 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump, with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Dude, what a fun little weekend for us, or it was a week leading into the weekend with all these spots that we stopped at, man, from Biori, to Dosis, to Mir. Man, that was a great turnout, great event, man. That's coming on smoother. Did you guys have more fun at any of them, more than others, or is it like equally the same? I thought this one was the more relaxing, kind of chill vibe that I like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was great. It was awesome. Jeremy's a freaking awesome, awesome dude. Dude, how, for, I was not expecting that. Yeah, I have to. Well, he's a brilliant guy, he's a really intelligent guy. Yeah, but, okay, so we all kind of knew that because we knew that he invented the technology that creates the dosing in this, and e-cigarettes before that. But I wasn't expecting him to have the personality that he had. That was what was exciting. To carry a conversation. Right, and you never know that sometimes when we get these interviews, it's like, our team is like courting their team, and we're kind of finding out, oh, the different synergies in the companies, and it's like, okay, cool, the boys are gonna meet, and I'm always excited to meet somebody, but when you're talking to someone who's got an engineer mind, I'm thinking in my head, like, this guy's not gonna be very cool, he's gonna be very dry, there's gonna be a lot of responsibility for us to carry this podcast. No, he's a super cool guy. Way cool. Way cool. Very knowledgeable in the cannabis space. Not just the business, but the actual science behind cannabis, and for me personally, when I talk to other cannabis experts or whatever, usually, many times I talk to them like, oh, well, you're not telling me anything I kind of don't know already, because I dive so deep into that, into the science of it, but Jeremy did, he went in pretty deep, and Dosis utilizes the terpenes that are in cannabis and knows how to put those together, and actually, we talk about in this episode, he tells us how they figured out how to construct their, each of their pens, like the one that's for bliss, or the one that's for arouse, or the one that's for sleep, or relief, or whatever, like why they work the way they do, and how they figured out the formulas, which for me, because you guys know I love that part of cannabis, I thought was absolutely fascinating. Well, I think it's important to let our audience know too that this isn't like this super plug because they're a sponsor, this is not a sponsor of ours, it's a relationship that we feel, we obviously, we can't be sponsored by a medical marijuana pen, not yet at least, but we were so interested in the company and what the product they were providing, that's where why Taylor sought out the relationship, and then after meeting them, I think we can all agree that we love it even more than what we did going into it. Oh dude, I was not a big vape pen user of cannabis. If I used cannabis, it would be through the volcano, or it would be a joint, right, if we're out or whatever, but these dose suspends are the cleanest hell and they're super inconspicuous, like you can be out in public, you're walking, going on a hike, or whatever, you don't want to necessarily pull out a joint, depending on where you're at, right, but these dose suspends, you do it and it's like, doesn't smell, it works real well, good stuff. No, I don't like it. I appreciate it, because it's like, they're trying to kind of take away that whole stigma of what marijuana has had for just decades, and that's a big hill to climb, and I just appreciate the effort that they put into their products, and you see it already, even with my wife, she looks at that, because that's still there, like that stigma's still around, but it's less, it's like, oh no, this can be a medical experience. Yeah, this was a really interesting conversation. I'm excited to hear the feedback from others that listen to it, because it surprised the hell out of me. I'm really excited to release it to everybody and then get feedback, and then, I've already started to get feedback from people that either one already knew about the company, they're like, oh my God, they're awesome, or people that have ran out now and tried the product out, since they've seen us already posting about it, so really interesting to see what you guys think. Now, because it's not a sponsor, we don't have any sponsors for this episode, who's gonna sponsor us? Right. Like, should we, our own shit? I mean- Actually, I think- We should sponsor our, we should sponsor our own episode right now. When this show airs, you think you only have like three days left to take advantage of the promo? Oh, there you go, Sal. Yeah, this month, we're giving away the Intuitive Nutrition Guide and the Fasting Guide for free with the enrollment of any of our maps, bundles, or fitness bundles. Now, these bundles are, we take multiple maps programs, we put them together, and we discount them like 30% off. The most popular one is the Cadillac of Bundles, the Super Bundle, which includes maps, anabolic, maps performance, maps aesthetic, maps prime, and maps anywhere. So you get all those programs, and it's a year, it's a full year planned out for you. So you follow one program to the next for the entire year with workout blueprints, videos where we're demoing them, different types of adaptation, different exercises, rep ranges, like your body progresses the entire time, enroll in that bundle or any of our other bundles, and you get the Intuitive Nutrition Guide and the Fasting Guide for free, and you can find those at mindpumpmedia.com. And without any further ado, here we are talking to Jeremy, he's the COO of DOSIS. Jeremy, we wanted to turn the mics on right away because I hate when we talk outside, when people, we like people to hear us getting to know you at the same time. So I think it's more authentic and real that way. We waste all the good stuff if we don't. So I was already asking the girls some questions before you got here, and I was just curious, how long have you been in the cannabis space? Yeah, so I've been in the cannabis space for about five years. I come from the electronics business, so my entire background is making printed circuit boards for all kinds of different consumer and industrial electronics, right? So everything from the GPS controller that's on a caterpillar gen set to LED lighting as it first started getting popular. And a lot of that's done in Shenzhen, China, which is an area in China that's really focused on manual electronics labor. So a lot of your lithium ion battery driven products come out of there, a lot of your printed circuit board stuff comes out of there. And in about, say, 2011 into 2011, being a 2012 electronic cigarette started getting popular. We kind of, me and my business partners based out of Chicago, been out here for about three years, but we started tinkering around with electronic cigarettes because one of our engineers' cousins was selling 40,000 of these really cheap, like poorly made electronic cigarettes every month into bodegas, just in the Midwest around Chicago, right? First started getting popular, super cool thing. Problem was about 40% of them failed out of the box. So we start taking this thing apart, being engineers and inventing stuff, looking at ways to make things better. We start taking it apart, looking at it and going, this is made basically as cheaply as you could make something, right? It was back in the day, if you remember how LED lights were, they used to be super expensive, really bright, no color to them, right? Those were all made in the same facilities and as Sony and Phillips and GE and all the big companies started making their own LED lights, all of these LED lighting factories started switching over to E6, whether it was the regular kind of standard E6, you see they look like a cigarette or as box mods started to get popular, guys vaping and blowing big clouds on the corner and stuff like that. And we made one simple change to it, right? We took what is a flexible circuit and something that is inside Apple watches and Nike Flex Bands and things like that, a lot of really higher end consumer electronics and it was something that we made on contract for a company that was the, we made it as the up and down volume button in Boeing airplanes. So underneath your armrest, little up down aircraft quality stuff rather than it being a bunch of wires that are soldered together, they use a flex circuit, right? Reduce this failure point. So we decided to say, hey, okay, let's take all the wires out of this E6, let's put a flex circuit on it and that was kind of the first step and for a few years we made electronic cigarettes. Got, you know, I don't wanna say we got lucky around 2013 but had a little bit of foresight to, to say why wouldn't you take this electronic cigarette and actually dose the same exact amount every time? So we put our patents in for dosage control. Now, were you at that time, are you thinking about tobacco or is- All tobacco, right? Because at that time, really nobody was even making cannabis vapes, right? You had a lot of people making their own oil, some of them putting them to bigger box mods, but you mostly had people, you know, at that time doing wax and shatter and things like that and in wax pens or nails or torches and things like that. The technology really is rapidly advanced when it comes to making oil. So at that time it was really all around electronic cigarettes, but, you know, our thought was why wouldn't you wanna dose that? You know, so we started making dosage control products and created a couple of really unique dosage control products, but figured out that the stuff we're making is a little bit too high end to meet the margins and the amount of money that, you know, you actually need to produce this thing for it to sell it at the 7-Eleven or a Citgo or something like that, right? That people are buying for four, five, six bucks. So- Pretty sophisticated for what it is, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's the, the e-cigarette was invented a long time ago, you know, and there's one guy that's really attributed to having invented it. At this time, Big Tobacco's bought most of their patents by most of this guy's patents up, but, you know, it's a, it was a simple, very, very simple platform that we kind of just tried to make a little bit better. We did in the e-cigarette business, started working with Big Tobacco companies, thinking, okay, we'll offer dosage control, try to license the product into that. And, you know, me and my business partner are both relatively young guys and weren't really, weren't really looking to just license our technology out. And then in around 2014, one of my buddies was in town from Colorado, stayed at my loft for Lollapalooza, had this big kitchen that I never used, right? And said, hey, I want to make some edibles so that I can go to Lollapalooza and sell them. And, you know, ended up taking some of the oil that he had, putting in one of our basic e-cig designs that we made and said, this thing works great compared to everything that else that's on the market right now. Oh, shit, like right out the gates, even though they're designed for it. Not even designed for it, right? And really, that's what, that's what most early vapes are. If you guys, I know a couple of you guys from the cannabis industry, right? I've seen the very first three models that ever existed. Yeah, and it was that standard product, single siphon wick coming up, made of plastic. It was terrible, it made a mess, it worked a few times. Yeah, it would leak all over the place. And, you know, it would start clogging and the oil starts coming into your mouth. I mean, not an ideal experience, but because it was such a more discreet way to consume cannabis, people took to it, right? I mean, even then, people are like, hey, I'm at the restaurant in the middle, you know, I'm hitting my vape pen at the restaurant. It doesn't make these huge clouds of smoke like an e-cigarette does. And it doesn't have the smell that smoking a joint does, right? So it became really a discretion play. And that's kind of, I think, what initially led to the rise in the popularity of it. Because anything that you buy, if 25 or 30% of them break, that product's probably not gonna make it for too long, right? It's a huge opportunity, too, for someone to enter the market and just create something that doesn't break. Yeah. Now, are you seeing that when your buddy's getting, he's making all the edibles, you've throw it in the vape pen. Now, right away, are you like, aha, like we gotta do this for cannabis? Yes, it was like this. He's like, can I take 5,000 of them? And we were like, okay, cool. Because in the e-cig business, it's like we're pumping out hundreds of thousands of these things every week, right? And we're like, sure, take whatever out of the warehouse, they're not branded, they don't have stickers on them or anything yet. And the aha moment was when he called back a week later, and he's like, hey, can you give me like 25,000 of these things? Oh, shit. He went through 5,000 that fast? Yeah, yeah. That's insane. Because they worked, right? I mean, they didn't leak. They weren't purpose-built. It's not the way we build products now for cannabis, but it was already a better e-cig than what was on the market. So as soon as he said that, we kind of take a step back and go 25,000. And we were like, yeah, we don't even know what, what do people charge for these things? And then we hear the price that people are charging for this, for a cannabis product, 10 times more margin for us. And we're like, okay, well, maybe there was something to this thing, right? So maybe we'll get it. Now, what are your thoughts at this time in your life about cannabis in general? Are you already somebody who uses, are you somebody who's not really into it? Yeah, so I was more of a CBD consumer, right? Played sports my whole life, couple of bad accidents and injuries, one on a motorcycle, you know, and went through what a lot of people go through when they do that, right? L4, L5 fusion, herniated discs in my neck, doctors prescribing opiates and opiates and opiates, right? So started actually using more CBD and ratioed products, right? One-to-ones, higher CBD products to kind of wean myself off of that, right? Because that was, you know, if you don't know, right? And you have that kind of injury and you go to the doctor and, you know, then I'm working 18 hours a day running electronics business, trying to grow my business. And opiates are nasty. Yeah, opiates are nasty. I mean, at the beginning, they're necessary, right? You've got a traumatic injury you're in some serious severe pain, but what ends up happening is over time either, you know, the doctors have you keep coming to take them and it becomes a cycle, right? And over time, your body gets used to it. You need more and more. And there's just at some point where it's an untenable situation, right? Over time, you know, you either have to find a way to stop or you're going to be on them for the rest of your life. And the downsides and the side effects and the way that it affects your life are, you know, extremely negative, you know? So there's definitely a place for them. It's just not in long-term holistic care for your body. No, they're already showing in states that where the cannabis laws are looser where it's either medicinally legal or recreationally legal, opiate use drops every single time in all of these states, people are finding that it's a great replacement for opiates and it's obviously, the addictive properties aren't the same. It doesn't cause the same withdrawal and all that other stuff, which may be why there's a lot of pushback. You know, I can only imagine. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, getting into one of the hardest parts around the lack of federal legalization and the lack of federal funding that we have here is you can't go to bat against the FDA and big pharma, you know? And these things, it's just, there's too much business. It's too much revenue. And frankly, the doctors, while many of the doctors who understand cannabis would love to be able to prescribe it, if not as a replacement, at least as something that helps supplement it, right? Because there are a lot of studies, like you're mentioning, that show the decrease. A lot of that decreases because if you do need, look, there are people that have a need for opiates, right? Cannabis in some circumstances with very, very acute pain cannot completely replace it. But they've shown that if you combine the use of cannabis with an opiate, you can decrease by 50 to 75% that consumption, right? And then you're decreasing the side effects, you're decreasing the long-term detriment to the body. Now, were you worried when you entered into the cannabis market of the, because I know the tobacco markets definitely got its own hurdles and red tape and all that stuff, but it's got a pale in comparison to the cannabis market, right? Because it's still federally illegal or at least it's still a scheduled drug according to the federal government. Were you a little apprehensive going into that market? Yeah, personally, we weren't, right? So it wasn't something that scared us off. One of the interesting things, and I think that people don't realize this because they think tobacco is so regulated and the FDA gets involved in advertising and the testing of tobacco and everything like that. Those same types of regulations have not crossed over to the e-cigarette space. So there's literally no regulation about what the product is made of, what components are inside of it. Even for e-cigarettes. Even for e-cigarettes. No shit, I didn't notice. So if you- I've seen some independent reports on some of those e-cigs and they're seeing all kinds of shit. Gnarly. Yeah, like worse for you than a cigarette. So even when, we were used to, we were really custom designers or custom electronics designers. But when we looked at making something to quality, I was even starting to ask, okay, well, in an e-cig, they used to just put stickers around the outside. And I was like, okay, well, what ink is being used on that sticker? And none of it's food grade, right? And then I'm asking about the plastic. What plastic are you guys using for these mouthpieces? None of them are food grade. What's the coating that's on, the very common that you see now, the nickel-plated, they like to call them stainless steel, but it's really just a nickel-plated silver tip that's on a lot of the cannabis. Like that's not safe. None of that is food grade, right? It's not safe to be in your mouth, but whether it's for- The bacteria and everything that could potentially- Yeah, I mean, it's just what it's made of, right? The process, what the plastic's actually made of, what can stay on there, you know, anodizing, very cool looking. You see climbing gears anodized. A lot of pins are anodized, but anodizing isn't technically food grade, you know? So just because it's got so many pits in it, there's, you know, when you don't want to get too technical on the electronic side of stuff, right, but- Yeah, but that's really interesting. I had no idea that the e-cigarette market was different than just the cigarette market. Like they would actually have different laws and regulation. I think it would be the same. I just assumed that. Yeah, yeah. It's a gray market. It was kind of a gray market, right? Because nobody, they didn't regulate it because it didn't exist. And then when they got invented, regulations tend to follow. Yeah, I think it's been around for a long time now. It has been around for a long time, but big tobacco didn't really enter until about 2016. So a lot of times regulation comes from companies wanting to push out their competition. Of course. So there was a thing on the table in 2016 and technically in August of 2016, there's this thing called the PMTA, which is a pre-market tobacco application, which says any product that wasn't in market by 2016 for e-cigarettes, technically would need to meet this PMTA requirement. All that is is. No competition for us. A million dollars of testing for every skew. Now, who can afford to do that? That's right. Big tobacco can afford to do that. But all the guys that are making all of this vape liquid and guys that are making smaller players. I'm so glad you're saying this. They can't afford to do that. Yeah, a lot of people don't know that. That's how most of the regulations in the market exist is from big players trying to eliminate competition or raise the barrier to entry so high that there is no competition. Yeah, so if I'm Philip Morris or RJ Reynolds and I want to put out 50 skews, different individual skews, so five different products, 10 different flavors, what's 50 million to me? Nothing, right? If I'm an e-liquid manufacturer and I've got 50 flavors, I can afford to do that. So yeah, you're right, it becomes a barrier to entry and a lot of times the regulations get pushed as a barrier to entry. And I'd say that when you asked earlier about being scared off about going into the cannabis industry, it was actually more attractive, right? Because we saw it coming. We were working with big tobacco as we saw them developing dosage control and we're talking about our dosage control technology with them and you saw them buying patents, buying patents, buying patents, right? And so the writing was on the wall and at the same time, we're one of the very few people in the cannabis industry that actually has our factory, controls our factory. We have people that work there full-time in Shenzhen and we started to see a consolidation in the factories, right? So whereas in 2015, there was 1,200 or so e-sig factories out there pumping out a wide variety of products, right? I mean, there's box mods, there's vapes, there's the small ones, there's different types of cartridges across the board. There's a lot of different styles of electronic cigarettes but what happened is they started to, Big Tobacco bought the good ones, started buying the small ones and shutting them down. Two years later, you had 400 and now 2018, there's maybe 50, 55 real factories over there now and most of them are controlled by Big Tobacco. So it's become a really interesting landscape and what a lot of people don't see is how, it's the cannabis vaporization technologies come a long way since we first saw it, right? It was just, hey, I'm gonna buy this e-cigarette tank off of Alibaba, I'm gonna put my natural CO2 oil in it. You know, it used to be brown amber basically and everything, not the gold distillate you see today and I'm gonna sell that, right? And they failed a lot too, but just like e-cigarettes that were failing, it was cool, it was something different, it was discreet, it was easy to use, especially for somebody who doesn't want to smoke cannabis or smoke a joint or a blunt or whatever, right? So, you know, the technology has gotten better but for the most part, the brands today are just buying a standard white labeled product that they buy from one of, you know, about 15 different companies that make e-cigarette vapes for cannabis and they can get their name printed on it differently or get a different color tip put on it, but you pretty much see the same style across the board. Now, how do you guys handle quality control on the back end, like with the flour and stuff? Because like when I was in the space, it was, you had to go to five different farmers just to keep stuff on your shelf. So I can't imagine the amount of pins that you guys have to fill and getting it into the space as late as you did. How do you deal with that? Yeah, so, you know, luckily, because I'd been making private label vapes for a lot of the big companies over this time, I started to understand the relationship, you know? So after we get this second big order and go, wait a minute, there's something to this, I started spending all of my time going from Chicago to Denver to Seattle to Portland to San Francisco and to LA and kind of just making this loop around the places that we're actually doing some volume in oil manufacturing and learning, right? You need to look into that like that. You need to learn, right? From an engineering perspective, I'm looking for process. I'm like, okay, how does this happen so that how are people making oil so that I can make a device that works better, right? Cause even then, as we started making products specifically for cannabis, changing the WIC, changing the coil, changing the materials a little bit, you know, we were seeing different failure rates from different people and, you know, we know that we are GMP certified, ISO certified manufacturing facility. So we know that if we quality control it coming out there, if I make a hundred thousand of something, it's pretty much exactly the same thing every time, right? So if we start getting, hey, one person says this one's leaking, then some of them are clogging, what's really going on? You know, so it started learning the oil production process. How exactly are people making oil and how wide is the variability of what people are putting inside of this? Yeah, and we've really just, I mean, it's only been maybe the last year or two have we've evolved it to where it's this pure, clear, clear stuff. Just like you were saying before, it was just amber and yellow and it was, you know, maybe 90% at best pure is some of the best stuff if you're lucky. Yeah, yeah, if you were lucky. And one of the biggest things was the particulate matter that was left in there, right? So that amber color is just plant material that's floating around in this liquid, you know? So if you're looking to try to vaporize something that's got to go through a saturation screen is going into a wick, right? It starts clogging up, you know? So learning about the oil process allowed us to start making better pens, you know? The oil inside that we were trying to deliver, you know, we need, we got to customize the hardware specifically for that material. Now, did you guys contract that work out of it? So the reason why I'm fascinated by this and I'm asking these questions, I feel like we're going to end up running into people that we know because, I mean, the machinery that it takes to produce a high enough volume to fill thousands and thousands of pens, there's only a handful of people that own that machinery and some of them are related to me. And so it's like, did you guys build that all out yourself or did you guys go find people that were already mass producing and then you guys contract the work? Yeah, so definitely we started building custom filling machines for cannabis and we were working with, we've worked with a number of different companies, people from the aerospace industry that handle thick liquids like, you know, epoxies that are coding linings on airplane parts and stuff like that to try to find a really high quality because believe it or not, until probably 2017, even the people that were putting out 100,000 pens, they were doing it by hand. Oh, shit. Yes, I mean, you literally had guys with syringes filling these things by hand. So you can't measure exactly how much going in there, kind of eyeballing it, you know, and most filling machines are used to dealing with products that are like, you know, pharmaceutical grade, right? This thing's filling essential oils into a bottle. That essential oil is exactly the same every time. Cannabis oil is a really, really interesting thing to work with and it's very hard to work with because it's very thick and just because of the nature of the oil, very small temperature ranges affect the viscosity greatly, right? So I have a question because one of the big issues that the medical community has had with the inhalation of cannabis, or at least what they say their big issue is, is the difficulty in measuring the active ingredient with a hit, you know, obviously different flowers, you know, different types of flower are gonna have different percentages of cannabinoids and terpenes and all the other active ingredients, but in particular the cannabinoids. Then of course, how hard you hit the joint or how hard you breathe it in, how the person, you know, if they're used to doing it, if they've done it before, if they've never done it before. So like you could have somebody take a hit of a joint and get, you know, half of a, you know, a milligram of THC and another guy can get five milligrams of THC. So that was a big problem. How did you guys, how does this pen work to where every hit is the exact same amount every single time? It's a reservoir, right? Isn't that what happened? So, I mean, it really starts from, you know, the entire process, you know, the finished form is what is the simplest way that we can provide a consistent, repeatable experience to a consumer, whether they're a consumer that's been in the industry for a long time, but especially people who are, who want or are curious about cannabis and want to use it or have had this past prior bad experience, either with an edible product or a joint that was way stronger the second time than the first time they had it, you know, those kind of things. So, and with flour, it's incredibly hard to get specificity, right? There's tens of thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of different strains right now. And every one of those strains has different phenotypes within it. And the way that the amount of cannabinoids and very importantly, the type of terpenes and the terpene profile are going to be significantly different based on where it's grown. So, even if I have the same exact clone, right? A lot of, some people grow from seed. Most large growers grow from clones, which are basically cuts off of the same exact plant so they can get some consistency. Well, if I take that clone and I grow it indoor here in LA where there's a lot of big indoor grow, and then I take it up to Carpenteria where there's a ton of greenhouse grow, right? Or I go up to Humboldt County and grow it outdoors. The end product is completely different, right? And not to mention that, you know, we've put strain names on things like OG Kush. There's probably no less than 50,000 different types of OG Kush, right? The original brand name. It doesn't mean a lot anymore, right? Because people are taking different pods. It bastardized the hell out of it. Yeah, they have. And I mean, it's not, you know, I don't think, nobody's done it on purpose and it's not a negative thing, but we're not in the Monsanto era where this is a genetically engineered seed and everybody is using that exact same thing to grow their corn, right? I mean, these are things that have been passed around that have been protected that, you know, that guys haven't seed banks and stuff. So it's a, you know, the variability at the plant side and then growing that plant and what conditions you grow it in, I mean that the cannabinoid level, the terpene level is always gonna be different. So yeah, cause this is exact. I mean, when you look at the box of one of these, like I'm holding the bliss, I look on the back here and it'll tell me, you know, how much per dose of THC CBD of, you know, the different types of terpenes actually breaks down the terpenes, which by the way, I think you guys, these are the first people I've ever seen to list that. I don't think anybody else talks about terpenes or tells you what kind of terpenes are in their product. So I mean, that's fascinating. And especially when as cannabis starts to go mainstream or if, you know, as we move forward towards, you know, legalization nationwide, you know, a, you know, a joint with bud called, you know, Girl Scout Cookies or, you know, Purple Cush Crunch or whatever, it's gonna be much more difficult, but something like this, I could see this being, you know, way in, right? Yeah, yeah, look, the product was built to provide permissions for people to feel comfortable trying cannabis, right? So how do you stay as true to the plant as possible, but deliver an experience that people are used to, right? Like, you know, the goal of the company is if I'm in Los Angeles or in San Francisco or Chicago, New York, Miami, Toronto, London over time, right? How do I know that I'm going to get the same exact experience? When I was in college, people were passing a joint around, yeah, no problem, I'm just gonna hit it and see what happens, right? Now, because cannabis is so strong and there's so many different traits, like I'm not gonna, like just grabbing a joint from someone, I have a hundred questions, you know, but- You might be crying in the corner. It may be, you know, I might be super paranoid and energetic or I may have to lay down on the couch at this party, right? And, you know, and people will say, oh yeah, this is, you know, this is blue dream. Maybe, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, right? So how do you go from this variability in the plant to delivering a specific experience? So- Do you guys have machinery that tests it where it hits each pan and tells you the amounts of cannabinoids in each hit or anything like that? Yeah, yeah, so I'm gonna kind of walk, kind of walking through the process from start to finish, right? You take the flour, you take, we use THC and CBD in all of our products. We take that through a primary extraction processes, which is CO2 is what we use. There's a number of different things you can use. You can use ethanol, you can use CO2, you can use a hydrocarbon. Now CO2 is supposed to be the best one to use. Why is that? Yeah, I mean, yeah, a lot of definitions of best, right? CO2 is not as volatile as like a hydrocarbon extraction is, hydrocarbon extraction's gotten a really bad rap for a few reasons. Number one, people just used to open flame blasts. But we were blowing butane in it like 10 years ago. Yeah, and so that was a problem. People, you know, there was safety issues around that. The machinery now has gotten so much better and the rooms are built to tremendous fire codes, right? What about for the user? Is it safer to use an extract that's using like CO2 versus- Well, now they're getting, we're there to the point now where they can process it all the way down to where it's 99.9% pure. I mean, you're pulling all that in and pulling it out. What used to happen is the guys would blast that, right? And then they wouldn't do the necessary post-processing to actually get all of that butane and propane and hexane out of the product. So not only are you, is it super dangerous as they're making it, you've also got, like you might be inhaling hydrocarbon. Now you're cutting the hydrocarbon. I would imagine some of your competitors are still doing that to this day. There's no regulation around that, is there? It's getting better. So until the end of December of 2017, there was no required pesticide testing or residual solvent testing in the state of California other than in Palm Springs, the city of Palm Springs and the city of Berkeley. One of the commitments that we made with the company very early was to say, we are going to test our products to the most comprehensive regulations that are out there at the time. So we used the Oregon Health Standards and we are not gonna ever put a product that has pesticides in it. And we will test for residual solvents, mold and microbiological materials and every product that we put out will pass. These are dummies so they don't have the analysis sticker on them but if you buy a dosage product at the store and you look at the actual lab sticker, there's a batch number on there. You can go right onto our website, punch that batch number in and it will pull up the lab report. That's dope. And that's from now all the way going back to the first pen that we put out, right? So even in a time where there wasn't a set regulation within the state, we complied with the strictest standards that we could based on what the labs were able to do. Now starting now in 2018 with adult use legalization, now there are lab testing requirements. You are allowed to put on your boxes that you're not testing to compliance at this time but it looks like July 1st will be the compliance date. Oh, wow. Where there's gonna be a full 58 panel pesticide test and you can't have residual solvents. And so when we say residual solvents, that's the butane. Is there butane, hexane or propane in there? Also is there ethanol, isopropyl alcohol, a lot of the stuff that we use in post-processing to clean up the material. And then when it comes to the plant, so if you know a joint, is there mold and microbiologicals in there? What's your estimation on how much is that gonna affect the market? Like how many people do you think is gonna get carved off because of that? It's gonna be significant. Right. Like what do you think? Come on. Well, I know this, I know- How are they gonna check on them? That's the thing. Like does it mean they don't have people going on or do they? No, they do now. So as of July 1st, you have to, if you're a distributor, right? Basically they've used the distribution piece of the business as the lever for regulation. So if you're a distributor, which dosage we distribute our own product, so we have a distribution license, we're responsible to take that product into a compliance cage. One of the compliant labs comes in and sends someone in, they pull a percentage of product based on the batch size, take it back, finished good, totally in the pen filled everything. They will have to cut the top off the pen, pull the oil out of it and they'll do the testing. If it passes, now that can be distributed to the store. So that's not to say that there's still not a lot of non-compliant business going on, right? You've got hundreds of illegal dispensaries in LA alone, what you have even more of as illegal delivery services. And those are still out there, but for the bigger brands and the people that are building strong core businesses trying to serve the consumer, compliance is getting a lot better. Look, the state has a lot to do, right? I mean, you're basically trying to build regulation for a 20 billion, what's gonna be a $20 billion industry just in California over the next couple of years. They're gonna over-regulate in a year. I think they'll over-regulate, to be honest with you, I think they're gonna over-regulate. When do we never not over-regulate anything? When do we ever not over-regulate? They're gonna over-regulate and over-tax. The reason why it's taking this long is because the government wants their fucking money anyway. They've been monitoring all this shit so they can go in and grab their shit. That's what I mean, they're gonna over- This is what I wanna know. So part of why I left was because I just got tired of waiting. I got tired of waiting. I was part of the front wave of people that were trying to do, when we first opened, right? So we were two of the first four cannabis clubs in San Jose and the Bay Area. So before us, there wasn't really anybody else. And LA was doing it first. And at that time, they only had like 10, 15 clubs. And my partners and I, when we came down, we looked at, we walked in and right away because there was, we partnered up with guys that were in the gray, black market side of the business because back then that's all there was, right? And we're coming in on the front end, medical marijuana is coming. We go down south and we start checking these dispensaries out and my two partners, I'm going like, oh my God, like this is gonna go in a space where, you know, some seven-year-old woman with arthritis needs it or someone that's got gut issues wants it and they're a lawyer, a doctor, a wife, a mother, like normal people and everywhere you walk in, it's shady as fuck. There's a huge 300-pound muscled-out steroid guy with a gun in his back pocket. You, I mean, just you could smell the weed like, I mean, it was just so unprofessional that we looked at it and go, oh man, this is gonna be so easy. Like we're gonna come in and do this right. And we did, but what was so frustrating for us trying to build this business legitimately way back then was all the other body undercutting all that there was no regulation. There was nothing that stopped you from backdoor selling or doing, selling other drugs or whatever it took to through. Cause at that time it was all these hustlers and drug dealers. There was very few guys like yourself that were in the space and guys like me got tired of waiting. So did you go through this frustrating? Are you still going through this? Look, it's definitely not as, it's not as bad as it used to be. There's, you know, there's a lot more infrastructure. There's still not near enough infrastructure to support it. But there's still a lot of that same hesitance from 90% of the people to go to a dispensary. Like even the nice dispensary, still have a dude in a bulletproof vest with a block standing out front and you're going through a security. Now I get it, right? It's, you know, dispensaries especially back in the day when there wasn't, you know, there wasn't more focus on how much you were gonna spend. They were all robbing each other. I mean, people were getting robbed all the time, right? So it was actually dangerous, but still one of the, you know, one of the things that we try to push and I, you know, I support very heavily and work with the Bureau of Cannabis Control here is why are we legitimizing a business but still not allowing it to bank? You know, why should I have to, when it's time to pay excise taxes, have to have five armored guards and an entire truck to bring $2 million in cash to the Department of Finance, right? And why is it, you know, from the most legitimate company to the most illegitimate company, bank accounts shut down all the time, right? I mean, it's just, if it's not an illegal business, let's figure out a way to structure it so that you don't, so you take cash out of the equation, right? The most dangerous part of the business is not like, what do you, I mean, how much pot flower can you possibly go steal to make it worth it, right? I mean, if you go steal extract, maybe it's worth it, but what do you do with it at that point, right? But everybody knows that cannabis people have money. They have cash sitting around because you can't bank it. The irony is all those regulations make it more dangerous, create black markets. If they overtax the hell out of it, the black market's gonna be. That's what happened to us. We watched when we, so we were, before even the taxing really started to happen and then it was like, here this comes. So we're getting hit sales tax, store tax, the city tax, the state tax. Before you knew it, like I was like, I gotta sell an eighth at like $80 just so I could pay the staff and we can keep things on the shelf. Yeah, but the dude across the street can sell it for 40. That's right. Because he's not paying any of those taxes. Exactly, he's cashing out. And that's still a very real circumstance for the dispensaries in LA. That's what I thought. I would like to point out though that you guys quality control, you guys have put together a product that all before regulations just highlights how markets work. You guys wanna be the best and you guys are out competing everybody as a result. And there's before any regulations. Well, because people want quality. That's right. I mean, they do want quality and it's in your best interest. We still feel that like even though we've grown to be a significant market share in the business, it wasn't really a core, it wasn't really a great environment for us to grow during that time. But I think what it proved was that people were looking for a product like this. And even today where we've got amazing dispensary partners like MedMen and Kaleva and Airfield and the Apothecarium groups up north to just to name a few of our great accounts that really run great businesses. Shout out to Airfield. That's our dispenser. Yeah, that's our spot. Shout out to Pat. What's up, man? All of those guys still, it's really hard to get our core consumer into that store, right? We feel that there's still 90% of the people even in a market like California that's relatively hip to the campus business. There's still a lot of stigma there. Yeah, I mean, look, when it comes down to it, your Manhattan Beach mom, it's not gonna go to a dispensary even if it's a nice one, right? And, you know, there's things around e-commerce that are gonna start to change that, right? And is that develops more and more and different styles of dispensaries and more welcoming environments, you know? Look, when a lot of people started rushing into the cannabis business, I hate to use the word green rush because it's such a played out term, right? But when people started rushing in, they were like, oh, man, this cannabis business is so much different than every business. Margins are awesome. Regulations are relatively light. You can make a bunch of money and they overpaid for their leases. They thought that cannabis was always gonna be this huge margin business that it wasn't going to market correct. Like, you know, business is business over time. Everything market corrects, right? So you have to put out a good, consistent quality product at a price that is reflective of the quality, right? There's great vapes that are $30. There's great vapes that are $100. You know, they may be two completely different things but they serve different markets. But regardless, over time, you gotta run your business like a business, right? And I think that's where a lot, so I think that's why you're gonna continue to see this shift towards more, you know, retail markets and retail locations that start to reflect like, you know, an Apple Store, a Sage Natural Wellness Store, a Warby Parker Store, you know, those kind of things. It's so funny too because the more they get out of the way, the faster the market for any product but in terms for cannabis progresses. I remember going up to, where did I go up to Oregon when it was legalized there? What would have still just medicinally legal in California? So in Oregon, it had been legalized for a lot longer, fully, right? Recreationally, and I went into the store and the quality of the cannabis, the packaging, the labeling was already better because they opened the gates a little bit and people competed and when people compete, you're gonna get more efficiency, you're gonna get better products because consumers are gonna demand it. And I remember seeing the difference, I'm like, holy shit, California used to be the leader. Now I'm seeing stuff over here, but now of course, California is catching up. And it's, I mean, and now you have products like yours, which looks like, I mean. Yeah, they look awesome. I was gonna ask you about, you know, the decision-making process in the design of it because I know that, you know, you're trying to make it more. Justice said I'm gonna get tampon when he first got there. I said, I'm gonna tell him you fucking said that, dude. I said, I'm sure he did it on purpose. Like it's, I think tampon, I think, I think medical, and I say, if I can sell as many dose pens as tampons are sold, I'm right here having a great day. You know, one of my favorite ones is, in the Atlantic, they wrote an article and the woman that wrote it used the term space tampon. That's pretty good. I mean, that's my favorite one so far. Yeah, you know, I can't take any credit for the beauty of the packaging and the way that it was presented. It was an idea that we partnered with. There's original co-founders of the company. There's a company called Anomaly, who is our partner in the business. Anomaly was named last year's 2017 AdAges Agency of the Year. So everybody from Budweiser, Beats by Dre, Dick Sporting Goods, incredibly long list. They have offices here on Abbott Kinney, but offices in six countries. The two founders, two of the co-founders of that company are on our board of directors and one is the chairman. So we were fortunate to have a firm that has created some of the best marketing campaigns in the world. If you remember the Budweiser commercial with the horses and the little puppy chasing them, that's, you know, that's our... Such a significant difference. You can tell right away to the thought process that went into the cleanliness of the design and it looks like something that can live on the shelf. Yeah, and that was the point. And when you're looking in the cannabis industry, see, I think a lot of people, it gets echo chambery when you're just talking to people in the cannabis industry because we know THC and CBD and Indica and Sativa, like we just, you know these things because you're in the industry, right? But even being in the industry, I walk into a lot of dispensaries and it's just wildly overwhelming, right? There's just like hundreds of products on the shelves and the merchandising is crazy and you can't really even tell what they are. So when we, you know, the need states, the need state concept was actually the core of the business, right? How do you go back 5,000 years, right? And breed all of the literature and look at everything that people have consumed cannabis for over this time. It's not, and it's very well documented. People consuming, people using the leaves, they're the seeds from the cannabis plants and putting them on hot coals as women are giving them labor or going into labor to relax them, right? I mean, people using it for anxiety. This is thousands of years ago, by the way. Thousands of years ago. So we looked at what are all of these, going back 5,000 years, what are the things that people utilize cannabis for? And let's try to deliver that, right? Let's deliver, not the cannabis culture while it's been an amazing culture and it's given people, it's given a great rise to the medical access side, which has been super important, right? Even in most medical states, like you wouldn't call California the last 20 years a medical state, even though it's been amazing for the access for people that really needed cannabis as a medicine, but the problem is it's the other, it's the 10% that you really see that is the rippin' bongs, huge giant blunts, you know, that entire subculture of the cannabis industry is what was more visible to the rest of the world, right? Not the kid with seizures that needed it, not the person with cancer that needed it for pain relief. So when we looked at it, we said, okay, let's take away the 10,000 strain names. Let's take away that super edgy stigma and let's go, what do people actually use it for over time? You guys did for cannabis what we did for fitness. Like fitness has gotten ridiculous with all these different exercises and movements and there's some shit that's been, we've been doing for a very long time that's very functional and works and that's really how we built all of our programming because there's something in that and I think that people over complicate it. You look on Instagram now and you go through all the exercises, you see someone doing some weird shit and some weird ass movement and exercise. It's like, dude, we've been doing movements for hundreds of years and people are thinking that this is gonna be the next great thing that's gonna make my triceps look a certain way. I feel the same way in cannabis. Even besides that, I must have said this five, 10 years ago. I know I said this on our podcast many times. If you want your industry to be legitimized, don't name your shit, you know, Crunch Berry, whatever and don't make gummy bears with 50 milligrams of THC. Like for sure some kid is gonna get that and get their hands on it or at least it looks like it, right? Like they had to, in order to be legitimized and it's psychoactive, you know what I mean? Take all the kid stuff out, the candy stuff and the weird names, make it look like it's a legitimate product because it is, you know, it's a plant that does some incredible things for a lot of people. Sure, you could use it recreationally and that's fine too, but I mean, treat it like adults are gonna use it, not like, you know, kids and many actually can use it. Yeah, and look, you're absolutely right. The gummy candy, all of that thing, when you talk about dosage and cannabis, like, you know, my business partner talks about this time where when we were talking about dosage control and cannabis, somebody gave him a chunk of a, like a little tiny chunk of a chocolate chip cookie and it was immobile for eight hours, right? And afterwards a guy who was a guy who knows like, oh man, you know, I accidentally put four times, messed up the calculation and I put four times more THC in there than I thought, you know, and they made a cookie. There was a cookie in San Jose, a thousand milligrams of THC. A thousand, if for people who are listening, who have no idea what that means, a dose that most people will feel is between two to five milligrams. I'm cool with five milligrams, more than five milligrams for me and I'm too high. Now, heavy users that I know, you may do as high as 15, 20 milligrams. Definitely don't recommend that. If you're a beginner at all, you'll probably have a bad time. A thousand milligrams in a cookie. It's what the hell's you're trying to see. And one of the getting back to the quality control side of it, right? There was no, you know, most of the products weren't tested and it's not like these things are being made in the same factory that's making the Nordic Naturals gummy vitamin, right? These are being made in like a dude's kitchen. And now they're getting better, right? But for a long time, because of the legalization, if you're, even if you were really trying to run a business, how are you gonna cap, how are you hitting capitalize and capex into a million dollars in equipment? If you don't even know if you're gonna have a license next year, you know? Yeah, there's no capital because the risk is too high. Yes, super high risk. So you don't have like, you don't even have the equipment's definitely getting there now. I mean, look, there's some beautiful facilities here. And as you go into the other states where the people's licensing's a lot more structured, you're starting to get some very nice GMP quality facilities. So, you know, it's definitely moving rapidly towards higher quality, but still, you know, the thought that more is better doesn't necessarily apply to cannabis either, right? We've tried to move out of this price per milligram conversation, right? Like I don't buy alcohol based on price per proof. Yeah, when we go for moonshine, right? Yeah, like, yeah, I'm, you know, or everybody would buy Everclear, right? And that's not a great experience. So when we looked at it, we said, let's take the milligrams out of it. We're putting, we're very well documenting exactly how many milligrams are in there, but even more than that, how many doses you're getting. So, you know, we have our dose pen 200, which was our original pen. The price of all of the things that we do, which is test our material four times, ensure that it's the cleanest possible thing there, build a pen that has a full microprocessor inside of it that controls the temperature of vaporization, controls the timing, is built of all medical grade plastic and all medical grade components inside in a real GMP environment, right? And is packaged in a way that actually gives you instructions and makes sense, right? And tries to lead you down the path of, here's what you should choose, you know? And so going from that, going from that need state concept that is, here's an idea, not all of these are strictly medicinal, right? We call them need states, but when we really have it broken up into experienced states and need states, because that glass of wine after work for someone that needs to relax, that's a need, that's a body need a lot of times, right? Sometimes you need to unwind. So the bliss pen, even though it is, you know, it's strong, right? It's got a high amount of THC in it, gives you a good amount of energy. It will intoxicate you if you continue to consume it, but it's there to give you that exact right amount, right? And that blissful experience is a need state that your body needs sometimes, right? Sleep, calm and relief are much more in that medically focused specific area, and then passion and arouse, which are a product that we launched are, you know, sexual health is a definite need state, right? That's something that people need. And when we look at those pens we talk about, you know, there's a lot of interesting, I like to say it's getting the mood, stay in the mood. You know, we have one of our reps who says pre-game and game for it, as we're explaining it around. But you know, the arouse pen, especially in a place like we're sitting now, Venice, that's an incredibly, incredibly creative community. You know, the arouse pen is one of the most popular products here because it's inhibition lowering, it's still energetic and it enhances creativity, right? So we get, we see people using the products a lot, but the core of it is you can control the experience to the point where, hey, if this is something where I like to use one dose of bliss before I go out or two doses of bliss, I know how I'm gonna feel when I'm done. And there's no smell when you use them. I mean, there's, you guys have definitely, I don't know anybody that comes close to what you guys are doing. There's no competition in this particular sense. And what I really appreciate is the information that you guys provide. These booklets back here, I don't know what they're called, the field guides. They're called. That's the first time I've seen anybody put together something as comprehensive that talks about, that talks about the different cannabinoids or the two major ones that have the most studies, THC and CBD. But then also talk about terpenes and their effects. It's been very hard for me to find information that I wanted to ask you because I've had, I know quite a bit, and I've had my own personal experience with cannabis. I had a family member who had cancer years ago. And so I went super deep into research. And so I've learned quite a bit on the cannabinoids, but there wasn't much on the terpenes. And I know for myself, cause I also use cannabis, when I could use one strain that's got, you know, 18% THC and 2% CBD. And I can use another strain with the same exact CBD THC, but one makes me anxious and I get anxiety or paranoia. The other one feels really good and calm or whatever. And it's not always the CBD THC. There's other things in the plant that are obviously making me feel different. And I think it's part of it, it's the terpenes. So let's talk about that for a second. Let's talk about some of the terpenes cause you guys actually list the terpenes in your vape pans, which is awesome. Yes, the terpenes are the least talked about, least understood portion of the plant. The term strain is the most influenced. Now there are other things we get in the minor cannabinoids later, but strains are primarily influenced by the terpenes that are in them, right? So basically terpenes are the components of essential oils. They're found in basically every plant, every fruit that you're ever going to see. Yeah, they're flavor and fragrance, but more than anything they're effects driven, right? So why is lavender used for relaxation and sleeping, right? Why are citrus scents and minty scents, things like peppermint used for uplifting? It's got to do with the terpenes that are inside of those plants as well. So cannabis is one of the plants that has the heaviest terpene profiles of almost any plant that's out there. And it's got an incredibly complex terpene profile. So most cannabis plants, you'll, if you take them to a real hardcore GMP lab that has the best equipment, they'll see between 45 and 95 different terpenes. A lot of them, they can't even really be identified, right? So what we did was rather than saying, okay, we're going to make a strain. I'm going to, Jack Herrera is a super popular product for energy, right? I have a funny relationship with Herrera. That's the strain I smoked when I came up with our first programs. That's one of the most creative strains ever made. Yeah, it's great, super energetic, right? So instead of saying Jack Herrera, we say bliss, but we didn't take Jack Herrera and profile it. So we took a database of about 6,000 strains from labs and looked at the terpene profiles of all of them and then grouped them into the, which I don't like to use the word anecdotal when talking about the evidence behind cannabis, but because it's not scientific or consumer, clinical trial, I'll use the word anecdotal. But if we also consider when you have enough anecdote, when you have thousands and thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of anecdote, I mean, that's evidence. And that drives research nowadays. In fact, a lot of the medicine, like the medicinal use of CBD for epilepsy was driven by anecdote, thankfully, the internet existed and lots of people got together and said, hey, this is stopping my pet seizures, my kid seizures, so yeah. So I'll just use bliss as one example, right? So bliss, we wanted an uplifting, energetic product. So we took the strains that people generally consume for those, Jack Herrera is probably the best example. There's a lot in that family though, Jack Herrera, Lemon Jack, all of that entire family of strains, people love as an energetic, non-paranoia inducing sativa, right? So then we took six or seven of those strains and layered out the terpene profiles and said, what are the terpene profiles of all of these strains? Brilliant. Okay, and then built custom terpene profiles based off of the primary components in these strains. And we built about, we built four different ones for each need state and then did consumer tests and said, okay, so here is our bliss, A, B, C and D. And we had a second set where we varied the THC and CBD ratio, right? Of each one of those. Cause all of our products are CBD attenuated. We don't have anything that's just THC or just CBD. Excellent. Which, you know, we can get a lot bigger conversation around why and then cannabinoid system. Oh, I read an interesting study where they took people who did heavy THC and then people who did heavy THC with CBD, the potential, the side effects, the negatives that are associated with cannabis way lower when they combine it with CBD. Significantly lower. So we took that and we built our own terpene profiles, our own formulas, our own strains, effectively, based on the consumer feedback that we got from these different terpene profiles. And the primary consistency around the product is in that terpene profile is exactly the same every time. So your flavor and your effect is going to be the same every single time with the product. All of our products are 88% cannabinoid oils. That ratio is going to vary between THC and CBD oil and 12% terpenes. And that terpene profile is exactly the same every time we list on the box the top five. Most of our profiles have between 12 and 20. We're all of them out between 12 and 20 different terpenes in them. And, you know, just like, it's just like grabbing a can of Coca-Cola or going to a Starbucks, right? You want to have consistency in the product, but the terpenes are really what drive the efficacy. So... It's that big of a deal. It's the whole deal. That's so crazy. Because, so take the oil, for example, right? We make THC distillate and we make CBD distillate. Now, we do grow specific strains because of how they grow, how fast they grow, how they yield and what minor cannabinoids are in them. But when it comes down to it, the distillation process, which is what you see as clear or gold now, you have removed the strain from the product. It's just CBD and THC. Right? I mean, it's... There's a little bit of extra particulate matter in there, but let's say for our product, for this specific product, we distill our THC to 87%. So it's 87% THC. There's going to be some small portions of other minor cannabinoids in there, CBD, CBG, CBN. And then the rest of it is just some plant matter that's still remaining, giving it that gold color. We can continue to distill it farther if we want to, but the way we've created our formulations and the ratios that we try to hit between THC and CBD, that just happens to be the number that works well for us. And then we combine that exact terpene formula. So if you took all of our blends and if you took the... So the bliss and the sleep, bliss is a nine to one THC to CBD, sleep's an eight to one THC to CBD. Buy themselves as distillate, very little difference. You wouldn't notice the difference. It's a percentage point on each side when it's THC and CBD. However, that 12% terpene blend is what makes this one give you your Jack Herrera inspiration and this one give you your... We don't like to call it drowsy because we try to avoid a drowsy experience but give you that restfulness. And if we flip flop them and we put the bliss terpenes in that sleep formula and put the sleep terpenes in that bliss formula, this would just be a stronger sleep formula. And this would be a little bit lower THC bliss formula. So it's that exact terpene profile that really... Really, nobody's doing that. ...derives, well... So a lot of people are doing it, but... I haven't seen it. They're usually just... So most of the pens, most of the vape cartridges that you see that say Jack Herrera on them, right? If you go and you buy a standard 510 thread vape cartridge, it's pretty much built the same way as this. They're just making their terpene profile based off of a Jack Herrera flower that's rowing it in there. Right, right. But I mean, nobody's doing this in the sense that... I think what they're doing is they're taking strains that traditionally have particular effects. You guys have identified terpene, specific terpene profiles and are putting them in products that are named things like sleep, calm, relief. What are some of the other popular strains that you guys have worked with? I know you said Jack Herrera for bliss. Are there some others you can name with the... Yeah, so, well, I can give you what's the family. Yeah, I imagine like sleep is like GDP or something like that. Yeah, it's in your GDP type family, right? Arouse is in your Skittles family, right? Passion is in your super hashy Cush families, right? Your very hashy type products. But rather than just mimicking an exact strain, we took the range of what are the six or seven most popular strains? I guess not even most popular. What are the six or seven evidence-based that, hey, people love this for sleep. People love this for pain relief, right? And taking that and going, okay, let's look at those and analyze the terpenes and let's overlay them and see what are the terpenes that are consistent between all of these that are actually making these work, right? And then building, you know, using that as the building blocks for a formula. That's awesome. Now, what was the feedback that you were getting when you were testing this? Was it very consistent or was it like, oh wait, like 80% of the people felt this way or was it all over the top? Yeah, so I mean, when we built it, we had a requirement that if we didn't have 80% positive feedback that it couldn't make it to the next level of testing, right? And we were very fortunate to have a really good number of groups and some great groups work with us to do this testing. So we had a group from Sonoma County that was primarily serves elderly medical patients. So we had hundreds of elderly medical patients that had been consuming cannabis for a number of medical reasons that gave us amazing feedback on our products, right? And then we used, you know, we have a very medicinally focused shop that really pushes the pen to their customers because they're really focusing on medical patients called Cornerstone Collective out here in LA. And now we have, you know, when we do these consumer studies which we continue to do with products and new products that we're looking to bring to market. So our existing consumer base actually gets to try new products as they're coming out, right? New blends, new formulations. And really, you know, after the terpene blend was locked, it was a matter of what is the THC and CBD ratio that works the best for each one of these because it's very impactful, right? A nine to one THC to CBD like the Bliss. So if you have a product that has 66% THC and 7% CBD in it, you're not gonna see that in the plant. Very few plants are going to express that naturally. It's gonna feel very different than a THC oil formula that is just 66% THC and 0.2% CBD, like you see in most, right? And that it's an entourage effect that has to do with your CB1 and CB2 receptors in your endocannabinoid system. So when you talked about, you know, the difference in the side effects, adding that CBD not only decreases the side effects that you're gonna feel, but we feel it also, you know, I just, I feel it, number one, smooths out the experience so that you don't get, you're not engaging one of those two receptors too much, but it also elongates the experience, right? So you're getting a little smoother, what I consider to be a smoother experience. Now you accumulated all this knowledge just after switching from the e-cigarettes, you weren't already reading about all this and learning about this prior to that? Well, I mean, I grew up in agriculture, so I knew a little bit about it, but yeah, mostly it was just, you know, mostly it was just as we were making devices, actually getting down to what, how was this stuff actually made and what are people, what components of this are people actually getting benefit from? And I think that's the most confusing part in cannabis, right, it's like some people like indica strains for sleep, some people just like them because they like to get a body high and hang out on the couch and eat and play video games or whatever, right? But what are the actual components that are making you feel that way? So I guess my, you know, the way I approached it was a little more from that engineering mind, right? Being, here's how you build an electronic circuit board, here's what each one of those components done and here's why it works when it comes out the other end. Well, plus most of the research on cannabis or the good research on cannabinoids interpreting is like the last 15 years, 10, 15 years. So, you know, if you start, this is the time to learn. This is when all the information's coming out. Have they identified, cause I know CBD doesn't attach to either the CB1 or CB2 receptor. Have they figured out how it creates its effects? I know it, I guess it improves the way you're into cannabinoid system works. Yeah, so it's like a booster function. And this is something that I think is the most, one of the most interesting things about the medical community in cannabis is that now, as we sit here now, it's widely accepted that you have an endocannabinoid system in your body and that it engages with the other important systems in your body, neurological, lymphatic circulatory, right? I mean, the endocannabinoid system is there and it exists. 15 years ago, there wasn't a single medical school that talked about the endocannabinoid system. So how do you have an entire, how do you have an entire important function, body functional system that engages with every other part of your body that's not even being, that's not even mentioned in a medical textbook. So, you know, that's one major reason that there's such a lack of knowledge about how exactly it works. It's because doctors don't even know about it, right? And then if you layer on the fact that there is the federal illegality issue, there's no funding for research. Not only that, let's get into the business side. Like, did you guys get funding or how did you, how many partners are there? How did you do that? Yeah, so I mean, originally it was self-funded among the partners. From the device side, we gave our technology and dosage control patents and the construction of the device and anomaly donated services to build the marketing and build the packaging and do those things. We had a great group of very early investors, but since then we've raised additional capital. Most of it's been from a very small group, but we have a nice core group of investors that have allowed us to get to the point that we are right now. Moving forward, we're at the point now where we've gone beyond the proof of concept for this device, people really enjoy it. And we could have taken this product and gone from state to state to state already. But I think the most important thing to us as a business was to know exactly what the perfect way to present this product to the consumer was and make sure that enough people had the chance to engage with it that we knew is there changes that need to be made? Are there adjustments to our business model that are gonna allow us to reach more people? Was there anything you guys had to recalibrate? Was there anything that you guys, after doing all the testing and kind of getting it out there and seeing a great response, did you get rid of a strain or did you do anything like that? Yes, we've had one, as far as the actual product goes, we're continually innovating on the pen side, trying to make everything work better, function better, reduce any failure rates that there are and prove the experience, but there hasn't been anything significant on that side. We did change the calm formulation from a one to 15 THC to CBD to a one to 10. So we increased the THC a little bit, not a significant amount. I have conversations with people all the time that are scared to try any amount of THC, but our calm formula has 6% THC in it. It's not going to intoxicate you, but it's going to give you a significantly better experience than a 99% pure CBD isolate will, right? Because of that entourage and being able to engage with both receptors. I think that the, I think the most adjustments and changes that we've made have been around education. From the beginning, we were very, very focused on things like the field guide, things like our six-fold brochures that fold out and try to tell you everything we possibly can about the product because there's a lot of education that comes along with something like this. It's different. It's new. Most people don't understand the cannabis industry anyway, and putting something that's completely different than everything else on the market out there, it takes time to educate. Like you said, nobody else lists the exact terpenes on there. That could be confusing, right? So we try to educate in a way that makes it incredibly simple. We've focused a lot on building our own, owned experience inside of retail stores. So I believe now in LA, we have four shop and shops. So basically a little Nespresso boutique inside a dispensary that we staff full-time. So you walk into a store and there's actually a dosage representative there and little trays of plant material that represent the different terpenes, and there's a lot of different kinds of things. So you can smell it, you can actually understand the experience that you're getting from this piece of technology, right? All right. So most of our learnings and most of our change has come around understanding how we can connect with our core consumer and get them into a dispensary in a way that feels comfortable. What states are you guys in? We're just in California right now. How would you be able to move in other states? It's very different from state to state, right? It is. It's a complex situation. In most states you need to partner with a licensee or you need to go get your own license. But most of the states aren't like California. So California has a lot of licenses, right? There's thousands and thousands of licenses that are granted to companies. You take a state like Illinois, there's only 20 growers and 60 dispensaries. In a state like New York, there's seven groups that are fully vertically integrated. Florida, 13 groups that are fully vertically integrated. So the newer states, not the non-Washington, Colorado, California, they're all much more consolidated. So you just have to choose the right partner. For us as a business, this isn't a brand that's gonna go get licensed. We're not just gonna go like, hey, here's Dosis, here's the pen, here's the packaging, fill it up, go do your thing. No, you guys are gonna dominate California and then when it goes national, that'll be the next step. Yeah, I mean, we will move. We will be in more states by the end of this year. And then we have a strong focus on Canada. So we've just started our, even though vaporization isn't legal in Canada yet, full legalization of cannabis is gonna happen, probably supposed to be July, probably gonna be around September. We've been very engaged in the process there, both in getting vaporization legal first, which just happened with the S5 bill. So there wasn't even ESIGs legal in Canada until a couple of weeks ago, but then getting what's called the S45 there, which is getting the actual allowance of cannabis vaporization legal there. But we've already started our full marketing campaign there to let people know that Dosis is coming. And we think those kinds of markets where you haven't had this really long history and thousands and thousands of brands on the shelves, those are the kind of markets that the product is even more attractive in. Let's talk a little bit about the types of pens that you guys offer or the different, because they're all named different names, depending on their effects. We talked about passion for a second. That one's supposed to be for libido sex. Yeah, so. And you guys are saying Kush was in there, which I didn't know that the Kush strains were known for that. So, yeah, so I wouldn't call a, so if we talk about, if we talk about both of them in combination as sexual health products, the arouse is to use more standard cannabis language, a sativa dominant hybrid. So it is a inhibition lowering, but not drowsy, something like you're gonna feel from a Jack Harare that energy, but a little less energetic and a little more inhibition lowering. For me, that's what I use before I go out at night, right? If I'm gonna go to a party. Before you podcasted? I did not before I podcasted. Maybe I should have, a little bit later for the party. But yeah, so that's an inhibition lowering product, right? It's about kind of interpersonal connectivity. The passion is more of a body engagement, right? So that's why we say kind of the get in the mood, stay in the mood. Your heavy cushes and things like that, they're really about your body feeling, right? Connecting with yourself. And whether that's personal, just feeling that body high, feeling really engaged with yourself, or that's with your partner, right? Feeling engaged with your partner. So one is much more mental and one is much more physical. Got it, got it. And then relief, calm, sleep, let's just do those real quick. What is relief for? And that's obviously a pain relief. And is that the highest CBD? Yeah, so that's our pain relief product. It's a two to one THC to CBD. Okay, so that's the closest to being an almost an even spreader. Yeah, that's the closest to a one to one. I will say that it was- It's like a blue dream type of strain or something like that in there. Yeah, it's actually the most inert of the strain profiles, right? Because when it comes to pain relief, just like sleep, I would say, two incredibly complex conditions, right? There's a lot of reasons that people are in pain. Yeah, good point. Is it muscle soreness? Is it muscle spasticity? Is it inflammation? Is it actually some kind of dysfunction within the discs in your back or something like that? Or is it just headaches, right? I mean, there's so many reasons for pain. So the THC and the CBD in combination, even though it's still a 48% THC content in that product, because of the 24% CBD, you're gonna get a modulation, right? So it's not an intoxicating product. Personally, that's my favorite of the products. It's not incapacitating if you're not really tolerant to THC. To someone like myself, I use cannabis semi-regularly, but I do have a tendency towards anxiety and paranoia if I use the wrong strain or too much. Which strain would be the one that I would use? Or which one would I would use? Which pain? Would it be the relief? To stay away from the anxiety? Yeah, not that I have anxiety, but if I go too strong on the sativa, it can give me anxiety. Yeah, so I mean, really we've, I think part of the CBD being in there and part of the way the terpene profiles are built is to decrease those side effects, right? Yeah, it's something like Durban Poison is like can give people incredible anxiety, right? I mean, it's the super strong sativa product. Worst anxiety I ever got in my life was White Widow. White Widow put me in a bad state. It can happen, right? And so Bliss is actually the most sativa of the products we have, but we don't get a lot of feedback around the paranoia. And there's a couple of things around that. First, the doses aren't incredibly high. So you're not gonna, after a couple of doses, which is why we recommend, especially if you're a new consumer or if you're just consuming a different type of product than you normally do, take a dose, wait 15 minutes, take another one, right? Within that timeframe, you're gonna know within an inhalable cannabis product how you're really feeling about it. Sleeps, obviously an Indica product. The Calm is a hybrid profile, very inert profile, right? Same with the Relief, we're really work, we're really letting the THC and CBD ratios do their work in those products. Not that the terpenes, so in the ReliefPen, beta-chlorophylline is a great example, right? Throughout history, you got a toothache, chew on a clove. Put it in your mouth, chew on a clove, that's the beta-chlorophylline in that clove, actually activating and having anti-inflammatory properties. So you're gonna see a lot of beta-chlorophylline in the ReliefPen on the terpenes side. And then arouse the sativa-dominant hybrid and passion is our heaviest Indica product, right? Which one's your best seller? Bliss. Oh, Bliss is. Yeah, so an interesting thing about Bliss, even though everybody looks at it as a medical product and new consumer product, this product actually won High Times Harvest Cup for Best Vaporizer. Oh, wow, that's awesome. And that's a panel of 27 people that have been in the cannabis industry for a really long time. So that was in November of last year. So, you know, it's not just for, it's not just for the, you know, the soccer mom or the new consumer. That leads me to the next question I wanted to ask you, which is, do you think that you guys are gonna just kind of have a piece of the pie and there's still gonna be a lot of other players in the space that market to like a, the more recreational use, do you think that's gonna happen? Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely going to happen, right? I mean, there's very few markets in consumer packaged goods that are dominated by single brands, you know, save energy drinks with Red Bull and five hour energy and some other examples. Yeah, it's just, you know, and cannabis is not, not everybody reacts exactly the same to cannabis products, right? It's one of those things that, you know, two people can have two different experiences with the exact same thing and everybody's body chemistry is a lot different. We especially see that on the edible side, right? And one, you can have a, you can have a 120 pound female that can take 25 milligrams edible and I'm a 210 pound guy and if I take five milligrams, I'm wiped out, right? And that just has to do with body chemistry. So there's a little bit of experimentation that goes on to figure out exactly what's right for you, you know? It's very similar to nutraceuticals and supplements, right? It takes experimentation to know exactly what's right for you and that only underpins the reason that dose is so important, right? If you're gonna experiment, experiment in a way that you know exactly what you're getting. It's controlled. So you can figure out what works for you. Well, excellent. You guys have set the bar very high. I mean, very, very high. Very much ahead of the curve. Yeah, I'm pretty into the industry just as a consumer and also as an observer and I don't know anybody that's even come close to what you guys are doing and you guys have answered a lot of the problems that I saw with the legalization of cannabis where the industry was gonna make it very difficult to go legal and something like this. I don't know how a regulator and honest regulator is gonna look at that and say, no, that's not, we can't have this be legal. It's... Yeah, and that's our hope, right? As the new states come on, we've been very active in Canada and actually our Canadian president just spoke in front of Senate, the Canadian Senate last week in support of the S45 bill to get vaporization legal faster there. You've got a large country, 35 plus million people that's about to go completely adult use and the only things that people are gonna be able to buy are flour and edible oils like olive oil, infused olive oil. So getting products like this out there so that more people can consume and you can do it in a more doseable way is really important. And we think that the platform is really great for that. And if that, we don't expect every person, every new consumer that comes and buys a dosage pen, yes, I'd love for them to consume dosage forever. But it may not be the exact right thing for them long-term, but if it's the reason that somebody takes that leap of faith to get off of Xanax, to not take an ambient at night to try to cut down on the opioid use, right? If our product is a reason that they do that and then they move on to something else, that's amazing, right? We've done our job. That's cool. But what we found is that people love the product and they know it's consistent and it works regularly for them. So we have a lot of great, most of our customers are lifetime customers, but the real benefit to the entire industry is that the more people that we can get or the more people that we can give permission to to try cannabis are only gonna continue and enhance their life and try to pull back off of pharmaceuticals and utilize cannabis, clean, consistent, quality, well-made cannabis to make their lives better. And that's what we're looking for, delivering health and happiness is our timeline. Well, hey, man, I'm glad you guys are doing it and you're doing a great job. Yep, appreciate you coming on the show, brother. Yeah, I appreciate the time. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. 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