S4:E10 - From CBD Shop to Cannabis Empire | Mike Sims on Vinally High

The Vinally High Podcast wraps up Season 4 with an unforgettable finale featuring Charlotte cannabis entrepreneur Mike Sims, founder of Crowntown Cannabis and CEO of Foes Inc. In this episode, hosts Drew Beats and BJ Buds dive deep into the intersection of vinyl records, cannabis culture, entrepreneurship, and advocacy.

Mike shares the story behind building one of the most recognizable cannabis brands in the Carolinas—from opening an early CBD storefront with limited resources to growing a multi-layered cannabis business that includes retail, product brands, and distribution. The conversation explores the realities of running a cannabis business in a constantly evolving legal landscape and why advocacy is so important for protecting hemp and cannabis access across the United States.

As always on Vinally High, music plays a central role in the conversation. This episode’s listening session features Legend by Bob Marley, sparking a discussion about Marley’s cultural influence, the relationship between reggae and cannabis culture, and the timeless power of music to bring people together.

Mike also reflects on the personal stories that have kept him passionate about the cannabis space—from customers finding relief through hemp products to the broader mission of building community and changing perceptions about the plant.

If you’re interested in cannabis entrepreneurship, the evolving hemp industry, music culture, or the future of cannabis legalization, this Season 4 finale is a must-listen.

Roll up, drop the needle, and press play.

Follow Our Guest – Mike Sims
Instagram: @crowntown_dispensary_official
Instagram: @cannabiskingsouth
Instagram: @the_king_canna
Website: crowntowncannabis.com
                 https://cltcbd.com/protect-the-plant/
YouTube:  @letsbeblunt7017  

Follow Vinally High
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YouTube: Vinally High

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This episode of the Vinally High Podcast is officially powered by Hey Binks, the beverage additive that turns any drink into a better vibe.

SPEAKER_05 0:09

Welcome to Vinally High, the podcast that celebrates two of life's greatest pleasures. Vinyl records and CBD products. We'll take you on a journey through our vast vinyl collections, exploring the significance of music in our lives, while also enjoying the therapeutic benefits of CBD. Each episode, we'll spend some of our favorite records, ranging from classic to rock to Andy, and everything in between. The violin high isn't just about music, but we'll also delve into the world of CBD, discussing its many benefits and how it can enhance our listening experience. From tangsters to edibles to topicals, plus four different products and share our experiences to eat.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

But I'm your host, Drew Beats, sitting across from me in the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen someone show up to my house, and you all know BJ Buds.

SPEAKER_04 1:35

Listen, at least I got clothes on. That's all I'm saying.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

I'll just actually preface that with it's actually not the most ridiculous thing I've ever showed up to my house in, but it's up there. Yeah, it's up there. It's up there.

SPEAKER_04 1:44

It's up there.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Man, how are you doing tonight?

SPEAKER_04 1:46

It's a good night, man. I'm having a good time. We've got a good show coming. I got it. I got this really good feeling. I don't know what it is.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Some kind of feeling?

SPEAKER_04 1:54

Yes, okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

I mean, let's just get straight into it because this came about a little unexpectedly. Um, we typically don't plan to have a guest for our season finales. We do the the season wrap, just the two of uh two of us. Uh and it's usually our least listened to episode of every single season.

SPEAKER_04 2:11

So Which is why I wore this today. Spice it up a little bit, you know.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

So our guest tonight reached out um to us to join the show, and we couldn't be more thrilled to have you on. I'm making this up a little bit as we go because I didn't get your email information in time because technology, right? I'm horrible.

SPEAKER_04 2:33

Hey, technology, and we still slip a man.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

But BJ, I could not be more excited to read this right now. We are joined tonight by the CEO of FOE's Inc. and the founder of Crowntown Cannabis. His background includes work as a lobbyist, advocate, educator, realtor, and ordained minister. Um, he's deeply immersed in both music and the cannabis culture, and a bunch of other accolades that I'm sure will come out as the show progresses, but we are joined tonight by none other than the king of cannabis and Charlotte.

SPEAKER_04 3:05

Let's go.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Mr. Mike Sims.

SPEAKER_04 3:07

What's up, Mike?

SPEAKER_02 3:07

What's up?

SPEAKER_03 3:09

Yeah, thanks so much, guys. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_06 3:11

Yes, sir.

SPEAKER_03 3:12

Yeah, um, you know, uh don't know what I am. I try to avoid growing up. You know, uh that's you know, I always wonder what I want to be and I still haven't figured it out, man. I've had the craziest background, I've done a little bit of everything. Uh I love cannabis. Um, that's been great for me so far. But yeah, man, uh very busy doing a lot of things, um, staying active and and all kinds of things. But yeah, it's uh it's been an interesting journey. Um been in the cannabis industry since I was 13 years old. Yes, sir.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

As a lot of people are admitting that now that they can, you know. Although I'm glad I actually read that for the first time in that moment because I did not know you were an ordained minister. We have that in common. I don't tell people that a lot, but I am actually an ordained minister as well. My wife literally just found that out, like so did your wife, like a week ago, because we were talking about it. It was one of those things where in high school, when you could start getting ordained online, my friends and I thought it would be funny to do, but they didn't, and I actually did it, and I've been carrying their certificate for the last what, like 20 years now.

SPEAKER_04 4:22

It's like renewal.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

No, it's good for life. Good for life.

SPEAKER_12 4:30

You're at a living wedding gloves. Let's go.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

I've I've done one, and honestly, it wasn't even a full wedding. I just I had some friends that were going to have a full-on wedding but needed to get married like quickly just for insurance purposes and stuff.

SPEAKER_12 4:47

Then it just became a thing.

SPEAKER_03 4:49

I never charge for it. And uh, my only stipulations is to give to a cherry.

SPEAKER_12 4:54

No divorces yet.

SPEAKER_03 4:55

Oh, one of the last ones I did. They made me hike up a mountain wearing a suit. And I was like, this probably ain't for me.

SPEAKER_04 5:05

Rethinking that old free thing, you know.

SPEAKER_03 5:08

I love love, I love marriage. I love it so much I've done it twice now. So uh but not but only twice, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Because this is the final. We didn't even introduce you. We're just gonna gloss over the fact that you're sitting there. The second one's already late.

SPEAKER_06 5:24

I'm looking forward for her.

SPEAKER_03 5:26

But no, man, it's great, man. We got a wonderful life and wonderful kids. Uh, you know, we started this journey together. Um, our journey together, and the journey uh as can on the legal side of cannabis entrepreneur was started about the same time.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

So you you were actually like the first store in in the Charlotte area. Under a different name at the time. Charlotte CBD.

SPEAKER_03 5:50

Yeah. Uh my business partners and I, it was three of us at the time, myself, Lindsay and Dan. We went out to Wilmington 2017, probably even right right there, the 2017, 2018. Uh the hemp pharmacy in Wilmington. We drove out there, heard about it, went saw it. They had the worst like hemp ever. It looked like grass clippings in a jar. They had uh edibles that were fired. It was like, yeah, and I we're like, we can definitely do it.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

We can do this so much better. This is where the bar is set. We got this.

SPEAKER_03 6:23

It was like, yeah, because at the time we're we're looking to go to Oregon to open up uh the century.

SPEAKER_12 6:28

But I was pregnant, so we're like, oh, we can't move across the country. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:33

We went to Oregon for like a week and it was gray the whole time. I was like, this ain't seasonal depression. Yeah. So uh, you know, um we formed our uh on legals in the car on the way back, our LLC, and we're like, well, we'll be open in like a month, this is February. America! We didn't get open until we had our first sale on 420 of 18. We could fit our entire inventory in a duffel bag. Didn't have a store. Didn't have a store. And we opened a brick and mortar store 2018 in October. We were the first in Charlotte, Charlotte City. And the night before we finally got up and dude, everything we thought was gonna be a problem wasn't like law enforcement and all that. No problem at all. It was painting, it was creditable, it was city trying to mess with us to keep us from getting open. And um$5,000 investment, we had some uh tax return.

SPEAKER_09 7:24

Well, five grand, like that was all we had. That was emptying the bank account.

SPEAKER_03 7:29

That was just for it. That was it. And uh the the day before we opened, this brown haired girl came up to the door, and uh we were we could have cameras inside so we could see outside everybody's like, I just tell her to come to the bar, and I was like, I'm gonna go talk to her real quick. So I ran out, she's like, Hey, I'm Katie Levins from Charlotte Agenda, I think it was at the time. And uh she was like, I want to do a story on what you guys are doing. And I was like, Come in. She comes in, like I did a pre-roll, I was opening and everything. Didn't think nothing about it, but it went viral. It was like a thousand views. Yeah. We had 650 people a day.

SPEAKER_08 8:05

We had no staff.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Well, there wasn't anybody else doing it really yet. And you were literally the first.

SPEAKER_03 8:12

Yeah, 450,000 our first month in a 1200 square feet. Jesus Christ. Right, right. And uh we like you said, we did have staff. It was myself and two business partners. We're like, we'll just take turns working at the store.

SPEAKER_09 8:22

We didn't think we'd get anybody. We're like, well, we'll just like maybe we could hang out until legalization. That was like our rental business.

SPEAKER_03 8:30

Every our neighbors and everybody's like, what in the hell is happening? We don't know.

SPEAKER_12 8:35

We're just holding on to the hell. Jars of head flower like behind the counter. I remember walking in the first time, and I was like, oh, we're gonna we're gonna date.

SPEAKER_03 8:46

But uh, you know, from there, man, it just it blew up. We were the first one in Charlotte. I think just on Central Avenue now, there's 37 schools.

SPEAKER_06 8:53

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_03 8:54

Right, so the market's insane. But uh we rebranded. Uh we decided uh we wanted to trademark Charlotte C and D, and you cannot trademark Charlotte or C D D. So um we did it backwards. It's like, well, what can we trademark? And that's how we came up with Crown Town. We wanted to keep the Charlotte theme in it. Of course. And then uh the Crown Town kind of sound like Pound Town. Yeah, let go. Sounds perfect. Uh now we rebranded as that then, and then uh, you know, Charlie opened the closing stores. Uh we're now in 18 stores, potentially 19.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

I was just gonna say, I think I've lost count at this point how many you actually have.

SPEAKER_03 9:34

We add some, we take some, you know, it's it's I was rolling through Denver and I'm like, what?

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Eight years later, you've got you just said how many stores?

SPEAKER_03 9:43

Uh we're 18 or 19.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

18 or 19. You're doing your hands are in a lot of different things. I mean, you have the plug distribution, you have all these stores, you have you have a multiple buses now. We were BJ, before you got here, again, this is the wasted material we talked about. You remember the original bus I showed you that they had, just the regular size short bus. Yeah. Well, apparently now Mike has purchased an old Victoria's Secret like pink panties bus. The kind that like the retail store that opens up the front of the bus. Yeah, yeah. I have to show it to you.

SPEAKER_03 10:20

Number one and number two retail stores for Victoria's Secrets when they were up and running. They sold their pink line from college campus to college campus. So it'd be like Victoria's Secrets branded for like University of Alabama, the Lunch, and whatever. So we bought it off of them. They said the only thing is we couldn't use that pink as trademark. So of course we blacked it out the whole time, but it's a a bubble 60,000 pounds. It's got one seat on it in the rest of the retail space.

SPEAKER_11 10:47

Do you think the Victoria's Secret Angels are on it?

SPEAKER_01 10:52

The real question is are you using it to now sell Crowntown panties? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_12 10:58

Another bus uh made out of handbags.

SPEAKER_03 11:03

Think about the college campuses and probably the dressing rooms that were on the back of that bus. I'm sure it's only made more than I'd over. You know, it's uh all that, everything, the the distribution company, the buses and everything comes out of necessity. Like, because um the reason we went bubble is they quit releasing us anything. You know, we don't want your kind here. Well, fuck it. We're gonna go bubble. You know, and that's that's really how it went. And then we set up like an ice cream truck, it was sell it right there off the side, a giant nine-foot joint on the top of it and lit up and blue smoke.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

So actually, like the first time I saw that that first bus on w one of the the pages, I was like, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life.

SPEAKER_03 11:53

Dreams do come true. The problem is, once you achieve one or two things, you're like, damn, I can do this again. It's a lot, man. It's a lot of spaghetti thrown at the wall to see what's next. But you know, constant uh the constant regulation, constant change, constant pivoting. You know, you learn just to go with it. But um, we got so many things we're working on. You know, not only the stores, we're looking to get into the Texas market, the Florida market. Florida will go right this year. Virginia will go right this year. Um, we've been working on a cannabis-themed resort in Virginia, called Caloland for the last four years, more depriming and everything else. It was designed by the same people that designed Grey Wolf Lodge in Arena. And Virginia's actually gonna go, it's on the border, like North Carolina Virginia border goes through our properties. Part of it's in North Carolina, part of it's in Virginia. They're going wreck, uh, they'll start licensing in June. The bills going to the governor's desk. That's awesome. Um, and uh actually yesterday, today's Saturday. Um, so they they have a very progressive governor now, speaking of very cannabis. So Virginia be going wrecked. Um I am in talks with uh going into the Costa Rican and Panama markets. Um supposed to be meeting with the Prime Minister for Arbeta. Good God.

SPEAKER_06 13:17

That's a lot of these things. Just as just as one.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

We're like, I mean, you had me, bro.

SPEAKER_03 13:24

You had me at the theme park, so I'd be in the show the design for that and everything. It's uh towing homes, camping sites, climbing sites, and commercial kitchen for different chefs that can come in, uh, big stage for performances. Gotta have that. Yeah, so it's like a music festival. We even have a uh so many things. It's very multi-layered, but um, there's a greenhouse you can ultimately, it's like a winery or bed and breakfast. You can see the cannabis being grown glass tunnel up into the middle of it, a whole art installation on the property too, have more art installations.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Well, we're planning a vacation very soon.

SPEAKER_04 13:58

We were just talking about it. I don't know if I said it on on live yesterday. We need to go on a vacation as our families.

SPEAKER_03 14:05

It's one of those things we start off strong, economy changed, laws changed, so investors like eh, eh, we're back forth uh as now or never. Uh during as we start out licensing moving forward, we gotta diversify. You know, the the the federal laws are changing, the state laws are changing. Um it's a mess right now. Just as many things fighting for cannabis legalization as fighting against us. So I know you're a small man, so you gotta Android. Um You know it. I feel attacked.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Everything in front of me is Apple branded. She drinks to Apple Way. Honestly, it's one of those things where my dad was a big Mac guy. So I like that's the only computers I've ever owned in my life. So when I became old enough to start buying my own, I just I just stayed with it.

SPEAKER_03 14:54

We had uh, you know, I think it was service merchandise, the first computer came from. We gave it a virus, like the first day tried to get the line mark on it. But nah, you know the real reason I got an Android to tell my music is I didn't have to pay for the song. Boom. There you go. That was it. And now I'll be honest movies.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

I didn't pay for most of my music back to the thing.

SPEAKER_03 15:18

True. But nah, it came down to that. I'm cheap. And still to this day, a lot of my friends are like, Man, I'll buy your iPhone.

SPEAKER_12 15:25

That guy's no, he likes making the bubbles go.

SPEAKER_03 15:28

Oh, yeah. He loves making the biggest.

SPEAKER_06 15:31

There you go.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Before we get too far, let's get the record queued up. Um because I love listening to music, and you picked an awesome record, and it fits, I think, perfectly with having you here.

SPEAKER_03 15:46

You gave me that whole list. I was like, I can take it.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Honestly, it's not even the whole list because each season I take some off that we've already played so that we don't get a lot of duplicates. But I don't I don't own any J. Cole yet.

SPEAKER_03 15:57

I'll I'll buy it. No care a lot. Next time, I'll be my deal. Deal. Especially the duplicate. You gotta get that one right.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Yeah. So tonight we're gonna listen. Actually, BJ, we are gonna listen to a duplicate because it's one from season two we played. Um, which is why I left it on because I figure far enough removed, not a big deal. Most folks aren't listening. So we're gonna be listening to um Bob Marley's Legend. And Mike, what we like to do, we've been doing this since season one when we were audio only. Uh, since nobody could see what we were doing, we thought it would be funny to make BJ describe the album cover art. So if people had never heard of it, they could get a picture of what we were listening to. And then with the invention of AI, we started running his his description as the prompt to see what it would generate as an image and see how well he did. Uh, so we still do that, even though we're on full video now, just because it's funny, and with the technology changing, you can see the differences from season one to season four in the AI alone, but also he's gotten a lot better at describing things.

SPEAKER_04 16:56

And I'm I'm I'm I'm gonna get him banned from AI because for some reason my shit's been too special. AI's getting sensitive.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

We've we've had some we've had some albums this year. Like we listened to uh D'Angelo's voodoo, and then someone had picked a Foxy Brown um Ilnana album. So him describing some of those.

SPEAKER_03 17:17

How could you not? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

He had to, and then so GPT was telling me that violates our policies, and I can't generate this image unless you rephrase it.

SPEAKER_03 17:25

I literally live on violated policies. I get banned almost weekly from something on social media.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

I was saying you just got banned recently. Instagram. Damn.

SPEAKER_03 17:36

You overgone forever. I'm trying, so well, BJ.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Let's do it. As I turn it on, would you like to do your thing?

SPEAKER_04 17:43

Oh, okay. All right. Let's see what we got. Can't say names, who it is, or whatnot. Looks like I'm looking at a uh a very, very concerned African-American man with the most beautiful dreads that I think I've ever seen in my life. It looks like he's looking off into the distance, wondering uh when's the next time he's gonna be able to smoke a spliff. Uh, honestly. Um he's looking out in the distance, looking at the next time that he's going to have to cash a big check. Okay. Uh he's got a beautiful ring on, a gold ring on. And um and uh it looks like he's wearing like a little bit of uh what's that pla? I don't know if that's plaid or wool? Yeah, I think it's like a wool sweater. You might be the first person to help me kind of disguise.

SPEAKER_01 18:47

Oh, is that team effort?

SPEAKER_04 18:50

First team, first, yeah, it's denim. Alright, that's all I got.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

It's usually a little bit better.

SPEAKER_09 18:56

It's kind of tough. Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

It's always fun when the album covers just a person's face because that's really hard to do with the stipulation of not being able to say names or or specifics in that sense, but the music's a huge part.

SPEAKER_03 19:12

I have to say in my warehouse that when I come in, it's quiet or in my stores. I'm getting on the because you have to have it.

SPEAKER_12 19:18

It isn't getting that often, but if he walks into one of the stores and the music is not on, yeah, I call it never know music, right?

SPEAKER_04 19:25

There's always got to be music playing.

SPEAKER_03 19:26

I joke, I say I the voices in my head I can hear them.

SPEAKER_06 19:30

No, get it out.

SPEAKER_03 19:32

You know, music moves, it's it's just like cannabis. It's one of those universal things. You don't have to speak the language. You feel it, you feel the move, right? And uh with your list, you're saying I chose Jay-Z, Kanye, Bob Marley. Jay-Z taught me the streets, you know, uh, literally uh the blueprint. And uh he taught me how to do it with with finesse and the corporate way too. Kanye was unapologetically him, even though Kanye is a little much for anybody. But he's he's a genius, true genius. Yep. Bob Marley, uh, having to travel to Jamaica a couple times, um realizing how small Jamaica is and how impossible the odds are in this island for everyone or against everything. That that island has been bastid and ravaged and stripped and you know, just exploited by so many different nations. And uh, you know, the the the differences there, the gang violence, the government violence, there's so many things. And uh, you know, my mom always talked about it growing up because she went once one time and uh talking about how amazing it was, and finally I got to go. The people make it amazing. And uh, you know, when we did get to travel to Bob Molly's workplace in Maus Land and Nine Mile, it's this long, windy road getting up there. Uh, you get a little like you think you don't dive way, it's like a driveway size road, and people share it. And not only do they pass each other head on, they do it at different times on different sides of the lane. Oh my god. And I'm like, oh hell. So they were going and there's cops standing on the side of the road with radar guns. And if you're going too fast, they'll literally hold up a sign and the guy will sign with a machine gun, and you have to pull over for it. And they raised the signals we're speeding, we're smoking. I'm like, what do we do? We're about to pull over, and I was like, he said, I said, Am I going to jail before weed was legal there? He was like, No, you just have to give them money. I said, much money I gave him. How much you got? I mean, oh man, no. The cop recognizes them, waves them off. Yes, yeah. So finally we're riding and we pull up middle of the mountain, nine mile, and there's five, six brothers with dreads and AKs too middle of the road. I mean, what is going on? And it's like, we're here. So we go in, and they're just there for protection, and it's literally. They call it Goldenfields. There's a big plantation with all these cannabis plants taller than me. And then you know, as Mazulium was born the whole night. But there's a guide there like Captain Crazy, and he'll you know like soul brothers immediately, and they did a tour there. And then seeing the humble beginnings where he began, and even this the single bed is where he wrote these lyrics. They had a joke, they had all these plaques on the wall or whatever, and they were talking about what do you think his favorite stream to play is on the guitar? And uh the G stream. But you know, you walk there and you you realize that to me he is that constant reminder that you're never too small. And that there no one is below being able to make a difference. And for that man to come from that environment, even as beginnings of having a you know, ultimately a known man as a father to have to be traveling through and gets this woman pregnant in Jamaica, but the humble beginnings and and to influence the world, this man's been dead what 50 years now?

SPEAKER_06 22:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:01

Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've been in high school there and 25. I was just saying, it's been a while. So you know, for him to continue, his music is timeless. And he literally bridged the nation in a live concert with two of the leaders and ended a war in real time. With music. And music that transcends cultures. And I mean, to this day, you put Bob Marley on in any room, and nobody's gonna be mad at you.

SPEAKER_04 23:26

Nah, no, no. And they're gonna know all the words.

SPEAKER_03 23:30

You know, to me, he's the constant reminder that you're never too small. And the authenticity, you know, he could have been whatever, he could have followed the trends and things, but he chose not to choose violence, not to try to choose the drug life, the peaceful, the, you know, and uh it's it's incredible. And when you go out there, you feel something when you're on that land and you're you're sitting on the rock that he saw on the way, when you're sitting on the bed that he sings about these songs, and realize, man, this man came from nothing in the middle of nothing, with nothing going for him in global still.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Yeah. So I mean, to this day, one of the most powerful things is watching the live footage of the the concert he did to bring um the two political parties together and having the rival, two rival gang members and the leader of the party, and everyone embracing and shaking hands. And that was how long ago.

SPEAKER_03 24:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

And and we still we still can't get it right.

SPEAKER_03 24:26

Right. It's unbelievable. You know, you live in days like, man, I'm so I've been with things, things like that, bro. I'm like, I'm so glad we're past that. And then surprise. Surprise. Yeah, we uh don't understand history. We're bound to repeat it. But uh what a what a powerful man, and you know, ultimately good. And when you go up there, I would recommend anybody, if you ever find a way, um, to make it fairly affordable once you get there. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 24:53

Uh but cannabis is now fully legal there. At the time it wasn't. The only place it was legal was on that property. And I asked him, I said, why is it legal here? Nowhere else. He said, Because here, Bob is bought. And I was like, Where? You go to his mausoleum, you have to take your shoes off, but you can smoke in there and everything. It's big Mausoleum, you walk around, there's upside down umbrellas hanging from the roof. Uh Swastia and uh the whole Rastafari uh religion, uh, you know, his mom's big into it. So uh it's just it's powerful. And it's just standing there, you have candle lit, you gotta join it with barefooted, you're just thinking about more of this. And it's like, man, how many people have stood away? There would never, and that's the great uniter of him, music, cannabis. You don't need to know everybody. We have these common things that are just humanistic, like natural occurrences. That's the beautiful thing. Jamaica's uh a special place. Leave Jamaica long stop exploiting those people. Uh we went back to COVID, it was rough. Um they never really were like a begging community, but during COVID, depending on tourism, so heavy. It was very hard during that time. But wow, man, rest peace, man. There's so many conspiracies around how he went out, man, that uh toe cancer ended up took taking that man's heart. Long live that that man, rest of soul. But uh Bond Marlin Legend, it doesn't get any better. I was actually working at a golf shop, golf USA in Huntersville. Yeah, and uh the whalers came in one day. They were on tour, and uh they were one of them was commentating.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

And they walked into a golf shop in Huntersville, North Carolina.

SPEAKER_03 26:37

And then they're standing there, and we had a practice putting ring, and one of them's putting and the other one's commentating. It's like it's not as deep in this pudding. It's one of those things right when we start getting cell phones 99.

SPEAKER_01 26:51

Um so you know So that's lost footage.

SPEAKER_03 26:58

You know, man, it's one of those incredible things. And uh, you know, uh, we we now, the industry, why we're we're getting more and more in the music, celebrities, things like that. Um, you know, and and stomping and cannabis in the beginning, I tell a story a lot. The standback to 1937, uh Henry Anslinger was our first drugstore in the United States, uh, very racist person. Very much racist. And uh he did a study the first time on cannabis, they came back and said that when white women smoke marijuana, it makes them want to sleep with black men smoke. That's not anybody. It's true. But uh, and uh but the funny part about it is, man, is uh that started it off. And then even given that the word marijuana was against the spending coming up across the border. Uh so in the very beginning of Stampa, but uh one thing interesting about Harry Ansligger, he brought on a cannabis expert to testify in court under oath about cannabis, and he said he once tried it to turn into a bank. So uh our very beginning since 1937, this is all about propaganda. It's all about uh, you know, big corporations that suffer from us being successful, paper, uh petroleum, pharma, you know, the whole night. We're still fighting the same battle, not yeah. And uh, you know, it's incredible. We were given the gift of this industry, if you will. Um everything I got in life, I I contribute completely to cannabis. Um also talk about music. Um starting in middle school and high school, I had the old paper scale weights, they weighed weighted bags that all and they're actually framed in my office on the plant uh with a little inscription, Crime Dupe. Shout out to Jay-Z and his song Salute. And uh he was like Crime Dupe. No, it's a lure. Alore, it is a lore, excuse me. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

We'll edit that out later, so you know.

SPEAKER_03 28:58

Uh Jay-Z's reasonable doubt cover, and only is it Crime Dupe, all that. But uh, you know, man, it's uh I knew cannabis was the answer. Um, I was a telling us to at an early age. My father died at four months old from alcoholism from PTSD uh before they knew what PTSD was. Yes. And my mind was very big on I don't want you to be a drinker, I want you to be, if anything, cannabis. And uh, you know, I fought for it my whole life. It was like living two lives. I went to corporate America banking. At one point I owned a towing business, I was a bell boxman, I was a bouncer, was a personal assistant for a lady. Um literally, like that morning I'll be banking cookies with this lady's granddaughter at Ghost Cell a couple times a week, or arrest somebody in this ring, go refund somebody's car that has a pay for bills. And I work in a pawn shop.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

I can picture you doing all of those things except the personal assistant part.

SPEAKER_03 29:52

My mom cleaned houses for a living, and she worked for some wealthy people, and they hired me to do everything and anything, literally for making bullets and boards of their church.

SPEAKER_09 30:01

Yeah, no, we did that together.

SPEAKER_03 30:04

So uh nothing's below me, man. I'm a hard worker. Uh I have an ADHD for sure. Um but you know, cannabis was my first love, man. And my mom put me onto it. I went to dare class, sixth grade. They lit it in class. They tell me my mom's gonna lose everything we got. It's a gateway drug, she's gonna be a crack kid next week, whatever the hell it's so I went home that day, took the roach out of her astro and tried it. And I'd swear I think that's all May Jane started playing.

SPEAKER_01 30:35

But anyway, uh we we make fun of the Dare program all the time all the time on this show.

SPEAKER_03 30:39

I mean, it's especially when you realize uh come back and look at this from it was a multi-level marketing.

SPEAKER_01 30:44

It was a Ponsai scheme.

SPEAKER_03 30:46

And they and literally as you brought on more, you got paid more.

SPEAKER_01 30:49

But uh they were all off-duty cops and you got paid more for enlisting other cops who want to do it too.

SPEAKER_03 30:57

Like it was scary straight kind of program, and they showed us how you could take coffee cream and turn it into a bomb, and how he burned the guy in the cell. And we were like seventh grade. I'm like, whoa.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

You initiated their program in like sixth grade. You're the ones causing us to want to go out and do this shit. 100% because I didn't think of it that much before that. No, I didn't. Remember, Bill came into my sixth grade classroom and said, Don't do drugs. Well, guess what? I started doing right.

SPEAKER_03 31:22

And it's the same thing with me because I was around it up, my mom and everybody, and I was like, That's that damn smell. Now mad at my mom. But uh, you know, straight up, they're like, she used to finally was real with me. She was like, This drug does this, this does this, blah, blah, blah. And I used to ride with her to like meet the plug Rhea. And I got tired of sitting in this dude's driveway for an hour because he was weird, and the stuff she bought was overpriced, and it was not good.

SPEAKER_04 31:46

I was like, hmm, I can get bad at my businessman came out.

SPEAKER_03 31:51

What is born, you know, in the business. But uh, you know, I I I I came up with humble beginnings, born in Charlotte. Um, you know, the neighborhood went pretty south growing up there.

SPEAKER_04 32:01

What's up to time?

SPEAKER_03 32:02

Uh born behind Garrington High School.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

Me, poop. So you're you're the second person I've met born and raised in Charlotte, and the first one sitting diagonal from that.

SPEAKER_04 32:11

We're we're a different breed. Third ward right there off of the first one.

SPEAKER_03 32:14

That man has drink if you go out there, the uh the square pizza man with hospital in point.

SPEAKER_04 32:20

So Presbyterian.

SPEAKER_03 32:22

Yeah, yeah. We have three kids, and I made sure that all three kids were born in Charlotte. And at the time for two of them, we were living in Charles Ford. Yeah. Uh but I I remember I made it four o'clock in the morning from Charles Ford to downtown Charles. I made it like 12 to 16 minutes. But uh, you know, what a what a journey. And uh honestly, I've never really got trouble when it wasn't legal. Since I've been in illegally, I've gotten so much things that we've had to overcome. You know, uh we we had to overcome from the very beginning in 18. They tried to ban it with smokable hemp flour. Yep. Um, tried to redefine a couple times in Congress what hemp was. Like every two months or so, we faced another challenge, another curveball. And then we were raided at one of our number one store in South Carolina. And uh, you know, we went through COVID. We went through raids, we went through having business license to take two or three times they took bank accounts from us.

SPEAKER_02 33:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:25

Uh a couple times in the middle of a shift on the Saturday where we were doing$20,$30,000,$40,000 days on the Saturday, they took a credit card process and right in the middle of doing it. You know, so um we actually were standing one time in a tire store buying new tires from the streets. We were buying runs and buying them.

SPEAKER_01 33:44

As you do with your weed money.

SPEAKER_06 33:46

Like the job deal that you are.

SPEAKER_01 33:52

It's the first thing you buy.

SPEAKER_03 33:57

We got another way, hey, the credit card machines just went down. We're gonna sit there in the store, opened a square account called Nikki's lotion. I was running a hundred grand. We ran a hundred grand for like four days. Yeah, and they were like, nope, you're shot down. And then it was like a lifetime ban from Square. And then later they came back, like, yeah, you should come to Pressman schools, but anyway.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

I've heard too many stories about that being one of the biggest issues people have had to deal with since 2018. And like you were saying earlier, it's you have your speculations as to what's gonna be the problem, and then nobody thought about banking.

SPEAKER_04 34:31

Yeah, it's the things that that you need to run a business that they attack you from from the side. Yeah, yeah. If they can't get you from above, they've come out of the way.

SPEAKER_03 34:39

You know, and then you think about it, this this plant is that a brazil. No, one, the prices really hadn't gone up or down. You know what I mean? The quarter still costs what it costs, they still cost what it costs, but that's inherently it costs about that much to create it. If you go less than that, you're probably not smoking the best pump anyway. Yes, but it's recession proof, it's depression proof, it's beat everything. Um, and it continues. If you want to mess up something involved the government, I wish the government would have left it alone if they didn't have people locked up so often. And, you know, minorities are locked up three to one or four to one. Um still. Still. Minorities, less than three percent. So we we started the store in Columbia, South Carolina. We were starting a program there for minority women to learn how to grow and process. Started going through all the problems. Long story short, we got raided in South Carolina. One of my employees got charged with a 20-year crime conspiracy to settle in Carolina. Uh, we got the charges dropped. We're now suing the state, the state of South Carolina, South Carolina, law enforcement, reaching tenant sheriff, city of Columbia, Columbia PD, uh, false imprisonment the whole night. We got a docuseries potentially coming out on the call.

SPEAKER_01 35:54

Wonderful thing.

SPEAKER_03 35:55

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 35:56

You were showing me a little clip of it before.

SPEAKER_03 35:58

It's a green sizzle, man. It's it's I've learned for like my life at the time. I'm just sitting here feeding everybody to a fire hose. Uh, but you know, ultimately they've tried to dismiss the civil case eight times now. We got a notification this week that they won't get a mediation and potential so like we did everything by these books.

SPEAKER_01 36:17

Well, you and you were telling me it was multiple people got arrested, the whole store got raided, you lost. I won't even say the figure that you lost.

SPEAKER_03 36:27

Yep. We had three different attorneys that we had to hire for. And they tried to tell you they tested it and it came back that it was too much marijuana instead of testing just detects the presence of THC, not even the amount. But my employee that was arrested, she was uh six or seven months pregnant with her third child, single mom. Uh but during the time never been in trouble at all. Before that time, from when they charged her, when we got charged jobs, she couldn't go to her kids' school and check up around anything or anything. Uh, she couldn't work her other jobs do an Instacart or Amazon deliveries or whatever.

SPEAKER_09 37:03

Yeah, because what once you're tagged with something like that, that's a heavier face everywhere.

SPEAKER_03 37:08

And you know, 16 pounds of marijuana found face everywhere and everything. When we picked her out through jail the next morning, I got my attorney there as quick as we could. We couldn't get out the next day. I was there at four o'clock in the morning in the parking lot. The news was circling around, waiting for them to come out so they could like throw the camera in their face. It's crazy. But anyway, we're we're probably gonna win that. But you know, we're diversified, man. We're trying to stay relevant. Um, talk a little bit about the advocacy. Uh, you know, when we first started fighting for this in 2018, uh went to Raleigh showing up in t-shirt and jeans. Yeah. Uh, expected this huge crowd of people, and there was probably 10 of us. And we got up to talk, and I think the first two people in front of me said F you to the people to the House representatives and started yelling, and I was like, well, this is a good thing. That's how cool. And I loved it. Like, the first one next to me is this girl had like purple hair, and the dude next to me had like white dude with cornrows and drums, and I'm like, all right, this maybe don't look the best, but uh, they wouldn't even give us eye contact. And then I started dressing nicer, and then I realized like some people were getting access, some weren't. And we started a lobbyist group of advocacy group called Pimp Retailers Association. And uh we were paying lobbyist groups$19,000 a month just to find out they represent law enforcement also. Wow. So then we started representing ourselves and doing our own lobby work. And uh, you know, over the years, man, about the same 10, 15 people shows up from North Carolina and federally to fight for us, but we've now grown. We've uh we've formed other organizations. We're now part of many other ones, but I'm on the board of one called CBHD. That stands for Cultivating Breakthroughs and Healthy Development. It's 11 board members on that board. Uh it's the 11 most probably prominent industry players in North Carolina. One of them uh Lee uh Vantine owns Apophics. Yes. Yes, sir.

SPEAKER_01 38:59

I was gonna say they're they're what the biggest in the state, probably.

SPEAKER_03 39:02

62 stores. He owned Hookah Hookup back in the day. He can burn it right after we did his stores to the Apocalypse.

SPEAKER_01 39:10

Great guy, man. I can't say enough about me. Love those stores, by the way. I mean, one of the first ones I had an experience with just because there was one close by. Yeah, all of the stores are top none.

SPEAKER_03 39:21

I actually went in one for the first time a couple weeks ago to do a video for CVHD. The man is great. He's doing a great thing, he's a great job. And you know, ultimately we realized there's nobody fighting for it, so we we formed this group. We've raised about$600,000 since mid-January. Um, we are 5013C. Uh we can take donations, whatever we also can uh, you know, go into lobbyist activities, all kinds of things. But we're literally fighting uh to preserve North Carolina. North Carolina is the only state that doesn't have an act of cannabis law that just adopted whatever the federal and Mitch McConnell in November 12th on my wife's birthday last year for an$880,000 tribe fueled at$30 billion. Yep. Overnight. Overnight. And uh we've been to DC two or three times this year uh on a federal level. We're trying to get a two-year extension through the Baird Bill. Um that gives us a two-year extension from the end of November 18, 2026. And uh meanwhile, in short session in North Carolina coming April, uh, we just had a summit in Kerry, North Carolina, outside of Raleigh, uh on Tuesday. And uh almost 30 something reps showed up. Uh the only five-star hotel in North Carolina didn't know that. Didn't know that either. Very nice stuff. Uh they all struggled out, we had a nice dinner, bipartisan uh people you never five years ago and six years ago when I started this, there was no GOP, no Republican representation for our industry out. We were the devil with the devil's lettuce. Uh but this we had about half an app, bipartisan Republican and Democrat. They all agreed we have to get something in plan. Uh we had a Senate Bill 265 almost passed last November when this went down, and uh they took another medical bill, Senate Bill 3, and threw it in as an amendment on our bill and ultimately killed it.

SPEAKER_02 41:20

Got it.

SPEAKER_03 41:21

So uh that was John Bell, Speaker of the head of the Republican Democratic Party. I don't think he's speaker of the house. Him and uh Bill Raven, and they've been kind of at odds about this. The must have been North Carolina we're looking at a hybrid medical bill.

SPEAKER_00 41:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 41:36

That we're gonna get revised in a short session in April. And uh hopefully it'll be similar to what we have now. There'll just be some end-of-life things, insurance things, uh for veterans, uh, reimbursement. And then we have Trump's executive order that he asked for the rescheduling of cannabis from schedule one to schedule three. Yep. So we got that going, but then carved out of that is specifically for him and having a medical program for him, reimplacement, if buying these products up to$500 a year, all these things. So some part of our administration and representatives are headed to the 1940s, the others are headed forward, and it's a collision course. Um it's gonna come down to uh who's got the most money. And when I got into politics, I thought there was truly two parties or three parties, it's really one as the party of money. Yeah, and uh whoever raises the most money gets elected. Um, I actually considered running for Senate uh this year, or we talked about it. Uh, looked it up to run for Senate and even be considered uh$700 million to one billion dollars that you have to raise to get elected. Yep. By the time you raise that much money, you owe everybody a favor. Yep. So you're both and you're sold with corporation land. So that's what we're doing with CBDHD. We're playing the game, we're raising the money, we're donating to campaigns and fines. The primaries passed in North Carolina, we got everyone we wanted and we paid good for it. Yes, sir. We've raised about 600,000 and we've donated close to that. So uh we're fighting, we're one of the few states in the states that do not have a law that uh we're fighting to have one. Uh we have a mass interest from people running from California, from Oregon, from all these states that have already shut down their hint programs because it fights with their rep programs. So we're flourishing in the states almost too crowded, like too much. But uh, you know, we need regulation. We've been begging for it. We're asking for age getting, we're asking for their labeling and testing, we're asking for licensing, we're offering to pay a six percent tax. Wow. Yeah. So, you know.

SPEAKER_01 43:43

And that and that's the thing, and we've talked about this. You're suggesting things that the respectful shops are already doing.

SPEAKER_03 43:51

We've done it since day one. It's nothing good for us.

SPEAKER_01 43:54

And so you're not gonna if that passes, you're not gonna be affected by it. It's just part of your policy anyway, and it's the reason. People shop at select stores, and your stores are one of them because it carries such weight and such respect in this town because of those practices. I can go into any crown town. I don't go into any crown town because there's one five minutes down the road for me. There's about to be another one about three more minutes away. Um, but you can walk into any crown town and get the same knowledge, the same experience, the same friendly staff, the same recommendation level. If you don't know, I know what I'm doing. And as soon as I walk through the door, they still say, How are you doing today? What are you looking for? What can I suggest?

SPEAKER_03 44:43

True. Yeah, you can talk about it. You can't speak to them. Right.

SPEAKER_01 44:50

So um and for a lot of us, that that means a lot. A lot. And so we all have our various reasons for why we use it. Um my wife suffers from chronic pain. She has fibromyalgia. So we have been using it a lot since that farm bill said we could start doing so. And it's great to be able to walk into a store and say that and say, What are you in here for? She's in a flare this week. I need what you've got for chronic pain. And here's the three suggestions, you know, coming straight away.

SPEAKER_03 45:23

And there's nothing in that store that I haven't tried personally for. Um that's a hell of a job to have to do.

SPEAKER_04 45:29

Somebody's gotta do it.

SPEAKER_03 45:30

When it was all CPU, it was so easy. RD days, but it even takes me out. Oh RD days. Yeah. There was so much coming in, and I can imagine we'd be crazy this one too. And I don't I got a very high tolerance. And I never wear my seatbelt. That plays into the story. Um, I never wear my seatbelt ever, anytime. I don't know.

SPEAKER_09 45:50

His argument is his first car didn't even have a lot of things.

SPEAKER_03 45:52

And it's 64 more bears. Anyway, so uh that then we're testing these syrups I was coming out with. Uh the guy that was making one for young folks. He was making syrups, and I was like, Well, I want one. And I was like, How's Charles this? And it's like, I think 1300 milligrams. Like, I want mine, 1800 milligrams. I want double eight, nine, and ten. And like, I want it all. And I want to call it purple drain. And uh my business partner's like, we're not doing this from crown time. I said, Well, let's call it King Canada. There's this whole thing how we came up with King Canada. That's how we came up with purple drink. Trying it that day, I was like, shit, you know, whatever. And literally on the way home, I was gonna meet her and the kids at Target on her birthday. And I was in the parking lot with my seatbelt on, the cars paddled, because I called her and was like, I can't drive. I can't drop.

SPEAKER_09 46:41

I was like, come into Target, like come see me and the kids like we'll calm you down here. He gets in the aisle and he was like, I gotta get the fucking.

SPEAKER_03 46:48

I was like, Great.

SPEAKER_09 46:50

He was like, This is what you guys did.

SPEAKER_03 46:51

I was never trying to just sit there like packing myself. Nobody's never got something. It's one of my best products ever. You gotta know your limits. You gotta know what you're made of. But uh, you know, I credit pass. When I started with cannabis, man, you get it in a brick, it can whatever they shipped it in. Uh, you know, I used up school trays and a credit card, I'd make that a QP and have probably three ounces of seeds. That's how I do it. But if when I really just try to get in this industry, I was myself. And it's the most humbling thing. Most humbling. And it's so simple, but it's so complex. When I learn something new every day, every time I think I'm done with this shit, I'm tired of being in this industry, that strategic customer comes up to you and says, Because of you, you changed my life. And um, my favorite story to tell, we had this lady that had a uh non-verbal, autistic son, um, three or four years old, tried everything, behavior lashing out the whole night. And she would always go to work, get a call at work, your son's going through an episode. Well, one day on her way home from work, frustrated, somebody's like, You should try C We D. She saw my store, stopped in my store, quitting there real quick, bought a teen shirt, went home. Next morning, kids getting ready for school. She's like, Here goes nothing, gives them a drop of t-shirt, gets them ready, goes to work, and didn't think nothing else. No, but gets the call at work, and uh, hey, I just want to tell you about your son. She's like, Oh hell. So again, and she's like, Are you sitting down? She's like, Yeah, she was like, Your son just followed. And I still get cold too. And she's like, Your son just followed.

SPEAKER_09 48:23

And we have a million stories like that.

SPEAKER_03 48:26

And I'm not saying that's the cure. I'm not sure. No, it was whatever. That one sticks with me, man. And uh one lady came in, she was on 14 different medications. She's still one of our customers. She has zero. Lady came in with a tumor the size of my head on the size of her neck. She's in remission today. And all these people, you know, because of you. I went down the chair and I had to access to these products. I came off opioids, I overcame alcoholism. I I came off so many things. I beat depression, I beat suicide. You know, it's it's incredible.

SPEAKER_09 48:58

It's a wellness product.

SPEAKER_01 49:00

It is. It is. At this point, we need to call it that across the board because that's exactly what it is. We've obviously been focusing a lot on this kind of talk throughout this whole season because it's a huge topic this year. And if this is what we can do to use our platform, that's what we're gonna do. Um, and we've asked all of our guests to tell their stories in those similar scenarios, and so many people have been sharing just all the different uses. But also, it's the what you've witnessed, even if it's not within yourself, like those stories that you just shared. Everyone has one where they know somebody whose life has changed for the the better because of this product. And we had a guest when we asked the question, you know, why should we protect the plant? Immediately came back and asked me the question, why does it even need protecting? It's natural. Like we're we're not we get the synthetic stuff, right? But like this isn't fake.

SPEAKER_03 49:57

They're always after the flower. And I'm like, this is the least worrisome part of it. Like you take a damn edible, too much of it, like you're in a whole different world. You smoke too much, you're you're gonna get there before you get there. You know what I mean? And they're they're they're heavy on Wall to Key Dreams, so one of these milligram catches, all these things, and um it's just unnecessary. Adults should be able to make the decisions they want to make. It's too big of a cat to put back in the bag. Total wine is the number one skew right now in the THC. And you know, it is like multi- uh, we just did uh uh just in North Carolina, we just did a poll for CBAC. It's a three billion dollar industry just in North Carolina, 10,000 jobs. Texas alone is an eight billion dollar industry. Um so you know, and we're not even talking about what the black market is or whatever, too, because that's still part of it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 50:51

Um people are transitioning. The the the stories I have of the the way I found out about who you were is uh through three people that came to me and said that they started coming to um a a shop because they got hit with something crazy. Somebody said that they were giving them something super simple, said they were giving them something, and they didn't they said they didn't even do it on purpose. They accidentally gave them something else, and they were like, okay, how can I consume this product which is so beneficial to me without having negligent, having something negligently served to me. And uh I always say you go to the shops because they're already following a higher standard than than Jacob that's like rolling in the backyard kind of thing and mixing in a little something else to keep everybody coming.

SPEAKER_03 51:40

So yeah, it uh you know, I don't put all man like all day growing up, but you know, you have to hide it all. Anytime me and my friends got in trouble, it was immediately my friends, big pun. Um I can see it.

SPEAKER_06 51:54

That's a lot of different things over here. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:57

But you know, uh it's crazy. The the most dangerous thing always was to get caught with it. But uh, you know, I was always into it, but yeah, to your point, I got robbed. I, you know, I bought one time$1,400 over the mulch that was they did the Switcharo. I mean, you know, I've seen people get killed. Uh, you know, people go to prison, you name it now, the people that go to to buy some cannabis, but they have a little coat there on the table or some other drug. They go, Oh, let me try one of them and that'll hold. So people talk about gateway as opportunities. You know, always say it's a gateway drug in a way that to me it starts that double life where you have no live one and start the devices, you know. So it's I I feel different ways, but everything in moderation, right? Uh more people have been killed by cannabis. And if anybody can find it, find it for me because uh be on the phone, please. Uh but uh look, I think donkeys killed 10 people a year.

SPEAKER_01 52:57

There's been some really great stuff being posted across various pages on social media with those same like weird facts about like more people have died doing this than from cannabis. And it's like the most obscure shit, right?

SPEAKER_03 53:11

You know, and then the medical aspect is it's the hypocrisy in itself, with schedule one being it has no medical benefit. Yet there are three named FDA-approved drugs directly derived from medical from cannabis. So, you know, the system itself was a joke at that point. But, you know, still even trying to reschedule it right now. Get make no change. I love seeing change in cannabis policy, but schedule three does nothing but put it over directly pharmaceutical and uh dispensary dispensaries, the medical dispensary, the whole line. So uh, you know, I love to see some movements and that's really they just need to treat it like any agricultural product, put a 21 up on it, make sure it's tested safely. Not just for cannabinoid content, but for pesticides, herbicides, microbials, those things. Because if you consume those, you're gonna get sick. Yes. And this plant clean cleanses sore. So whenever it cleanses, it sucks up and you consume. And that's why testing is so important. Yeah, we've done that since day one. Uh but you know, man, I always said once this thing's fully legal, I'll probably quit. Well, then where's the fun in it?

SPEAKER_04 54:18

No, there's a strategy.

SPEAKER_03 54:22

We we've been forced to have a full-time career in real estate concurrently with this. You know, I'm uh I now have a hundred employees. I'm the CEO of this company. Uh, we got 18 locations, the distribution company, the cannabis resort, the whole damn thing. Meanwhile, we're you know lobbying in six different states and fighting for it, you know. At the same time, we got three kids under nine, and we got two uh full real full-time rotors with two real estate firms. So uh, you know, that is we always talk about man, if we could just put the resources not towards lawyers or fighting for what we got, but actually expanding the business would become something crap. You have two theme parts. The money we spent on attorneys alone, man. And I literally probably have seven different attorneys, but everything from you know, business contracts to laws around cannabis to copywriting our products. Um, we did merge with a company uh last year out of uh Winston-Salem, North Carolina, called Celestial Wellness. Shout out to Mahomes. Uh, we doubled the size of our company. Uh we know they have Celestial Wellness, we have Smokey Shoals, which is another one of our retail brands, All Souls Grotto, uh Crowntown Academists. We literally got one in Waves, North Carolina, one in Pisca, of course, uh from tip to tip from the state. And then uh through those brands, we got organics, King Canada, Tapestry. Uh you know.

SPEAKER_01 55:44

As I really started to unfold like by following the various pages, how many times like your face and name popped up? I'm like, at what point what don't you have your hands in? Love it.

SPEAKER_03 55:57

It's a it's a damn mess. It takes a whole village for and shout out to my wife, man. She uh when I met her, I you know, I was like, listen, I ask promoted weed. Um that's an understatement, I think.

SPEAKER_04 56:10

You gotta put it on the light.

SPEAKER_06 56:11

She was a real and uh I I converted her.

SPEAKER_03 56:14

She was my grandest music. She saw what it can do and what it is. And uh, you know, so many times we wanted to walk away and say deal with her. But we got cancer patients, we got grandma McCants, and all these people that are depending on us, but he is. And um, her and her father were able to her brother passed away in the car accident about 20 years ago. And her and her father were open able to open a store together in Salisbury, North Carolina. And uh I always think about what it'd be her brothers would be cannabis food.

SPEAKER_10 56:41

This was the most wild thing for him.

SPEAKER_03 56:44

But it's beautiful to watch her and her father have that store together and build this thing together. And uh even your store here in Honey Sword, there's four of my best, the greatest friends we have. Uh James is a veteran, his wife Elaine, Mark, and Jen. You know, we did land styles with them. We're like, we want to try this. Now they're two scores in. But watching that field and then talking about kids being around, like, my kids are bored as hell with this stuff. But like, uh I mean they've been around it their whole lives. And to me, it's just daddy's boring work. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 57:13

I was gonna ask you about that because I knew you had kids that that were all younger. We all have kids of various ages. And I think that's one of the biggest problems in a lot of people's minds is well, what about the kids? And it's like we're like, we've we've always been we've always been very open about it in this house. Um once we started doing it more and more because again, the the laws changed and it became more open. And it was that educational factor, though. It was not we smoke, it was we smoke and here's why. And now one of them is an adult, and so it's a full circle moment.

SPEAKER_03 57:54

And that's what kills me too about these fallacious headlines when you're and I do get about one call a month of, hey man, my kid uh took one of these things or shouldn't have. And I don't condone that. It's some kids need it for medical needs, but I can tell you of every kid I've ever known that accidentally ingested a gummy or whatever, even the ones you hear about on the news that like kid overdoses in hospital, you read on through it, you realize they get them kids. Well, they gave them overdosing is a a weird term, right? Because you think overdose and they're dead. Yeah, right? Exactly. Overdose means you took too much. Yeah, you just had more than your body. They they say they were treated at least. You read the treatment, they were given a saline bag, they were resting, they went home and slept at each. Nobody dies. And that's what's important about this, and it's not for everyone, but there is no death factor, you know.

SPEAKER_01 58:43

And and now there's the whole big scrammeting scare that it's propaganda when it's grief for madness, one on one.

SPEAKER_03 58:50

And I honestly I ask constantly, have you ever met someone that scrammets? No. Nor have I personally two uh two or three people in my life that did develop a paranoia from smoking and and stopped. And it was that fight or flight, every time they went to smoke, uh, they felt like a panic attack. And uh, even one friend loved recently, he's been an avid smoker, a friend of mine forever, and he traveled to a legalized state, got legalized bud, freaked out when he he had this bad reaction in his body, and uh he quit smoking ever since. But a lot of times, man, people don't realize in legalized states, they have such stringent test testing requirements that they're now hitting cannabis with gamma rays to kill off mold, milder, and pesticides. So it's literally radioactive. I mean, you can literally look this up. This is a real thing. So the adverse reaction people often have is usually by something else besides the cannabis. And uh, you know, also when you eat it versus smoking it, it produces another compound once it goes through your liver called tetrahydra 11 uh codebadio. That's gonna be uh ten times stronger.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:03

Boy, is it learn that with the hard way too?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:06

But yeah, man, it's uh you know, man, I I'm living a teenager's dream. I remember High Times magazine growing up, and they add in the back of it, get paid to smoke weed.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:16

And you said, Where do I sign up?

SPEAKER_06 1:00:18

I'm there every day.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:19

I literally, now of course, it's because like everything I love, I turn it into a business that I it turns it takes the fun out of it. I ran from corporate America because all I did was sit in meetings, but now that we've grown so much. But when I send these meetings, I smoke my joint, I get up and I walk around and I'm free to be who I am. And uh, but you know, everybody works differently. For me, I need cannabis to calm me. Um she always tells me to calm my mind, my energy down. Uh, but you know, man, it's it's a beautiful journey. It can be taken at any moment, but uh the good in it is always gonna be there. It's always gonna be selling it. Um it's always gonna be a part of my life. It kills me, it kills me. I babys choice. Uh but I I dedicated everything I got to it, and everything I got best for it. And uh, you know, we got some great things coming. I want to get Candyland open soon, of course. You guys are welcome. Um, you know, and I want to uh talk about being a kid in a candy store. Different uh doctors and and medical people too. I want a lot of these studies to truly be done to figure out why it does what it does and when it does what it does. Actually, one of the greatest heroes in this industry is right here in North Carolina, and I forget her name, Nicole Gilmick. I know I know she actually discovered the CB1 and CB2 receptors. Wow. And she's here in North Carolina, a lady about four foot tall, the most nice to mean lady ever. Um she was looking for um uh menstrual cures and then hormones and discovered C1.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:48

It's always a mistake. It's always a mistake. You're looking for something else and find something else.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:52

We didn't even find out about endocannabinoids until 97.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:55

I was gonna say that's all fairly recent in the grand scheme of things.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:59

That's all almost 30 years ago. But uh, you know, we shouldn't be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:02

I try not to say that.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:05

You know, man, we learn something new every day. And uh, you know, I always said I'm gonna be the first one if we go through all this and found out it's bad for us, probably the first one. Uh admitting we carry cratom in our store. I was always told it's a great alternative to other boys because people don't die. And I've heard more stories of people actually dying from Kratos. People carrying cradles in my stores.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:25

I was saying, I never knew a lot about Kratom, um, but heard those same horror stories. Like, oh, don't try that. That's the bad side of what's in the shop.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:33

Yeah, I think you've done correctly and right, but they've uh synthesized into 7-O hydroxy new, and they one pill is equivalent to a pound of cradle. So it's actually stronger than most open uh adverse reactions in that. So we we just continue to have the store. I can right now legally sell anything at my store to a two-year-old. Legally. Yeah, uh, besides vapes. Vapes, you have to be 21 and up because of the hardware, you have to be 21. But we've been 21 and up, self-governed since they're not.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:06

And that just circles back to again, the the shops that are doing the right things are already doing the right things. And that's proven by what you just said. There are no laws, but you're still self-regulating your company because you don't want to see the negativity.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:23

Yeah, yeah. The very thing we're begging for, they use against is just the Wild West. They're serving it to kids, and you know, and all these things. And I see every time they ring these stores now, like they're selling your kids. That's what you get. That's what you get. Like it leads to, like we did, and get some of gold to go buy it for you.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:39

Quit stolen and like get it right, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:45

Uh, we've made such a large impact in this industry. Drinking is a 90-year move.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:50

Yeah. Uh that's one of the craziest trends we've talked about since last season. Rarely.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:57

And when I do drink, like the other night once from the hills playing, I got like a uh espresso martini if I drink it.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:04

Mommy! And now you're good. That's it, that's all you need.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:07

No, I don't drink, I'm still hungry, but uh but you know, man, it's it's it's the other thing. And me and I don't have the cannabis trees going to the store, uh, the restaurants and things now. But uh Jim Bean, Jack Daniels on them. The expert said they have lengths of alcohol standing right now. They're not even producing alcohol this time.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:24

That's wild.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:26

Yeah, when you when you look at some of the figures, especially with the the younger generation now, the 18 to 25 year olds, making that push even more to get away from alcohol. The numbers are astounding at how low it's gotten. And the improvements because of it, man.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:41

Yeah, you know, and that that's the beauty of it. And I think even though Girl Foles Circle, I think the young adults, even younger, probably don't want any of it.

SPEAKER_07 1:04:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:48

You know, and or find out their way. But uh everybody, I think COVID did a lot to change people's perception of what I'm being fed through media and through our food and our the health that we're lost track of. They're literally poisoning us for now. Yes, yep. We're we're no bite and stroke in our industry. Someone brought it up the other day. You know, there's not childproof packaging on alcohol. No, yeah, they're requiring it as a bus. Zero death. Alcohol feels how many hunger today.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:17

You know, so you always wonder how that happens. It's not by mistake, it's the lobbyist. They purposely leave it that way. They want the kids to be able to go in and have a sip of mom and daddy's stuff. So uh everything, the world is a stage, man. When you really start digging and get on the politics and everything, it you it gets ugly. You realize it's all corporation fed and live and led, and that's unfortunate. We're in the game now. It's all why we survive. We're raising money, we're paying off the right people and get the right things paid. Uh either that or we don't exist. That's where we're at.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:50

We were talking yesterday uh about doing a a a hop to hip campaign. Just these folks are making this alcohol that nobody's drinking. Just just transition with your customers. Right. Create that we said some some are.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:05

On the local level, you see a lot more of the craft breweries.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:11

Come on. Give us ideas now.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:13

Yeah, but it's crazy. Uh we just actually just signed a deal with uh DJ East Sun, which is two chains DJ. Okay. Um he has two uh people under him, uh Nell and uh Honest Ave, anyway. And they also were this guy uh Jay Wick. I don't know if you heard Jay Wick or whatever. He's got a new song called Tim Piece, uh All Flat. I got to myself call myself Furvin. Okay. All right. Uh but uh DJ East Suggest Two Change DJ, we just came out with a new flower line with him called No Stress. I think I saw that. Yeah, we're launching that now. And uh so you know we're uh we're in the talks with some other celebrities, local and and uh different genres. Uh even uh a group called uh Pretty Lights is more of an EDM group. I could never work with them either. They're speaking his language gummy was Dab Judo, the six-down world champion spots. You know, so uh this is something that transcends all different genres things, and we're just now starting to get in. Like my homie and our chairman for CBDA scheme, Leo Van Time, we van time's son, has a drink line called Rizzy. And uh did their playoff thing. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:32

Yeah, I've done the the uh yeah, the Roy Riot. Yeah, yeah, I'm one of the managers at that television.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:38

I'll say BJ was at that podcast live doing the Roy Riot.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:42

Set up the telking, I do all the way games and everything. Yeah, let me know. I'm a Panthers fan too, unfortunately. Well, there's no better place to be than at the Royal Riot, baby.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:50

Yes, sir, but we're just saying we've been we've been members of the rival since day one. Yeah, we have your kid now that we need to get addicts.

SPEAKER_12 1:07:57

Come on, Sally. Can we get our little packets?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:05

We went to a side gig when we started this. I was looking at Michigan where she's from. Yeah. Uh West and Oregon here in North Carolina, and there's another place that came. We went to side gig and she was like, anywhere you go, you're gonna be fine. So we're like, North Carolina it is. But I don't want to move from here now.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:20

I'll go state.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:21

This is on a state where you can have summertime in the morning, spring wintertime, and it's snowing at night.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:28

Literally on Monday, we're gonna have possibly have a tornado and it's snow in the same way somehow.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:33

You drive this way to the towns this way to the beach. Yes, sir. Uh where the rest of the, you know, growing up, man, in North Carolina in 1980, you tell me you're from Charlotte now like, where's that? Yeah, I'm close. Right. Yeah. So we're we're on the mad battle. I've grown with it. I've done everything possible. I've struggled towards, I've worked in banking, I've done everything in the city. And I don't want to be on a building legacy or something I can leave with my children. You know, we gotta fight for everything we want, man. And when I sit up there in these political hearings and things for cannabis, I'm sitting there listening to all this stuff that gets passed daily, and there's nobody there to hear it. They barely vote on it. One of them that sticks out in our mind is the hearing on changing the laws. In parts of rural North Carolina, they have these hog ponds that's full of hog crap, blood, and all kinds of stuff. They take this and they spray these giant nozzles in the air to fertilize the farms in the area. It carries over the neighborhoods and everything, makes me look very safe.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:33

Oh god.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:33

And I stand there and listen, they passed a law that protects these companies from being people barely even raised their hand to work for it. There's nobody there to fight it, and they went through like that. And that's what happens every day. Um I'm really big on getting connected with your local representative, your politicians. Uh, I used to think it didn't matter, but now I have a relationship, probably five or six house for zone, just north in that talk to water. Yes. And they they often now call me to ask my opinion on things. And uh they literally take those phone calls and email on how they decide on a lot of things. Yes. And uh, especially if you're one of their constituents, one of their voters. And I tell people people say voting doesn't matter. Oh, they just had a primary that flipped the seat North Carolina came down to two votes. Two votes. And if it didn't matter, they would try to take it from us so often. So email, call, reach out to them, set up meetings, reach out to their staffers, they will sit and meet with you. And if enough, they hear it enough. I we were up in Raleigh last year fighting for what we were doing, and um, we call it shrimp day. Uh everybody around there was wearing these shrimp shirts. Um, there was thousands, and they were all wearing the same shirts. There was 18 wheelers doing net laps around the Capitol with these big shrimp signs on everything, blowing the horn. Nobody out there could not tell they were there. And I guess they were trying to change the shrimp walls to the local shrimplers in North Carolina. And they showed up so big that they literally dropped it that day. Wow. And that's what it takes.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:05

And if you show up, we the people, yes, no matter what the change is, people are too damn comfortable here. And it's just comfortable now. But if you show up and you organize and you speak how you should speak, not just because of other people too, and I'm sorry, but a lot can get done. And that's what we got. We got more bipartisan help than ever. Just like you said, we you can deny it all you want, but even the Republicans had somebody in their family that overcame the problems with games, yes, or whatever, and they can't deny it now. And what happened is Bill Raven, one of the GRP leaders, ended up with cancer. And it's been said that you read this story, he said it just somehow cannabis showed up in his mailboxes.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:45

So somehow.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:47

Yeah, somehow.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:48

And I was like, hey, so how'd you how'd you get his address?

SPEAKER_03 1:11:52

What am I doing? Like, can the cannabis just show up in my house? Yeah, no. Yeah, man, it's uh nobody cares between the facts there. Uh, you know, the government has known this, has done this for a long time. If you look it up, the government actually owns the patent on treating cancer with cannabinoids since the 90s. Uh G3 GW pharmaceutical and raid simpson since the 70s and been treating the people with Red Simpson or so, you know, man, the propaganda is heavy, and we affect so many industries, and we're disrupting so many industries. We've become a target of so many industries. And where we used to be united within the hemp and cannabis industry, we're now fractionalized because we got wrecked. We got medical against hemp. And now we're getting attacked by the big MSOs, the Warren REP program, your PR leads, here. Uh, all these people are spending millions to try to shut us down because they're haters and they gotta pay a 30% tax that they can't run out on taxes. Well, we circle that. And you know, uh we pay radio sales tax, and that's it. That's why we've been successful and went from nothing to a$30 plus billion dollar industry in seven years. So yeah, I can talk forever, man. I hope we're not gonna talk about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:05

Oh, we're we're good, man. One of the reasons I was so excited to have you on this show is literally everything you have going on upstairs that you can just talk about because you're probably one of the most involved people that I've come across in the short time we've been doing this. And I mean, obviously, we cannot thank you enough for all the work you do and all the resources you've put together to make it easier for those of us who want to do something but don't know where to start. Um, when you first kind of started putting out that you were gonna start the protect the planet movement, um that I sit down the meetings for now once a month. I just remember being like, wow, this guy has thought of everything. Like you put out work, you know, Google Docs with just everything in it to the point where we could copy and paste the email, and you already had the address for everybody within the state you could email, depending on where you live. Like you put you put so much into it that like a lot of somebody who had no idea of what they were doing could go to your resources pages and just in five minutes take care of all of it.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:15

Yeah, I'm blessed by passionate people. I might not say all my staff was there because they love me. Um, but I they I think everybody's feeling is passionate with the plan, and it takes truly a whole village for me, uh especially me. I mean I need David City a lot.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:30

You gotta watch. But they they helped me a lot.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:33

They made me look good, they helped me stab success. Uh I learned a long time ago. Can't be good at everything. Build on what you are good at. And uh I was appointed given the gift of Gab, uh, you know, being the Charlie Kid school. Uh usually one of the only white people in most of my circles growing up, you know, those kind of things, man. But you you learn uh camp on the streets, you know, and you learn how to read people quickly and fast. And um, you know, so you learn it quickly. If if not me, who? Yes, and like you. You find out the best in everybody and you build on that. You can't change people. You can only build on that. And just like I'm not a long distance runner, but I've accepted that uh, you know, uh you you build on what you've done that. And um, you know, luckily I got the uh the voice for radio or the face for radio. But you know, if life is crazy. But really, what happened is when we first started this, we were gonna open, and people kept, well, I thought you were open, I thought you were open, and uh one of my employees, Billy, on my business partner dance back door, back step, took a video of me, and I was like, let's just tell people what's going on while we haven't opened. And we had people invested already by the time we were open because they were like, we were sharing while we were fighting and why they were.

SPEAKER_11 1:15:59

We had some merch before we had anything.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:01

We had some share before we had everything. Yeah. Uh the North Carolina mechanism. We went up to DC right after they legalized. We had these shirts, me and my buddies Blake and Joey. We were going up there joining this big rally. We bought these tickets, we're like doing a fight, and we get up there in typical fighting fashion, like the whole thing fell through. There was no anything. So we're like, well, hell, we're here now. So we walked around, found some underground dispensaries and stuff. There literally no shirts. Anywhere I went, people are like that shirt. Oh, we should buy it, we should buy it. And it started that whole movement from a shirt. And then my business partner's gonna start this thing, and then being on social media, you know, being the face, and then I started reaching out, the uh the news was there at that store all the time. And I started building relationships with them. So now any kind of candidates things happen to each other before us. But I was like, you know what? Uh here we are. And I gotta fight for it. You know, come November, I could be in a position to never have to worry about money again, or literally be homeless. And that's the reality I live in right now. You know, and uh not only that for my hundred employees directly to work for me, yeah. Think about the other people. You know, I have people that clean, I got people that do graphical homework, I got packaging, we got just suppliers we buy raw goods from, sugar, and all kinds of things.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:17

Yeah, when you open up these stores, you got people building stuff and awesome.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:21

And we spend a lot of managers, but uh, you know, and you think about all that, think about how many empty leases, you know. We're personally guaranteed all these leases. We got real business bank loans out there. And uh, you know, the the the ban has started now. Banks are now shutting off loan. We just were starting to get it. They're taking credit card processing again. Uh so you know, we're we're facing the inevitable. It's like you're trying to grow while surviving, while trying to diversify, and you have to do it all the same as well.

SPEAKER_11 1:17:53

Well, it takes time too to grow the plant into a product that can go and sit on a shelf and be ready for consumption. So the clock is ticking now. Yeah, we have till November 12th, but you know, it's already That's gonna come before we even know it, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:07

Over a hundred days has passed. Like I said, it was her birthday. We were sitting at uh for her birthday at the melting pot, and I I learned on my phone, and I showed her in the room dinner, and uh we sat there and kind of stirred around on our phone for a while. We went home, I think we cried a little bit, panic a little bit, and then it's like We've been here before.

SPEAKER_10 1:18:25

Maybe not to this level, but a few times we thought it was the hour.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:28

Here we go. They're cutting the dad's about to open another store in Charlie. We'll we're still, hey, if we we're gonna lose any everything anyway, you might as well.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:39

So the thing about a business owner, uh, you know, an entrepreneur, is when you put them between a rock and a fucking hard place, uh, as we found out throughout history, they're gonna blow that fucking rock up, right? Or they're gonna build a ladder above it, they're gonna dig a tunnel below it, they're gonna figure out a way um to make it work. That is the that is like the fucking definition of our country. Right. Nothing's ever been easy, and it's the ones that stick through and push hard that not only are are successful and keep going, but they create the most beautiful fucking things um to that. That's why we love you guys. Yeah, I love you guys.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:16

That's why I've always said, man, it's the journey, not the desperation. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_11 1:19:19

Responsibility because uh we brought a lot of people in there. We brought a lot of people in this. A lot of people saw what we were doing and wanted to do it too. And the responsibility is just I'm out of here.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:31

If we do it because it's the right way, they're not even she gets mad at me because I'm just like, eh, you know, yeah. This is this, but I feel like karma is the greatly, greatly collaborative. Whatever someone does to you is their karma, and you respond is yours. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:19:47

Well, he's been so calm lately that I'm like, get mad. And it's like that's libel.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:52

That's the we talking or not parking. I think they've got it finally dressed.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:58

No, man, but it's uh, you know, man, like I look at it every day. I was like, my worst days are most people's best.

SPEAKER_08 1:20:06

But the other night he was like, I gotta go to this event. It starts at 9 30, and I'm like, oh boo, you gotta go to a club for work.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:15

Yeah, but you you go to work and just make hilarious videos about smoking at work all day because I watch those videos.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:25

She's not even a smoker, she's not she uses cameras to case like numbers and everybody assumes like the biggest part of the world. She has like one of them.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:40

I don't believe in me.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:41

And I'm gonna say I was to day years old when I found out that was your dad, because I did not know that was your dad. But I love watching those videos because the two of you playing off each other and the creativity you come up with because you're doing it daily and multiple times a day.

SPEAKER_11 1:20:59

You can't tell that many things.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:05

You know you've made it when you get recognized at the carabins.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:10

I I was actually there first few times he started getting recognized because he's the store somewhat. They come pop a jar, man.

SPEAKER_12 1:21:16

He's like, people come up to him all the time, like gapping him up. Oh and they'll walk away and I'm like, who is that? He said, I have no clue.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:25

No clue. No clue.

SPEAKER_12 1:21:26

What do you mean?

SPEAKER_03 1:21:28

You know, he worked, he had his own window business when he came when he started. And he came in to visit one day, and literally, I think the next thing he said quit his job. He was our number one, you know, employee for the longest time, and then uh Ryan started his own store. He's our first employee. I want all of my teammates' employees to become store owners. And uh, I think that's the McDonald's model take for label, right? Like you gotta earn it, right? You gotta be part of it. We wanted to be an experience, you know. The music played. Most people that come through our doors already going through something, so I wanted to be an experience. They walk through, leave your troubles at the door. We're gonna make you feel better, we're gonna help you. When we first started, we had 600 people a day. I would take a bottle of CBD teacher and walk down the line and gudge to everybody online to come into the store. And uh, but man, it it's all love, it's beautiful. You know, I get uh to be the front part, the vessel of this, as she says. Uh, but there's a whole team behind me that truly pulls this off. And uh, you know, man, it's if it ended today, it would suck. But I can this journey is a lifetime memory. Yes. It put me in rooms now where five, six, well, ten years ago now, I would probably be in there as a server. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:49

And now you're hosting podcasts with our government officials. Like you literally, you literally just had uh an episode what two days ago um with our one of our Charlotte representatives.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:01

And so it's the same deal, man. I learned that when you reach out to him, they ask your response. And uh, you know, he's another Charlotte native, um, the youngest uh House member currently, Mr. Campbell. Yeah. So, you know, man, he he came out the gate asked me for a rec bill, but he wanted 30% tax. So I had my uh one of my sisters, my teammates, Jenna, email his people and like we need to talk. We had a great couple meetings and he said to do a podcast, but I got a lot of people that were otherwise be oppositions, they're scheduled soon for a podcast too. Um but yeah, man, that's I just want to spread the word. I love doing this kind of thing. I love what you guys are doing. Um, you know, uh I jumped at the opportunity when I saw I was like, hey, I'd like to come do this too.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:43

I mean, I can only like all of your pages and every post so many times until I bought your attention.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:49

I haven't there's a lot of people trying to the uh Friday and Thursday, I completely cleaned out my em my voicemail box, and by the end of the day I had it was full again, 47 and I got 11 emails to keep up with the case.

SPEAKER_09 1:24:02

Oh, they start they try to reach out to me and get to him. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:05

So well now that I know I can do that, I'm gonna start messaging you through your Instagram page.

SPEAKER_09 1:24:14

I want to I'm like, you're you are gonna be my next business. I'm gonna gatekeep, and that phone call should have cost me$399.

SPEAKER_08 1:24:23

I'm like, that is like a million dollars worth of game you just gave away for free. You're gonna capitalize on those.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:34

You know, that's what I'm saying gatekeeping.

SPEAKER_09 1:24:36

Yeah, I've come.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:36

I've come from nothing, man. And uh to literally had everything looking back, and I always have. And uh, you know, learning to trust the process, learning that you're not gonna get the rewards you're looking for, usually especially given it, maybe never ever. But the reward for me is being able to wake up every day and and have that freedom of I work my ass off every day. I never give myself a day off. But I have that freedom if I wanted to. And um, you know, the example I'm setting for people and the inspiration that I get from others and others get from me. This is the government's worst nightmare right here, is folks sitting here doing this, having this conversation, talking through things, but realizing we have more in common than that. I've met people all over this world, and sitting with them in the joint, I've literally became pranked with them this last two decades. And uh, you know, real recognizes real is an ego stripper, it makes you explore yourself. Alcohol kills the sense that falls the sense to the mask. Cannabis makes you sit right in the middle of who the hell you are.

SPEAKER_09 1:25:36

And I think that's why some people don't like it, they don't want to face themselves.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:39

Sometimes I don't like it. Sometimes they don't think too damn much about things. But you know, it it's uh I think it's important, man. We're we're in an unprecedented time.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:49

Yes, sir.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:50

And uh I think it's important more than ever to see what can go wrong if your voice isn't heard or represented in the country. And uh, you know, the wars have got to stop. We'll call them what you want to. Nobody wants to die. You know, and uh I think if we all got involved and and quit the complacency and the comfort to make a change, we could. But it until it hurts the most, to put people until it's almost collapsed, we're not gonna wake the people up. And uh, you know, you you can make a difference and you will make a difference. You just gotta stand up, stand together. Literally, united, you stand divided, we fought. Yes, sir. And the two-party system is divided, is designed to keep us divided and fighting. Um, but you know, it's understand propaganda, understand the mind games, we're heading into an AI world where it's gonna be harder and harder to tell what's real and what isn't. It already is. Yeah, yeah. If there's ever a time in the world we need cannabis, now please.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:49

Because it makes me think every commercial's AI, and I'm okay with that. To think it's all one thing and not switching back and forth. There's literally some commercials, especially some of the medicine ones now, um, where my wife and I will be like, we'll literally have the debate. Is this AI or is it real?

SPEAKER_03 1:27:05

I'm I can't go the rest of my life having to ask that question. That's where I'm at every day. Especially if you watch the White House uh website. Every day I'm like, is this the understanding? Is this is this real life? But uh but it's it's insane, man. But yeah, it's uh you know, someone told me this not too long ago and made me think cannabis is the real core of American culture. And it's something really kind of exclusive. People use cannabis all over the world, but we have so many different multifaceted from the hippies to the hip hop community, the jazz community, whatever. It was literally built on this plant. And uh, you know, we gotta preserve that American culture. And it's that fine line as a business owner who want to grow my company to be where it can be, but keep the roots of they keep that authenticity and that identity. Because let's not have to be yellow testing all that. We used to go sit in the house and smell like cat did the jewelry and restart like the bag and get a 12-foot ball where we're sitting, you know, it's it's part of it, like I don't want to, lack of better terms, whitewash the industry. And we gotta remember of who built this industry and how many of our brothers and sisters are still sitting behind bars today. And uh, you know, it's none of us are free until all of us are free. So wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:29

I think that's gonna be the uh the clip for the episode to tease because that was probably one of the most powerful statements we've had on this show.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:36

Yeah, man, it's true. And uh, you know, it's bigger than all of us. Uh she often says I'm a vessel for this, but I love to be the voice for those that don't have a voice. And um, you know, we got a lot of work to do to make things right. And I think this past five, six years of our lives, we realized we can't take anything for granted, and nothing's promised. So uh, you know, uh value these core memories like we sit here doing this because we're we're only gonna be as young as we are today.

SPEAKER_07 1:29:03

Yes, sir. Right.

unknown 1:29:05

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:06

Unfortunately, we are wrapping it up. We're at time, but I can easily say this has been the fastest conversation we've had all season. Absolutely. Um we didn't I didn't even stop for our commercial break because the conversation was too good to not let it keep rolling.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:23

I was like, please don't do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:24

So honestly, you have so many credentials. I'm not even gonna make you list them off right now, but we're gonna put in all the um all the episode notes when it posts every Instagram, every website, everything that you do that people can find.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:45

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:46

And through our links page, um, we actually have the link to the Protect the Plant page, which is a sort of a subpage of Crown Town as well. So you can go there, you can find out more information about what Mike is doing with Protect the Plant. And if you are aligned to to donate to the cause, that can be done through the site there as well. They're doing amazing things. They are counting the pennies, they're listing the pennies, they're being fully transparent, which is something rare. Um, so we appreciate that amongst all of the other things you are doing to A keep our community together, but B push the needle for everybody else across the country because you're not limiting it to just Charlotte, you're not limiting it to just North Carolina, you're helping fight for the country. And I can't say thank you enough for that. So before we wrap up, um, is there any last words you would like to give to our listener base?

SPEAKER_03 1:30:45

Uh stay in tune with who you are. Stay authentic, stay authentic and be unapologetically yourself. Uh those that will accept you will accept you no matter who you are. Stand for what you believe in. Never think you're too small, never think you can't make a change. Take it from a guy that came from nothing, has nothing but a drink. Every day is an opportunity to get it right. Every day above ground is the opportunity to change history. And uh don't take that lightly and don't take that for granted. And there's no such thing as an accidents out there. Everything managed, and there's more wins in your losses than there are in the wins. So that's all I need to tell.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:26

As usual, you have to follow that. So, what are your closing thoughts?

SPEAKER_04 1:31:31

I got shit. Yeah, that is phenomenal.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:37

Rest in peace. So I I I have nothing I can say after all of that either. Um, so with that, of course, we always want to thank everybody for tuning in to Vinally High, the podcast where the grooveest tunes turn into the craziest discussions. We hope you've enjoyed this auditory journey with us. Remember, stay tuned, stay mellow, and always keep your vinyl vibes. Until next time, keep reaching for the Sonic Sky and always stay vinally high.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:07

You've been tuned in to the late night groove of the Vigh podcast. And tonight's vibe was brought to you by Hey Binks, the official beverage additive of season four.