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 it would actually look like to take twenty million and lose control of the outcome.

The alternative has cost him. Years of operating at a loss, watching most of the growers around him leave the industry, and scaling up in ways people told him were not possible. He runs his material at a fraction of what comparable product sells for, on purpose, because he does not think quality should only reach people who can pay a premium.

He also gets into why he stays out of competitions, what he makes of the large companies moving in, and the morning federal agents came through his house.

Catch the full sit-down at fsotd.com.

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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 reach the person buying it. He is blunt about what he thinks the market currently charges and who benefits from it staying that way.

He also shares the lessons that came expensive. Why a freezer will not actually freeze anything, what to do at harvest instead, the equipment failure that nearly cost a full run, and why he refuses to process material he did not grow himself, no matter who is asking.

Catch the full sit-down at fsotd.com.

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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 everything else too. You cannot make good product without growing it right first, whichever method you use.

He also walks through his own path. Seeing shatter for the first time in Portland, accidentally making live resin because his material was not dry, getting rejected by stores for it and then winning a major cup with it, and eventually switching away from the method that made his name.

Full episode is up at fsotd.com.

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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 cold room may be getting a small fraction of what it was rated for.

He also covers keeping a room flatlined so pressure swings stay minimal, the numbers he targets through veg and into early flower, why he keeps veg rooms hot rather than cooling them down for the crew, light levels by variety, and the overnight failures that nobody catches until the next morning.

fsotd.com has the complete episode.

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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 is the most common failure by a wide margin, and why so few operations own a light meter now that the industry has moved to LED. What he checks when the numbers all look right and the plants still look wrong.

He also gets into building a real pest program with multiple modes of action instead of spraying the same thing until it stops working, how to spot hop latent viroid by leaf angle and stems that snap without pressure, and the hardest call in cultivation: when a room is no longer worth saving.

Catch the full sit-down at fsotd.com.

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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 speed rail, roughly eighteen billion spent with projections reaching far higher and no train to show for it. He makes a point of keeping it out of party politics. His argument is simply that people are paying for something they are not getting.

He also talks about the politicians who have reached out since, why he has turned down every paid promotion offered to him so far, an honest answer on manufacturing overseas, and the trip to Mexico that is becoming his next video.

The whole thing is at fsotd.com.

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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, to the point where the only institution that would take them was overseas. Thousands of units seized at customs over the years through random inspection, all of it destroyed. And the morning his social account with six hundred thousand followers vanished while he was on a plane to pitch investors, leaving him to pitch the next day with nothing.

He also talks about finding one of his own custom designs sitting unbranded on a shelf across town, and why he thinks the major platforms change their position the day banking opens up.

Head to fsotd.com for the full conversation.

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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 customer service job the same week. Twenty months of putting nothing into his own bank account. Getting burned by supplier after supplier until a test order with a brand new seller came back perfect, and building that factory alongside them from two hundred pieces to two hundred thousand.

He also talks about the community volunteers who turned packing into a party, the meme page partnership that ended with him at Tommy Chong's house and moving his whole team to California, and the one thing he thinks most people get wrong about cold outreach.

Catch the full sit-down at fsotd.com.

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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 years nobody saw: a seven figure tax bill on money he didn't have yet, staff who couldn't be told about the deal in advance, and a real possibility of walking away with a fraction of the headline number.

He also talks about the $15 million valuation offers he passed on years earlier, the non-compete that kept him out of the industry he loved, and what the money actually changed once it finally landed.

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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 people and Roger lived upstairs, leaving to focus on Talking Terps, and coming back years later as the brand behind Puffco's first co-branded collab. He also gets into PuffCon taking over entire city blocks and why he thinks 420 should move to Miami.

Then a real argument about New York: he believes it already has the best cannabis laws in the country, lounges or no lounges, and explains why.

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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 standing there.

The detail he's proudest of isn't the look, it's the feel. The lighter sleeves are made in the USA and finished so they're almost velvety in the hand. Blazy said on a podcast that when he buys a lighter sleeve he buys Talking Terps, specifically for the texture. Hopelord's point: most people stop at the 3D print. Push the design all the way through and you get something people actually want to hold.

Plus the collab list, Puffco, Alien Labs, Kumba and Pake from Japan, a bicycle with Dos Noventa in Barcelona, and how each one came together on its own timeline. The Toad Venom drop with The Flowery, which went to their black tier first at about 100 half ounces. Pulling the brand back for a year and a half to respect what's in people's pockets. And red hot 1,100 degree nails in 2013 with Action Bronson, which he'll be the first to tell you was horrible.

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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 people copy Talking Terps. He made a toy, and within a year other people were making toys. He posted a lighter case and started seeing ads for them from companies in France. His read is collective consciousness, not theft. Inspiration is free and what matters is execution.

The brand itself started by accident. A line in a song Juice and Erick the Architect were making after a Red Rocks show. It became a hashtag, then a logo, and the first person to wear a Talking Terps shirt was Snoop Dogg. He couldn't design shirts, so he made a two foot plush instead, and TP Crawford came out of that. The name came from a creative partner who's a boxing fan and was thinking of Terence "Bud" Crawford.

His dad got a signed first edition before he passed.

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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 lighter in Reading. Running around High Times Cups collecting flavors like Pokemon cards and coming home with fifteen jars at a time.

Then the Mendo run. In 2016 he convinced Greener Fields to sell the original Skittles cut, took $20,000, called Ted, and drove up in the middle of the night. That cut plus an OZ Kush seed became Brainwash, the collab they finally did last year.

He also has a documented photo from backstage at a Smokers Club show at Best Buy Theater, him with Rocky, Playboi Carti, Ian Connor and others, showing them Skittles for the very first time while everyone was still on OG.

Plus the Toad Venom deal with The Flowery in Florida, and how the Talking Terps merch relationship turned into a strain drop.

Want the stuff we can't put on YouTube? Unreleased content and early drops weeks in advance at FSOTD.com.

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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 the plant, a clip he still remembers.

He breaks down what he sees now that he's had the curtain pulled back. Berner as a promoter and a selector is elite, and LMC is direct that he's genuinely from the culture. Where it gets complicated is the back end, and what happens when you're managing over 200 licensing partners through other people.

They also get into the DOA and Ryan situation, the trademark that should have been locked down, and why LMC thinks the whole thing has become a waste of resources for both sides.

Then the bigger lesson: maybe long-term full partnerships between two public-facing people in weed just don't work. LMC makes the case for short-term collabs instead, the way two actors do one movie and then go their separate ways.

Want the stuff we can't put on YouTube? Unreleased content and early drops weeks in advance at FSOTD.com.

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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 and you see how they got there.

Lance gets into his own version of the problem. Someone says something on the podcast that stops the room, and within 24 hours he gets the call. On our friendship, on everything we've built, do not let that go out. Some of these are people he's known ten years before they ever sat down. He says the show would be fifty times bigger if he just ran everything unedited.

They both talk about what doesn't make it out and why. Manic episodes. Fiancés calling. Two weeks of footage documenting somebody's life falling apart that neither of them will ever publish.

Plus the real reason LMC has stepped back from investigative work: the model doesn't pay. Thousands of hours, real enemies, and no revenue at the end of it. He explains what he's rebuilding first.

Want the stuff we can't put on YouTube? Unreleased content and early drops weeks in advance at FSOTD.com.

Subscribe for new episodes every week.

RAW Rolling Papers. King size wides, the uncreased fatties, the RAW king size blacks, and the Phoenix flintless lighter with a windscreen and poker. Grab authentic through https://rawthentic.com/

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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. Wiz with Khalifa Kush. Method Man out there in the story feeds gifting boxes. TCA reps working events. Compare that to Jay-Z and Monogram, where the D'Ussé playbook got copied into an industry that doesn't work that way.

Then the Drake and Canopy Growth story. LMC interviewed Bruce Linton, Canopy's founder, who told him the deal was a promo vehicle. Canadian rules block direct brand advertising, but you can advertise through news, so every press release about Drake was the actual product. He doesn't think they ever seriously intended to launch a brand.

Plus why running a cannabis company like a tech company doesn't work, and his actual advice if a celebrity asked him how to enter the space.

Want the stuff we can't put on YouTube? Unreleased content and early drops weeks in advance at FSOTD.com.

Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Faven Lighting. Under canopy lighting that's changing how facilities and grow rooms get built. They'll put together a full layout for your setup, whether you're running HPS, double-ended, fluorescent, or LED. Use code FSOTD. https://favenlighting.com/

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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 entirely, so growth just stops.

He looked up what a video with those numbers typically pays a creator. Just under a million dollars. He's been paid $50,000 in AdSense across everything.

Lance gets into FSOTD's side of it too. They archived 150 videos and applied for monetization, denied. Archived 500 videos, reapplied, denied again. The reasons they were given: smoking on camera, breaking down flower on camera, and pointing people toward where to buy. When they asked whether federal legalization would change it, the answer was essentially no.

Meanwhile CNBC runs cannabis coverage fully monetized. Both of them break down what that double standard means for anyone building in this space, and why relying on AdSense makes creators fragile in the first place.

Want the stuff we can't put on YouTube? Unreleased content and early drops weeks in advance at FSOTD.com.

Subscribe for new episodes every week.

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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 giveaway through them every month.

The very first fortune was an Eddie Huang quote from Fresh Off the Boat. They wrote the rest themselves, keeping a notepad while watching movies and listening to music, collecting anything that could work.

They were also early on rosin. Their first R&D jar came from Hash Era, he dropped it on the floor, and there wasn't any more for months. Food grade rosin barely existed for edible makers at the time.

Plus the 500mg tie-dye cookies, poured in five separate batters by hand. The Art Basel Vice party where a DJ described his fortune cookie like a mushroom trip and got them written up. And why Super Chill started as a throwaway project while they waited on fortune cookie licensing, then became the whole thing.

Want the stuff we can't put on YouTube? Unreleased content and early drops weeks in advance at FSOTD.com.

Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Brands that we only trust:

SlapHub LA. Custom bags, mylars, jars, branding, logos, and 3D imagery, all designed and produced in house in Los Angeles. Use code FSOTD. https://www.slaphub.la/

Woodward Collective. Custom cut and sew hoodies, shirts, hats, plus brand design and packaging. Low minimums, big or small. Use code FSOTD. https://www.thewwco.com/fsotd

Chapters

0:00 It started with fortune cookies

1:32 Discovering rosin early

3:44 The jar he dropped

5:20 The friend with lupus

6:06 How they found edibles

7:46 There's no money in edibles

8:50 They said nobody wants this

11:40 The first fortune ever sold

12:32 Who wrote the fortunes

13:41 Five bucks by the register

14:03 The 500mg tie-dye

15:18 The Art Basel writeup

#SuperChill #FSOTD #FirstSmokeOfTheDay #CannabisEdibles #FortuneCookie #CannabisHistory #Prop215 #LiveRosin #HashRosin #CraftCannabis #cannabispodcast

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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 instructions telling you to mix in rosin or distillate. Link up with a graphic designer and you have a brand. That's the whole barrier to entry.

They also get into why nobody in edibles gets critiqued. The space is all pats on the back and gassing people up, and they've been blocked and unfollowed just for posting about natural coloring and their own process. Not naming anyone, but people take it personally.

Plus the blue raspberry story, a flavor that only exists because of a red dye shortage and was never a real fruit at all. Why they've never had to reformulate for the no-artificial-color trend, since they never used it. And a hard look at monocrop agriculture versus growers like Murray Farms running 400 varieties.

Want the stuff we can't put on YouTube? Unreleased content and early drops weeks in advance at FSOTD.com.

One of the brands we trust:

RAW Rolling Papers. King size wides, the uncreased fatties, the RAW king size blacks, and the Phoenix flintless lighter with a windscreen and poker. Grab authentic through https://rawthentic.com/

Chapters

0:00 The dollar edible tray

1:17 Same SOP, different mold

2:26 Making a tier system

3:10 Nobody critiques anybody

3:30 Blocked over ingredients

5:09 RAW Rolling Papers

5:48 Underground sets the trend

6:51 Blue raspberry isn't real

8:18 Reverse engineering flavors

9:01 Built for shelf life

10:01 The booth stands out

12:09 You can buy the whole recipe

12:55 Don't be afraid to look dumb

#SuperChill #FSOTD #FirstSmokeOfTheDay #CannabisEdibles #CannabisGummies #ArtisanEdibles #RealFruit #FoodDye #Red40 #CannabisIndustry #CraftCannabis

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