First Smoke of The Day

Someone shows up at the farm with a contract and serious money behind it. His answer has been the same every time: send me the contract, and then no. In this episode he explains why those deals rarely work in the grower’s favor. The risk sits almost entirely on one side, the buyer wants the brand to dress up a parent company, and the math falls apart the moment prices move. He walks through what i...

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Six hundred and sixty pounds of fresh frozen material, washed and loaded into freeze dryers in about nine hours. Two people run the wash. The farm itself is handled by one. In this episode he explains why volume is the whole argument. The cost to process a run is roughly the same whether it takes nine hours or seven days, so speed is what brings the price down, and that savings is supposed to reac...

He says there is a lot of sulfured hash and concentrate on shelves right now, and that most of it comes down to one thing. The people making it never learned to grow. In this episode he explains when sulfur is actually appropriate, why it is the only real answer to a pest problem that has worsened in recent years, and why it has no place anywhere near the flowering stage. His argument runs through...

He ranks environment above everything else, and says around ninety five percent of the operations he walks into do not have enough dehumidification. In this episode he lays out his rule for building a room. Spec it for week nine, not for day one. Sixty pints per day per light fixture. And understand that the colder you run, the less capacity that equipment actually delivers, to the point where a c...

He can tell how a room is doing before he looks at a single plant. He walks in, notices how his skin feels, and says that alone tells him whether it is going to be a long day. In this episode he breaks down how he actually diagnoses a grow. Reading plant architecture after the stretch to work out where the room was overwatered or dried back too hard, and roughly when it happened. Why environment i...

Harrison was on a call with a consulting client when his phone started blowing up. Joe Rogan had played one of his videos on air. He told the client he had to go, hung up, and decided to start taking the work seriously. In this episode he explains how videos about California infrastructure turned into about a thousand new followers a day. It started with an unfinished airport train, then the high...

Harrison sold bongs. He never touched the plant. The police still showed up at his house and federal investigators still looked into him, because people assumed anyone shipping at that volume had to be moving product too. In this episode he lays out what it actually costs to run a cannabis-adjacent business under federal prohibition. Banks that froze and closed his accounts as a matter of routine,...

Harrison built the largest online head shop in the country. Over 50 million dollars in revenue, a thousand bongs a day for a year, and more than a million sold. His salary when he sold it was ninety thousand dollars, the highest it ever reached. In this episode he traces the whole build. Launching a one dollar subscription box on Reddit and waking up to a hundred subscribers, then quitting his cus...

Full episode is up at fsotd.com Harrison sold his company for $10 million. A third of it was cash and two thirds was stock. Then the stock fell from around $8 a share to $1. In this episode he breaks down the full acquisition. The buyer had just purchased three of his biggest competitors, and when the offer came in around $9 million, he said ten or he walks. They agreed. What followed was two year...

The whole thing is at fsotd.com Hopelord's first paycheck in cannabis came from Puffco. The job was seeding and talent relations, which in practice meant handing Puffco products to artists he met while touring. In this episode he traces the whole relationship. Finding Puffco through a producer friend in the ASAP camp, visiting their second office in Carroll Gardens when it was seven or eight peopl...

TP Crawford took close to a year. 3D render first, then find a factory that'll actually take the call, then prototypes, then shipping, air or sea. Hopelord walks through what it really costs to turn an idea into something physical. He also went to the RAW factory with Josh and saw the scale up close. One mill supplying essentially the whole world, and damn near pre-sold out while they were standin...

Hopelord's father taught art for 47 years. He passed six years ago, and Hopelord only learned his most repeated lesson by reading what former students wrote on his Facebook wall. One of them, 36 years later, was still applying it: steal from everyone. Get up from your seat, walk the room, see what everybody else is doing, take what you like and make it your own. That's the lens he uses now when pe...

It started with a tweet. Someone in the ASAP mob posted that he'd just gotten a G Pen and was looking for wax. Hope saw it, brought some over, and by the end of that week he was with the whole crew after the show. That one post turned into years of access. Touring with Flatbush Zombies from Seattle to Santa Ana. Meeting Ted before Alien Labs was Alien Labs, back when it was Lemon Fuel OG and a six...

LMC made the documentary on how Cookies got built. He says what Berner created is legendary, and the timing may never be repeatable. Still illegal, then legal. Streetwear first because it moves across borders easier and costs less to support. The Wiz vlog era that put Berner in front of an entire generation, including LMC himself, who watched it in middle school. And Berner walking on stage with t...

LMC estimates he's spent three to four thousand hours on the phone with people in cannabis, hearing their version of events. His read: a lot of them are straight up lying, and most of the rest are incentivized to shape it. He talks about why he's developed a strange compassion for some of the people this industry treats as villains. Not all of them, some earn it. But walk back far enough on most a...

Celebrity weed brands keep dying and LMC has a theory about the room where those deals get made. Everyone at that table is incentivized for the deal to close. Nobody gets paid to say no. So even when someone in there knows cannabis works nothing like liquor licensing, there's no reason for them to speak up. He walks through why the ones that survive all have the same thing in common: they live it....

LMC dropped a documentary warning people about spray packs. It hit 400,000 views in two days. Then YouTube age restricted it. He appealed. It's journalistic, it's educational, it's not promoting anything, it's literally warning people about a dangerous product. Denied. In the year and a half since, that video has done under 50,000 more views. Age restriction cuts off suggestion and advertising ent...

Before Super Chill, there were medicated fortune cookies. Vanilla or chocolate, 50 milligrams, five bucks, sitting in a jar right by the register at TLC and Zen Healing. They pitched dispensaries on customizing the fortunes. Put a promo inside, a free joint on the next visit, $25 off, and suddenly every patient walking out has a reason to come back. One shop in Marina Del Rey ran a quarter pound g...

Lance brought in a tray of the cheapest edibles he could find, 50 cents to a dollar each, different brands across the board. Super Chill's read: most of them are coming out of the same manufacturers running the same SOP. Same recipe, different mold. They explain how it actually works. Mold companies publish recipes on their websites. You can buy pre-flavored, pre-colored gelatin in bulk with instr...

Everyone told Super Chill real fruit wouldn't pass testing. Too expensive, too unstable, not worth it. They did it anyway. Their process starts at the Hollywood Farmers Market on a Sunday morning, not in a kitchen. Baby Crawford peaches from Ryer Farms, a third generation grower whose stand runs $10 a pound with a sign telling you not to touch the fruit unless you're buying it. Wiser Farm melons....

They did the walkthrough and the office was fully staffed. Graphic designers, compliance officers, the whole team. The day they moved in, everyone was gone. What was left was the owner's little brother and his friend from high school. Super Chill had just landed a statewide Stizzy launch across 50 stores plus delivery, with Catalyst and others already placing orders. All they needed was a kitchen...

Turtle named a strain Giant Fuyu after a Japanese persimmon. The state told him he couldn't put it on a label because it appeals to children. His response: what kid in America is asking their mom for persimmons. The samurai artwork had to go too. Two Chinese food boxes smoking blunts for Purple Sticky Rice, gone. Now most of his strains are just words on a bag, and he says it's taken a lot of the...

Turtle smokes for how weed makes him feel, not how it tastes. He says the market stopped caring about that a long time ago. He gets into the two things killing good flower: THC percentage and the camera. Strawberry Melon sold fine for years until numbers became the deciding factor. It never got past 26%. Green Dog's verdict was blunt: it's good weed, it tastes good, it gets you high, nobody buys i...

Turtle ran 105 phenos with the Green Dog team. Six made the final cut. The reason wasn't yield or structure. Keegan set one rule: if it's not better than Purple Sticky Rice, it doesn't get garden space. Doesn't matter how many A's or A minuses it pulled. When your competition is already that high, you can't afford to run it. Turtle breaks down the whole hunt. Why the 30s hit hard for three rounds...