Amanda Reiman, Vice President of Community Relations, Flow Kana
Amanda Reiman is the Vice President of Community Relations for Flow Kana, a branded cannabis distribution company that works with small farmers in the Emerald Triangle. She is also the Secretary of the International Cannabis Farmer's Association, a non profit that advocates for research and policies that favor sun grown cannabis cultivation through traditional farming methods and a Board member for the California Cannabis Tourism Association, the Mendocino Cannabis Industry Association and The Initiative, the first incubator/accelerator for women owned cannabis businesses.
After receiving her PhD from UC Berkeley, Dr. Reiman was the Director of Research and Patient Services at Berkeley Patients Group, one of the oldest dispensaries in the country, and the Manager of Marijuana Law and Policy for the Drug Policy Alliance, a national non-profit that was engaged in the drafting and campaigns of legalization initiatives across the country and abroad. She also taught courses on substance abuse treatment and drug policy at UC Berkeley for 10 years and had published several research articles on the use of cannabis as a substitute for opiates.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Thinking Outside the Bud where we speak with entrepreneurs investors thought leaders researchers advocates and policymakers who are finding new and exciting ways for cannabis to positively impact business society and culture. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:31] Welcome everyone this is Thinking Outside the Bud, I’m Bruce Eckfeldt, I'm your host. Today's guest is Amanda Reiman, Amanda is vice president of community relations at Flow Kana.
[00:00:40] We're going to learn a little bit about the company a little bit about her. Amanda welcome to the program. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:45] She always like to start with having guests just tell a little bit about their professional background and then how they got into cannabis. So give us your story.
[00:00:52] Well my professional background and candidate's background is really one and the same. I really haven't been a professional outside of the cannabis space. So I started studying drug policy when I was getting my master's degree in social work in Chicago. And what really struck me about drug policy was the racial and social disparities that existed in terms of who was getting in trouble for using drugs and what were those associated penalties and being a social worker. This was something that I thought was really fascinating and something I wanted to study.
[00:01:22] So I decided to get a PHC and social welfare. And that took me out to California in 2002 to the Bay Area to start the program at UC Berkeley. And you know I was a Midwestern girl growing up in Indiana and Chicago and I really had you know I had heard about medical cannabis on the news that's happening in California but I really had no idea. And when I moved to Oakland in 2002 I was really just flabbergasted at the difference between the prohibitionist State and Illinois that I was living in and what was happening in the Bay Area. And as a social scientist I was especially interested in the role that dispensaries were playing in these social and community health of medical cannabis patients. And I started to learn about the history of the cannabis movement and for anybody that's hoping to be in the cannabis industry or who already is in the industry it is imperative that they learn this history because it is very important for us to understand the social context in which cannabis really moved from being a very scary narcotic to being an accepted medicine. And it really started in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s and 90s with the HIV positive population. And so you know just indulge me for a second please.
[00:02:40] You know it is a lot of folks remember in the 1980s and 90s there was a lot of confusion over how HIV spread and folks thought you could get it by hugging and kissing by sharing a toothbrush or a toilet or a towel with somebody. And because of that a lot of folks who are HIV positive were pushed into social isolation their family members were told not to hug them not to come near them in the hospitals they were put in separate wards from the rest of the patient population and where they really found solace was with each other and with community and with cannabis. Cannabis was something that was you know passed around as a remedy for chemotherapy for cancer patients and also wasting syndrome that was associated with HIV. So the early dispensaries in the Bay Area were really groups of HIV patients that got together and decided to share cannabis and the very first medical cannabis law in the country was proposition P which was passed in nineteen ninety two in San Francisco spearheaded by Dennis Peron whose partner had AIDS and who really wanted permission from the city of San Francisco to give cannabis to AIDS patients in his home and really became the very first cannabis dispensary.
[00:03:48] And what did the cover of the center of proposition P. What did it actually enable.
[00:03:53] All it said was that if folks are using cannabis for medicinal purposes that it should really be the lowest law enforcement priority of police in San Francisco. I mean it really didn't give any kind of regulation. It was really more of a hands off which was actually the same thing as Prop 215. A lot of folks think that Prop 215 was a cannabis regulatory law but in fact what Prop 215 did was say that if you had a doctor's note that you could use that as a defense in court which had nothing to do with your patient or anything. So when I came to Oakland in 2002 which was six years after Prop 215 passed you really just saw this very casual bottom up community based network of dispensaries that emerged in areas that were lenient like the Bay Area. So I decided to do my doctoral dissertation on how these dispensaries were operating as health service providers and the benefits that they were providing to their communities and to their patients. So I did that in 2005 2006 in a time where there really wasn't a lot of academic research being done on cannabis. And a lot of it was still around the activism. And so I think as we started to shift into an industry folks were looking for the people that were starting to do the research that were starting to kind of standardize and solidify what we knew about cannabis.
[00:05:14] And because I was in that cohort I kind of got thrust into the industry in a very early stage. I went to work for Berkeley Patients Group as their director of research and patient services in 2008. And so I was the first one of those I basically made it up I went in and I was like No researcher and you all have like thousands of patients coming in here every day. And we could learn a lot about who they are and what they're doing if you would hire me. And so they did and I did a study on using cannabis as a substitute for alcohol and other drugs. And it ended up being the launching point for a whole new area of study that we're starting to see really take off now. Which was fabulous because without Berkeley Patients Group a lot of that would never have gotten started. So they were shut down by the federal government in 2010 briefly. So I left there and I went to work for the drug policy alliance which was a nonprofit that I'd always admired since my very early beginnings in this work. Ethan Nadelmann had always been a huge hero of mine who ran the organization. And they were looking for someone to work in their California office.
[00:06:18] So I started to work for them in 2010 and really became the head of their marijuana work nationally and internationally. You know really with the climax I guess you could say being the passage of Prop 64 in California in 2016 after that which was an extremely heavy lift and a very very difficult in many ways traumatic experience. I decided that I wanted to work on implementation that you know we had now passed legalization.
[00:06:46] You know now it was gonna be who's going to win in the industry who's going to end up standing at the end of the day. And in my mind I wanted that to be the people that lifted this up when it wasn't an industry when there was no money to be made outside of under the table when there was a huge risk to be taken in making a living in cannabis. I want those folks to have a chance and I saw the work that flow Cano was doing with the small farmers in the Emerald Triangle region of California.
[00:07:12] And I decided that that was really the next step for me as someone that seen this industry really evolve from a movement to kind of bring it full circle and make sure that these individuals had someone advocating for them and that communities could see a net benefit from legalization. And even though it's legal here about 70 percent of the state has still banned commercial activity. And I think to move that needle what we need to do is show that communities that embrace cannabis become better communities. And that's my role up here in Mendocino County.
[00:07:43] That's great. And I like this conversation because I think most people don't realize or appreciate that you know it's one thing to pass legislation. It's another thing to actually stand up an industry that's healthy and sustainable and good for the community. And quite honestly you know different states because of the legislation how they're structured it and how they implemented it are quite different. And it's having a fairly dramatic impact over the success of cannabis businesses and the integration of cannabis into culture and society and civic just kind of process.
[00:08:11] Tell us a little bit about how you how you kind of now the different states or how you map the different ways that legislation is being implemented and how it's affecting the actual community and the development of the cannabis market locally.
[00:08:26] Well I think that you know when we look at legalization we have to be really clear that the difference between legalization and regulation so legalization is the same no matter what state you're in. Legalization means that this is no longer a crime. And given that cannabis was a crime in every state it's removing those criminal penalties. And there's nuances in that in terms of how far do you remove them or lower them or does a misdemeanor become an infraction or does it become nothing. And I think that you know there's nuances there but really the idea is that something was a crime and now it's not. And that doesn't matter what state you're in. I think where we see the differences is in the next step as you were saying which is the regulation. So OK. Now that we've decided this isn't a crime how do we ensure safe access for the appropriate age group in the context of how we regulate business in our state. And so when you look at a state like California it should be no surprise to anybody that the taxes are extremely high that the regulatory hurdles are extremely difficult because that is how California does business. And if you look at our environmental regulations if you look at how we regulate other types of businesses we definitely put more regulations on cannabis and that's still kind of an artifact of prohibition. But when we really wade through that it's not that different. We are very over regulatory and overtaxing state.
[00:09:49] When you look at a state like Ayn which traditionally has been very different with lower taxes you know definitely more of a hands off government approach less regulatory hurdles.
[00:10:00] That's what you're going to see in a place like Maine.
[00:10:01] So I think interestingly cannabis could almost become this microcosm her re-examining how states do business and you know what else have we had an opportunity for a new regulated commodity to come online where states had such freedoms to regulate in ways they saw fit. So if we see a state with lower taxes flourishing in a way that California can't then California is going to have to make a decision whether they want to just do business as usual and take the hit or whether they actually want to evolve. And so I think that's actually something pretty exciting Neal. They say that states are laboratories of democracy but we really don't have that many opportunities to treat them as such.
[00:10:41] Yeah. Do you see that the. I mean we are we're in this funny situation where we've got this kind of state by state legalization and regulation still federally illegal so you know we can we can't do anything across state lines is that kind of further accentuating the differences between the states because of it. Because I can't again move product from California to Maine. So each state is its own microcosm of an entire industry of everything from seed to actually dispensing. So how was that playing out.
[00:11:09] No you're absolutely right. I think when we look at the fact that they're growing cannabis in Colorado you know if cannabis were legal everywhere they probably wouldn't grow cannabis in Colorado. You know what I'm fond of saying you know I grew up in Indiana. We didn't grow. We didn't build greenhouses to grow mangoes just to be just admitted that Indiana was not the climate to grow mangoes. And we got mangoes from where they grew and we gave them our fort right.
[00:11:34] So I think that you're right the the inability to cross state lines has definitely insulated these policies because for example if California was exporting to Maine we would have to come to some kind of commonality around what that looks like around regulation and so we'd have to meet somewhere in the middle. In the absence of that California gets to be like to the California's. It can be. And Maine gets to be the meanest it can be. You know I think that things will change once he can cross state lines because then it'll really be the strengths of the individual states in terms of what type of commerce and supply chain they can support that will really determine what type of cannabis commerce happens there.
[00:12:15] Yeah. So let's talk about and we can talk specifically about California and if you have examples happy to do that too but well how do you see as the sort of legislation and regulation and kind of gets defined and starts to get implemented.
[00:12:27] Where is this starting to intersect more of this sort of social and cultural dynamics and issues like how were that you know the friction points or where were the things that are getting worked out in terms of how this stuff ends up impacting. As you mentioned one of your goals is to help make sure that the people who essentially took all the risk and were helped build this you know build this community build this this market or this industry you know prior to legalization you know that they have a seat at the table that they've got opportunities that they're actively participating in it like why are they not like what are the dynamics that are going on here.
[00:13:00] Right. So capitalism is it's a pay to play system right. So in order to get in the game you have to have money. And you know we as a country have decided well if someone doesn't have money but they have a really great idea. We have these avenues through small business loans and other ways for them to finance their dream these things do not exist for the cannabis industry because of our lack of access to banking. So you really even more than other industries in capitalism need capital in order to get your foot in the door. So when we're talking about people that have been notoriously impacted by the drug war we're talking about communities that have notoriously experienced economic instability and lack of opportunity.
[00:13:39] So in essence you know the whole like give a man a fish teach a man to fish dynamic doesn't necessarily play out here because we are giving a whole bunch of fish to people who have no idea how to fish or what's the fish if they have it so now they just have all this fish in it's rotting and they have no idea what to do with it. And I think you know there's a big mismatch and I don't know if it's blindness by choice or if it really just is an ignorance among regulators about how disadvantage the playing field really is. And I think with legalization you know we were very successful at addressing this because we were able to do that in the law and say that OK. This is no longer a crime your records are gonna get expunged you know having a cannabis record doesn't impact your ability to get work in the industry like we could do all of this but at the end of the day if it costs fifty thousand dollars to get a license and you have to be able to fill out forms that even the state doesn't understand then you know just having and being impacted by the drug war and have someone hand you a license is not going to do anything to help you succeed in fact and in many ways it's it's setting you up to fail. So I think that how we impact this is we need to be really honest about what communities need beyond just the ability to get a license.
[00:14:56] And I think there are some programs that have tried to address this. One is the hood incubator in Oakland. You know Oakland was the first city to establish an equity program saying that people that met certain criteria basically get in the front of the line in terms of getting licenses. I was on the regulatory commission for the city of Oakland at the time and was really driving home the fact that well great you're letting these people get in the front of the line but do they even know how to run businesses. I mean the fact that we're arrested for cannabis in Oakland in nineteen ninety three does not mean you can run a successful business. So what do we do. For them. Like where's that in between. And so the hood incubator was founded by an amazing group of women to serve the purpose of training and incubating folks who can qualify from equity programs but just haven't had the opportunity for training. Another program that's addressing this is something I'm on the board of directors of it's called the initiative and it's the first incubator and accelerator for women owned cannabis businesses. It's based in Portland and it has a fund attached to it. So the class is funded after completion of the program and I think that the more we introduce these opportunities for people that should be at the table to know how to build their chair. So that they can actually sit at the table is great. And I would encourage anybody who is working in cannabis to really think about how your business can help contribute to lifting up and supporting those who really deserve to be right next to you.
[00:16:26] So we had an interview with people from the MPP from their marijuana policy project and we talked a lot about sort of the expungement and the efforts that are going on legally but I like this idea that yes we need to do all these things we need to kind of remove the kind of the residual legal challenges or issues that people have kind of a clean slate coming into it but we need to further go one step further actually educate them given opportunities to create the businesses educate them around what it means to operate a business start a business operate a business successfully grow business.
[00:16:56] I guess you see this. These are the incubators and accelerators and things like that.
[00:16:59] Is that kind of using the capitalist tools to right size the situation or I guess where where do you see kind of the capital this approach to business in this industry as being something that you can use to actually help grow it versus something that you actually need to undo or to change fundamentally.
[00:17:18] Well I don't know we're not going to change it fundamentally in my lifetime and I'm only 42. So you know I think that it's something we can chip away at.
[00:17:26] If we can constantly question and be critical love and it's our responsibility to do so. But I think we have to work with what we have and where we're at and that means giving people tools to succeed in the situation that we are currently in while we're also trying to amend the policies and the institutions that are creating the situation. So you know I think it's it's very much. Meeting people where they're at. And so you know with the initiative the incubator for women for example we're very much borrowing from tech incubators and from that model. But we're amending it to focus on the population we're working. So understanding that you know women who are working mothers for example may not be able to attend an eight hour in-person incubate for six weeks. So giving opportunities to participate online opportunities to participate part time opportunities to participate in boot camps.
[00:18:16] If you can't commit to an entire incubator accelerator but still want to get content and then including content that it's not just about business development but specifically about being a woman in the cannabis space which is a very interesting place to navigate. You know men are the fastest growing consumer group in cannabis.
[00:18:35] Yet the products are primarily still marketed towards men. And I think that there's a big misstep there that's really only going to be branded by more women getting it to decision making positions in the industry. So however we can influence that and give them the support they need to get there. We're going to do that even if it's following more of a traditional capitalist how much money and then get yourself out there model.
[00:18:59] Yeah. No I like that. I think that's one of the exciting things about the industry is that there is there's both a focus and is part of the conversation. There's also an opportunity and the fact that you have these kind of weird open playing fields and you know in the market because of the federal legal issues people can come into space as I always would normally be grabbed up by big players. They're not doing it. And so there's this open space I guess.
[00:19:20] So what else do you see in terms of you know if you're putting together your agenda of what the cannabis industry needs to address from a policy from a social point of view what else is on your kind of list for four things we should really start conversations around or be focusing on.
[00:19:36] Well I think that you know since I'm up here in agricultural conservation country I'm very concerned about cannabis turning into Big Ag and I'm very aware of the impact that industrialized agriculture has had not just on the quality of our food and how that impacts our health but the quality of the environment and how that impacts our health and the health of future generations. You know I said before that I think cannabis is a great starting point to talk about the evils of capitalism or maybe not evils but barriers you might barriers the limitation of capitalism.
[00:20:11] I think it's also a really great place to talk about the limitations and the issues created by industrialized agriculture. And so I think as we're looking at policies around cannabis we still see policies really pushing people indoors for cultivation and that is a relic of reefer madness and of prohibition and the fear of seeing a plant in the ground in the sun doing its thing and being a plant and really wanting to keep it under lock and key with this fear that it's somehow going to get into the wrong hands. I think we need to recognize that cannabis is an agricultural crop and not only is it an agricultural crop. It is one of the most beneficial agricultural crops on the planet meaning that it's a bio mediator. So it actually cleans the soil of toxins. It works well with a dozen varieties of companion plants that act as natural pesticides. And so I think that we have to look at cannabis and also at hemp as a sustainable agricultural product that we should really be taking very seriously if we tried to undo some of the harm you've done to the Earth instead of forcing it into a concrete floor indoors with false lighting. You know if you look at what it takes to light a half acre of indoor cannabis for one year it's the same as adding almost 300 homes to the grid.
[00:21:31] Oh yeah. No as it was. You don't do that.
[00:21:33] Yeah I mean I was a classic way you can find Groves right. You got to look at power consumption and it grew right there.
[00:21:40] I think that you know we're going back to our earlier point about what's going to happen once we can ship cannabis across state lines. You know I think it will grow where it grows and once it becomes an international commodity cannabis will come from places like South America and South Africa and Northern California. And it's not going to be grown in a warehouse in Michigan. And so I understand why it has to be that way today.
[00:22:05] But I don't want us to get so invested financially in indoor cannabis growing technology because I don't think we're going to do ourselves any favors if we get to a point where society is willing to be OK with cannabis as a crop but there's so much moneyed interests in indoor technology that the lobbying makes it almost impossible to really do right by the earth with this plant.
[00:22:28] So you know I just my initial take is kind of thinking through the arguments that I've heard or how I see this kind of have been playing out is that that the medical side you know that I think there's a big influence from the medical side or at least mind.
[00:22:40] My perception is that the medical side is kind of coming out there saying hey look we're now talking about creating a drug you know a medical product. And therefore we need to have all this control over its quality its potency its chain of custody you know that we don't have chemicals and stuff inside this product that can be harmful. And so that's pushing everything to these robo grown greenhouse models. You know it's it's basically kind of hiding the underlying principles or do you think it's valid for the medical side. We just need to split out kind of medical from recreational.
[00:23:15] So I think that if you were doing a controlled scientific experiment where you need to ensure that there is absolutely no variability in anything but the very specific independent variable that you are studying you know that I think it control climate environment makes sense. I think otherwise. I mean here in California you can't have any detectable level of pesticide on your product when it gets tested for consumption whether it's better loss of homes or I don't use and to be honest we look at farmers that use regenerative farming practices where they're not spraying anything on the plants. They are using companion plants and beneficial insects people that grow indoors have a much harder time maintaining the quality of their grow and do have to use far more. Products in order to deal with pests because they're not in a natural environment. Now again this is not true for everybody. So I don't want to lump everyone that's growing indoors into one category because I absolutely believe there are people that are doing it right. But I think it's a misconception that cannabis grown outdoors is somehow less controlled or lower quality or that we really don't know as much about what's in it because the farmers that are growing the sun grown they know every single plant they know every inch of every single plant and they are very good at producing a standardized product just like the indoor farmers are. I think we really need to look at the sustainability aspect and can't reach a place where we're comfortable with the production method. And it's also not going to be so harmful for the earth.
[00:24:47] Yeah. So and So how do we make that happen. How do you see the kind of market playing out or do you think you can create or. I think we need to create the kind of knowledge and sort of educated consumers around this and be able to say you know asking at the point of purchase actually at the point of consumption you know is this outdoor grown indoor grown as is can we influence the creation of product through changing the demand and an educated consumer.
[00:25:13] Well I think we have to. You know it's interesting because even though cannabis consumers are not new and then people walking into dispensaries who have been consuming cannabis for decades and decades the idea of having the knowledge at your fingertips about the source of your cannabis is fairly new unless you live where I do and everybody grows their own and then you know who is is who. But I think you know the idea of going into a dispensary and being able to ask the questions that are going to give you the knowledge you want to be able to make a conscious decision is something pretty new. You know until fairly recently in California you'd walk into a dispensary and all the candidates was just labeled as the name of the dispensary and you had no idea where it came from.
[00:25:54] So I think letting consumers know that cannabis grown in the sun and that it touches the soil is more of a natural environment than cannabis that's grown in a pot underneath a false light indoors. And also I think even more important is to connect the consumer with who's growing their product. And you know that's one of the things that flow can't really wanted to do from the get go was to create this transparency between the consumer and the source of the product. That was something that really wasn't around and folks wanted to be able to go online and see the farm and understand more about how cannabis was being produced and how their medicine was being produced and know who's the person behind that. And I think that that's something that kind of fits in with the culture of cannabis which is really a move away from the very sterile and impersonal pharmaceutical industry and towards more of a plant in medicine and holistic health model.
[00:26:51] So tell us more about Flo Connor. I mean what specifically what is the organization set up to do. What are what are your or what are you doing now. What do you hope to do in the future.
[00:26:59] So Flo kind of started in 2015 as a bicycle delivery service in San Francisco since the beginning. We've really I said always been very transparent about the source of the product. So we've always labeled our product with the name of a farm. We've always had the ability of the consumer to go online and see what that farm looked like and who those farmers were. And so we really realized early on that there was a market for this that folks really were responding and dispensaries were responding. So we started to move more into wholesale and then we really became an entirely wholesale company still sourcing from the small farmers up in the Emerald Triangle. And then a couple years ago as legalization was impending we were talking to our farmers that we worked with about what their concerns were after legalization and with regulation and really across the board concerns were how am I going to get my product to market. I don't have a driving commercial space on my property. I don't have a commercial space to process it to put things in jars and on how am I going to do this.
[00:27:58] So we look to other agricultural industries and saw that centralized processing was something that was very common where you would have small farmers that were clustered in an area with a centralized processing facility that they would bring their product to get sorted graded processed and then sent out for distribution. So we work with a lot of farmers here in Mendocino County. They identified for us actually a 80 acre facility that was formerly housing Fetzer wine that was owned by the Fetzer family. And it had one hundred thousand square feet of industrial space that had formerly been used to process and distribute wine. So it was very very perfect for what we were looking for. So we went into escrow on that property on election night in 2016 and we closed on it in March of 2017 and opened our processing facility in April 2013. So that is the first stop on the campus tour is the processing facility. That is where we taken the dried cannabis. We do trimming and we do sorting and grading and then we process it into jars and into pre rolls.
[00:29:07] We have two other facilities up in the Emerald Triangle that do trimming to prepare the product for processing. We're bringing a lab on to the campus Cascadia from Portland Oregon is going to be opening a third party lab on the campus in 2019. And we're also going to be introducing manufacturing onto the campus in 2019 so that we'll be able to make bulk oils sobs tinctures edibles basically keeping all of the value in Mendocino County cooperated with the farmer after the product is jarred and labeled and packaged up north.
[00:29:42] We have a truck that drives it downstream.
[00:29:44] We unload in Oakland and fulfilled dispensary orders there and then we have two more fulfillment points in Southern California. So we are licensed as a distributor for the state of California and so on is this being branded as flow on or are you bringing.
[00:29:59] Is it for the farmers. Like how you're doing the branding.
[00:30:02] We co brand so our branding has flow Kona and then it also has the name of the farm and that our website still has a list of farms where you can go and learn a bit more about the farmer. A big part of what we do it kind of harkens back to how we started which is to really create a relationship between the consumer and the farmer that grew their cannabis. So we bring our farmers all across the state for meat your farmer events at dispensaries where consumers can talk to back with farmers that grow their medicine and ask them questions and learn more about how the product is produced.
[00:30:35] Awesome. So if you know the listeners here or people like to say or business people that are getting more cannabis savvy cannabis people that are getting more business savvy. So if you have people that are interested in or starting get involved in cannabis what sort of piece of advice or thoughts would you give them in terms of helping them either avoid avoid mistakes or you know kind of accelerate their you know their growth as as a business.
[00:30:58] Well I don't think there's any way to avoid mistakes. And if I would say don't take it personally when you make mistakes because the industry is evolving so quickly and changing every day that what you think is right today isn't right tomorrow.
[00:31:13] So you cut yourself some slack but with that be prepared to be nimble and be prepared to turn on a dime and always keeping your mind that the more things change the more they change more. And that's especially true in California where we've been through many iterations of regulations and we're still not there yet. So you know I would say there's really we're not on solid ground yet the cement is still wet but that brings with it tremendous opportunities. You know so when else do we have an opportunity to be so impactful of a new and emerging industry. And so for folks that are interested I would say go for it but recognize that the cannabis industry isn't just the cannabis industry anymore. There's so many nuances within it and there's so many areas within it. Find a place where you really fit because it's interesting I find folks that are like I went to work in the cannabis industry. I'm in apply for this job and I'm like Do you have any experience. They're like No but I know a lot about cannabis. Maybe ten years ago that would have worked but it doesn't work anymore so don't waste your time going after jobs that you wouldn't go after if they weren't cannabis related. So ask yourself if this were in another industry would I still be qualified for this job. And if the answer is yes go for it. If the answer is no you're probably not going to get it. So I would say people really need to find where their strengths are and not be afraid to think outside the box. When
[00:32:41] They get there. A good blog. I appreciate it. This has been a pleasure. If people want to find out more about you about Flo Cano what's the best best way to get that information will flow on his Web site is w w w dot Flo Khana dot com. So that's really the best way to check that out if you're interested in the whole sustainability issue and the other board that I sit on is the international cannabis farmers association and where I CSA dot farm
[00:33:08] And that's an organization that advocates specifically for policies to support son grown and traditional heritage farming of cannabis. So those are two places that you can look if you want to know more about sustainable sun grown.
[00:33:20] Yeah I know but I'll make sure that both of those links are on the show not so people can get through. Amanda it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time this is this is a great conversation.
[00:33:28] I look forward to hearing hearing how Flo kind of does and the future of cannabis. So this is great. Well thank you so much for having me
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