High Functioning Podcast

Alex Mendez is an attorney from Quincy spending his own money to win a Massachusetts State Senate seat that pays less than his current job. In this episode he explains why, and the answer starts with a $20,000 hospital bill for one night to deliver his daughter. Massachusetts spends over $35 billion a year on healthcare, and Mendez argues most of it disappears into insurance middlemen instead of c...

Oregon's wholesale flower market fell to $50 a pound, less than it costs to grow. Whole farms sold entire crops for $25 to $50. People who left six-figure jobs at Intel to grow cannabis lost their life savings. Samantha Seagaard watched it happen in real time, and she is telling Jason Reposa why she thinks Massachusetts is walking the same road. Two years ago she stood in front of the Cannabis Con...

Everyone hears "synthetic" and thinks fake. James Winokur, CEO of CitraChem, explains why 99.9% of FDA-approved drugs are synthetic, and why a plant-inspired molecule has a 45% shot at approval while a fully novel one sits at 10%. We get into what Schedule III actually changes for operators, why lab-made doesn't mean fake, the FDA botanical route almost nobody clears, and where hemp beverages, the...

The founder of Massachusetts' first cannabis testing lab says 50 to 60 percent of the product on retail shelves would fail the state's own mold guidelines. He knows because he tested it, off the shelf, in a free program he eventually had to shut down. The bigger problem is not contaminated weed. It is that the labs catching it are losing business to the labs that pass everything. Chris Hudalla is...

A Harvard-trained primary care doctor got addicted to Vicodin in his thirties, lost his medical license, and got sober. Twenty years later, he is board-certified in addiction medicine, prescribes cannabis at Mass General, and just published Aging Well with Cannabis. Jason Reposa sits down with Dr. Peter Grinspoon to talk about what the cannabis industry still gets wrong about harm, why budtenders...

Michael Marinaro and Tara Hopper raised $600,000 in one weekend and then paid $20,000 a month for five years to hold a building before Bada Bloom! could open. Now they are fighting for the rest of the capital while the Massachusetts cannabis industry consolidates around them. In this episode of High Functioning, Mike and Tara walk through the real cost of a social equity license, why investors kee...

Rae Russell runs customer success for PAX in Massachusetts. She treats field marketing as a sales job, not glorified event staff. In this episode, she and Jason Reposa break down what separates a brand ambassador who moves product from one who just shows up. They cover how she knows which budtenders sell before she walks in, how to measure whether a pop-up worked, when an activation wastes money,...

Most dispensaries run on broken data and never find the leak. Socrates Rosenfeld, co-founder and CEO of Jane Technologies, built a decade of infrastructure to fix that. In this episode he breaks down the protocol Jane built to unify fragmented SKU data across every POS and CRM in the industry. He explains why online average order value runs nearly double in-store. He reveals how Jane Gold lets bra...

Michael Mulkern built and sold a CBD company, lost his investment in a bad acquisition, got laid off with a newborn at home, and launched MAVZ Naturals the same week. He now runs 34 dispensary accounts across Massachusetts with zero ad spend. In this episode he breaks down the sample jar tactic that wins retail floor space, why he bought his own product back off dispensary shelves during his rebra...

A cannabis label company asked Adam O'Day to design their packaging. He said yes — until he saw the rest of their branding was AI-generated. He walked. That decision is the center of gravity for this episode. Adam O'Day (muralist, fine artist, 13 years full-time) and Allan "Alz" Sousa (fine artist, gallery director at Black Walls Gallery) sit down with Jason to talk about what authentic creative w...

Dispensary menus train customers to buy the highest THC percentage. That is not a product strategy. That is a race to the bottom. Dr. Riley Kirk is a PhD pharmaceutical scientist, co-founder of the Network of Applied Pharmacognosy, and author of Reefer Wellness, distributed by Penguin Random House. She built 425 thousand followers on TikTok making cannabis science readable for anyone. She joins Ja...

Kristin Rogers co-founded Levia and built the Massachusetts cannabis beverage category from scratch. She sold to a multi-state operator, watched the innovation stall, and spent three years getting the brand back. The change of control finalized this month. She breaks down the acquisition mechanics, why nobody got rich, and how she is now building hemp DTC while fighting for multi-serving cannabis...

Emily Tuttle, Director of Business Development at Cannabis Creative Group, joins Jason Reposa to break down the "3-Funnel System" driving revenue for top dispensaries. In this tactical episode, we cover: - SEO Strategy: Why you must optimize before your website goes live. - Paid Media: Real benchmarks for Google Ads ROAS and programmatic spend. - CRM Retention: Using Alpine IQ and Springbig to seg...

Hennessy Shaw has spent 12 years in retail cannabis. She started as an executive assistant at Rhode Island's first medical dispensary and now runs sales and marketing at Bud's Goods & Provisions. In this episode she explains how Bud's built concept stores that move product, why a simple terpene ranking card changed how customers shop, and what wholesale looks like when you spent your whole car...

A hidden clause in a federal funding bill could shut down hemp drinks by November, and most operators still do not fully understand how serious the threat is. In this episode of High Functioning, Christopher Lackner, founder and president of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, breaks down how the ban threat emerged, why the alcohol system may be the clearest regulatory path, and what happens if the catego...

Brandon Pollack is the co-founder and CEO of Theory Wellness a cannabis company he built from a single medical dispensary in Bridgewater, MA in 2015 to 15 locations across five states, with 350 employees and zero outside equity investors. Two years ago, he sold the company to its own workers through an ESOP a move that eliminated federal taxes entirely and locked in value for every person on his t...

What does it really take to survive as an independent cannabis farm in Massachusetts? In this episode of High Functioning, host Jason Reposa sits down with Lisa Mauriello and Boey Bertold, the husband-and-wife team behind Paper Crane Cannabis. They run an organic, sun-grown Tier 6 farm in Hubbardston, assachusetts. Lisa and Boey share the unvarnished truth about building their business. Boey detai...

How do you successfully juggle three different companies at the same time? In this episode of the High Functioning podcast, host Jason Reposa sits down with Samantha (Sam) Kanter, a powerhouse entrepreneur who runs Sam Canter Events alongside two distinct cannabis brands. Sam pulls back the curtain on what it takes to manage an event agency for over 13 years while pivoting to build businesses in t...

Massachusetts cannabis is showing record sales, but many operators are dealing with falling prices, weak margins, and real survival pressure. In this episode of High Functioning, Jason sits down with Shannon O’Brien, Chair of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission, to talk about receiverships, cultivation freeze discussions, testing fraud, enforcement gaps, and what regulators can do when t...

Consumers chase high THC numbers, but what do those numbers actually mean? Keith Saviano, Head of Cultivation at Nimbus Cannabis Co., explains the 3-Gram testing loophole, inflated potency percentages, and how cannabis brands navigate lab compliance. This episode dives into testing manipulation, terpene education, and why the future of cannabis depends on transparency. If you’re an operator, inves...

Devin Alexander, CEO and co-founder of Rolling Releaf, explains how margin gets crushed by 280E and how a single portal error like “LICENSE NOT VALID” can block revenue while costs keep running. We dig into reimbursement funding mechanics, cash-flow timing, and the compliance bottlenecks that quietly create audit risk.

There is a dangerous rumor spreading in the cannabis industry: that with the "right" legal opinion, you can stop paying Section 280E taxes immediately. But the IRS has just drawn a line in the sand. They have released a specific list of "frivolous positions," and if your strategy is on that list, you don't just owe the tax—you face an automatic 20% negligence penalty. In this episode, we sit down...

Why is "Wine Mom" culture a joke, but "Canna Mom" culture a crime? After Prohibition, the alcohol industry didn't just sell a product; they engineered a culture. They used movies, media, and social rituals to turn a banned substance into a symbol of sophistication. Today, we break down how to run that same playbook for the cannabis industry. Joyce Gerber (Attorney, Advocate, & The Canna Mom Sh...

"If you compete on price, you are selling sand in a desert." Dab Riga (Founder, TLEHL) joins Jason to break down the economics of solventless manufacturing in New Jersey. Key Topics: The "Orange Juice" Analogy: Why Rosin is the only "Fresh Squeezed" product on the shelf. The Automation Play: Using industrial robots to survive price compression. The 48-Hour Sprint: How Dab coordinated a real estate...

"However much money you think you're going to make... cut that in half." Seb Pollack (Kitchen Director, MariMed) joins Jason to deliver a masterclass on the reality of scaling a cannabis business. From the "worthless" nature of courier licenses to the engineering secrets behind the country's top edible brand, this episode is pure strategy. We discuss: The Exit Strategy: Why you need one before you...