on this since you did have a chance to check it out but just for context for our listeners here we go so that they know what we’re talking about yeah so this tweet that I put out and actually you know as I tweeted this I forgot that I tweeted something similar maybe like a year ago when I i’ just read some bad science in this space um and i’ formulated in a different way and it got the same amount of of backlash and I entirely forgot that this always happens every time you put this tweet out because some people are really just really married to this idea but the Tweet was you know the quote Entourage effect is just astrology for pharmacologists and some people agreed and some people very very strongly disagreed with that statement um I lik I like this one this that’s amazing so that’s actually my buddy Mike Cunningham he’s a chemist too’s he’s a brilliant guy he works for a psychedelics company called gilgames at the moment um and I I laughed very hard when he posted that sort of my my feeling on the matter yeah yeah so for your listeners it’s just a um so um that’s a really short way and and honestly you know if you just look at that tweet I feel like it doesn’t really get on into the Nuance of what he believes so I encourage you to check out episode number 198 of the chinois podcast if you’d like to hear the full episode but since you had a chance Steve uh do you mind telling me like what you thought about the the his perspective rather I’m curious it’s been a while since I’ve talked to anybody about this so yeah so this is actually a common debate um and I know where to stay neutral on some topics and this is one of them but I will give you what both sides are because it’s something people are really passionate about yeah I think one of the benefits that I have in being a young cannabis researcher in a new field is right the man who discovered THC and CBD he just passed last year the year before so like the researchers in our field a lot of them are still alive um the term Entourage effect at least from what I’ve seen it’s been quoted to Dr Ethan Russo um Ethan Russo is a well-known um doctor used to work with GW Pharmaceuticals he’s kind of like the guy one of the guys um now I’ve heard other schools of thoughts that say it used to be called Ensemble effect and then somebody switched the term to Entourage effect um now this is what I’ll tell you why is it called specifically Entourage effect it means that if you’re in the room you know if you and I are sitting in the room right now and we’re talking we’re going to have one type of conversation that is the effect if a third person walks in that we don’t know it changes how you and I interact with each other that’s the Entourage effect so every chemical that’s there and the presence that they’re in all changes how the like what the outcome is and what the effect this so like as much as he says like yes that’s astrology and so on and so forth um you know astrology was still a matter of record keeping right like there was science to it so I’ll put it like this the Entourage effect Ensemble effect more canabo have different effects like that is true how to standardize that to his point no clue like sour diesel is never going to be the same every time you consume it I don’t care if you grow it I don’t care if your favorite grower grows it it will be slightly different every time because it’s a living organism and unless it lived in the exact same conditions with the same you know what I mean like yeah and I think his point because I drill I actually did ask about different canabo because I was like we we like his point is he studied it at the receptor level and he said that your your canabo receptors cannot process tpes so I don’t so it’s interesting like the idea that it’s like yes different cannaboids might be processed but like the lemon itself is not going you know I think is his point um yeah but the thing is so what’s very funny is isolated turpins have documented effects like a lot of them and just to give you example take cannabis out the like take think about every plant we know but get rid of cannabis for a second I know that’s like impossible right for us to any other plants that exist um basil right um anything that has a really potent smell these herbs these are all tpin when you cut into some parsley bait right all those herbs and spices that you have those are tpes yeah and the thing is unlike cannabis most of them have one primary tpine right so because they have one primary tpine people know that lemons typically make people feel this way why because lemons are primary line right Pine is rich in Alpha pinene which is a bronco dilator so the Turpin themselves themselves isolated they do have known effects the issue is in cannabis those same turpins that we’re used to knowing they’re acting different because there’s an Entourage it’s like hey bro normally when I see you you don’t act like this it’s like oh you saw Alpha pinene with beta caropine and Meine and lenol L and now you have no clue what type of effect you’re gonna get but the truth is imagine if there was something I could say hey Cole what are you about to do I’m about to go swimming I want something that’s going to increase my lung capacity give me energy and reduce my stress this is the exact chemical profile okay I want to go relax and I want to go watch Netflix and eat some food and fall asleep 30 minutes afterwards here’s the profile for you there’s there’s no reason that we can’t possibly get there one day right I think and one of the things he did concede we we talked about some of those studies that he talked about where cines do have a physiological effect and what he was saying is that yes indeed they do but the concentrations in those studies are not anything akin to what you would find in cannabis so it’s like maybe yes we’ll get there and dude people are coming up with some really turpy stuff nowadays to where it’s like 5% 8% so I mean it’s becoming statistically significant a St statistically significant part of the product so I mean maybe there’s something to it but I guess what he was saying is like it’s just so often not it’s such Trace Amounts um and back to the astrology thing I don’t even know if he was disputing that astrology was recordkeeping more so that it was to make the analogy I think I don’t mean to speak for Sam on this but the reason it that res I should ask him what exactly he meant by that because he just ended up talking about his uh his research the reason that resonated with me and I laughed with it it’s not because I dispute the astrology like that you can like like that there’s like some something behind it my girlfriend and people I know will look at like this newspaper and be like this is the reason I’m having a bad week and it’s like bro I could write this [ __ ] like that’s pseudo science yeah that’s what most most people like at his level I figured he was like making a reference without when you say the word pseudo science that’s kind of like an accusation so you don’t want to say that but to what you just said like oh yeah well Mercury’s in Gatorade right now so that’s why I stubbed my toe and it’s just like oh Mercury’s in Gatorade that’s funny yeah so the thing is just like you know like could there be something to it sure but the way that we say it no so that’s kind of like the Entourage effect could there be something to it likely the way that we currently say it unlikely yeah well said well I knew I knew we would have a a a good conversation regarding that and uh like you say it’s definitely a contentious issue I just wanted I just like as an outsider I feel like I’m in a weird spot where it’s like I’m acknowledging that I love tpin and that they are indeed there I mean they show up on tests you can see them you know what I mean so it’s not that they’re not there I just dispute that like the lemon strain like I’m just like whenever I smoke a lemon strain versus like a skunky strain I’m just like yeah this is good weed you know and like sometimes the smell will take me back like the skunky ones especially man this like when I first started smoking you know and I guess I get a feeling of nostalgia off of that but like you know lemon Pine and mint are very inviting for me um and I have narcolepsy so like I’m actually a high energy person but when you have narcolepsy you know you have to watch your energy levels because you could just like crash really quickly I’m on medicine now I’ve gotten older but my friend told me one day he said you’re the only person I know who consumes cannabis to stay awake and I was like I had even thought about that and the reason I started is because I heard the Cannabis works for epilepsy so I was like I have a neurological condition with no there’s no cure for it and as soon as I heard people epilepsy were reducing their seizures by like 90 you know 95 98% I was like I’m willing to try cannabis everybody kept saying THC is gonna make you sleepy THC is gonna make you sleepy and you know sometimes it does but I did find that you know before stuff got crazy when I lived in Illinois and I grew sours I grew hazes I grew diesels like very like uplifting energizing cultivars I was like you can consume this and go clean your house like you don’t have to right pass out and get L it’s like hey I hate washing the dishes but you know it’s nicer when I’m in a better mood and my legs in my back don’t hurt and so I found that very interesting you know I actually used to eat I used to put fresh flour in my tea in the morning so whatever I was consuming I would also consume raw Bud cuz that was the only way to make sure I got the raw and the dried you see what I’m saying yeah yeah so I can consume them together and I mean to this day knock on wood like I never got Co or anything like that um I don’t know if you’ve seen the paper people dispute it but it’s a real paper it’s been cited a lot it’s got over 45,000 views but the paper is um somebody during Co took a human cell and put it in a Petri dish and they injected it with cbga so the precursor to THC everything cbga and cbda so the acidic versions non decarbed he injected it into human cells and then he injected those cells with the co virus and the virus can only affect you if it binds like it has to meet at a certain place cbga and cbda prevented the virus from finding that place where it can latch on what does that mean antiviral so we hear antiviral and doesn’t know what it means but when that molecule stops the virus from making you sick that is the definition of an antiviral property so there’s a great paper that says covid-19 um levels reduced um entry levels reduced by CBD and cbga highly cited like please look it up I think it’s something everybody should know um but that’s why I’m like it’s not just th see anymore we really got to look at these 200 cannaboids you know hundreds of tpin and flavonoids and Esters and everything yeah is is this it sorry to if it’s not we go okay 45,000 views 46 citations yeah so folks if you want to check this out I’m showing you the how you can find it I’ll read the headline for our listeners if you want to Google it can avonoids cellular entry of SARS K2 and the emerging variants um I found it on pubs.acs.org um so hope you can find it and oh yeah I’ll throw the link in the podcast description so that that you can easily just look in the podcast description and do your own research for reference just so everybody knows ACS is the American Chemical Society they are the governing body for chemicals so this was like a major this is a major thing this didn’t go to like some small Journal um this was a a massive breakthrough at the time and yeah I I heard you know some statements from the person who you know whose research this was and you know they thought it was going to be a game Cher like even when you read it it’s just like is this real like why didn’t anybody know about this and the truth was it just kind of faded faded away into the dark so if you see that picture over there there’s like a cannabis leaf right yeah to your right and then you see cbda and then you see the covid protein with those spikes and then you see the next word says block cell entry so yeah all they did was that Pro that that SARS protein that picture it wasn’t able to infect the cells because cbga and cbda were there wow so that shows where we’re really going with this like people say antioxidants and antiviral but they don’t realize like these natural plant compounds the ones that are legal the ones that we skip over every day we say CBD CBD ain’t [ __ ] CBG ain’t [ __ ] I don’t want THC give me 100% THC I want thca diamonds I’m doing dabs it’s like okay that’s great that we’ve been there but it’s some point like everybody can’t consume inhalable products some people do need other versions whether it’s a beverage or an edible topical tincture vaporizer subdermal I can keep going right um but we you also have to realize it’s not just the way you administer or the dose it’s the formula or recipe or concentration of canabo and Turpin and different things and I do think you know I don’t think we’ll be saying Entourage effect but I do think people will be looking the same way they do uh I’m looking for a bourbon I’m looking for a brandy you don’t walk into the liquor store and say can I have your strongest alcohol right they’d be like hey bro what are you talking you’re strongest alcohol that’s why I’m looking at purchase what’s the highest percentage yeah what are you trying to clean bro yeah that’s what I honestly when I go and exactly when I go to the liquor store and get like Ever Clear which I think is like 95% alcohol it’s never for consumption it’s always for like cleaning the bong or something to your point you know yes but that’s one of those things like but it’s normal to say what’s the highest THC you got right you got 35 you got oh you got any 40s and it’s just like hey is this accurate let’s just start there is the testing accurate is this really 40% flour and then B like what are you going for at that point are there any turs at all are you just consuming THC by itself because you know it’s been shown there are ad first effects of just consuming high THC with nothing else because that’s not how it’s made it’s made with other chemicals for a reason so now you go ahead and you blow off all the turpins that it was supposed to be with and you’re like Max THC that’s it and we don’t know what the consequences of that are versus the raw flower yeah well uh Steve if people want to I’m sure that there will be um I’m not sure in what capacity you do this maybe it’s just social media or something but if people want to like connect with you and or support you what would be the best Avenue for that yeah um I tell everybody to reach out to me on LinkedIn that’s where I do a lot of my business communicating um also helps me filter out people who just want to ask for free information um but yeah anybody who’s serious about inquiring on Partnerships I’m doing a lot of stuff right now with athletes mental health Wellness veterans obviously those are my passions um we’re always looking for Brands and collaborators and different things in different cities so y Stephen C Philpot Jr on LinkedIn Philpot is p h i l p TT 2 T’s um yeah and if you find me on LinkedIn you’ll see all my information my educational post and work that I have coming up this year yeah yeah and would you mind if I put if you don’t want me to it’s okay but you sent me like a presentation is that all right if I put that in the podcast description or is that not something you really just blast out I don’t even know what it’s oh are you talking about Pitch deck yeah yeah yeah pitch deck I don’t even know what these things are but it was just cool oh yeah yeah that’s that’s for you that’s for you I understand yeah I mean if people request it you can send it to them though sure absolutely Well yeah if you want the pitch Tech I guess hit me up but hit up Stephen first uh so uh anyways though I I had a lot of fun today I would like to do this again with you especially like as you said at the very beginning this thing changes year to year you know our whole understanding could flip and you’re you’re fingers on the pulse on all these things so I think it would be uh really awesome to reconnect with you as time goes on uh you know if you have something that comes up that you want to promote always reach out to me but I guess what I’m saying is you’ll definitely hear back from me um to come back on I’d love to do this again appreciate that also uh two things just to say so I was recently elected to the board of the minority cannabis Business Association and I’ll also be writing for sports cannabis Inc which is a literal magazine uh Lifestyle brand around Sports and cannabis so those two things this year I’ll be kind of like as the scheduling happens I want to make sure that we’re still doing impactful things that will be resilient no matter what so um those are two types of organizations and brands people can like follow me with awesome awesome well thank you for continuing to fight uh you know fight for the good fight as they say and um yeah please do keep in touch and I guess just before we go were there any specific bases that that we didn’t uh discussed today that that you wanted to uh I want to give you the space before we go um no I think you know I think people should go ahead and follow me on LinkedIn because I’ll be sharing my updates on some of the branding and stuff that’s going on this year but yeah I think uh Sports Performance wellness and mental health um it’s going to be a really good year to talk about those things and um where cannabis and even functional mushrooms we could talk about another time um where those things lie on the so yeah I’ll hold you to that next time we’re talking mushrooms all right yeah I’m with you Steve take care folks I hope you found as much value in this conversation as I did we’ll see you in the next episode see you

The Cole Memo