But first on this episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, Matt starts with a statement about why hemp advocates and companies need to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Now that hemp is legal, we need to be part of healing the damage caused by the War on Drugs.

Then Matt meets Eloise Theisen, President of the American Nurses Cannabis Association, for a discussion about treating patients with hemp and cannabis. The conversation covers everything from building a cannabis regimen for specific patients needs to how to talk to your loved ones who could benefit from hemp or cannabis but may be hesitant to try.

This episode is part of our Women in Hemp series.

About Eloise Theisen

Eloise Theisen, RN, MSN, AGPCNP-BC, is full-time faculty in the Medical Cannabis program at Pacific College of Health and Science.

Eloise is a co-founder and the Chief Visionary Officer of Radicle Health and currently works there as a Board Certified Adult-Geriatric Nurse Practitioner. She is also a senior advisor to Circle Labs.

Eloise was one of the first healthcare practitioners to bring a clinical dosing regimen to the cannabis space and she has treated more than 5,000 patients using cannabis. Her work has been featured in Newsweek, the SF Chronicle, Leafly, Weedmaps, Merry Jane, and Green Flower Media. Eloise continues to advocate for patients at the local and national levels through education and has successfully increased access to local cities.

You’ve got hemp questions? We’ve got hemp answers!

Send us your hemp questions and you might hear them answered on one of our Hemp Q&A episodes. Send your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

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A Nurse That Prescribes Cannabis: Complete Episode Transcript

Below you’ll find the complete transcript of episode 44 of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, “A Nurse That Prescribes Cannabis”:

Matt Baum:
I’m Matt Baum, and this is the Ministry of Hemp podcast, brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education. Welcome back to the Ministry of Hemp podcast. Today on the show, I’m going to be talking to Eloise Theisen. She is the president of the American Cannabis Nurses Association. We talk about everything from building a cannabis regimen, to who is cannabis right for, to how to talk to your relatives that may benefit from cannabis, but who are a little afraid to try it out. It’s a great conversation, and I hope you stick around for it.

Black Lives Matter & the War on Drugs

Matt Baum:
But before we get into that, you may have noticed that the world has changed recently. It started with the death of George Floyd up in Minneapolis, at the hands of a police officer. This kicked off an unprecedented amount of protest and incredible support for the Black Lives Matter movement that it desperately deserves. And we here at Ministry of Hemp are taking it very seriously as well, and doing our part. Because it’s not just our job as good citizens of the United States to make sure that all of our citizens are taken care of, but it’s also our job as hemp advocates to recognize that a lot of this police brutality, and arming of police force, and the innocent deaths of Black people at their hands stems from the war on drugs. Our editor-in-chief Kit O’Connell, put together a fantastic piece that you can find on ministryofhemp.com right now. And of course, I’ll have a link to it in the show notes, but it basically talks about how this started in the 60s, with President Nixon.

Matt Baum:
Cannabis has been a major target of the war on drugs, the same war that has led to ballooning prison populations and done terrible amount of damage to both Black and Latino communities. We were thrilled to see so many different hemp companies filling our email inboxes. Some of them even let their employees take the day off to go and demonstrate peacefully. It’s been amazing. And we are calling on all hemp companies out there to support Black Lives Matter and support this movement, and help fight racial injustice in this great country. Some of you are probably thinking, “Matt, this is quite the leap from hemp to Black Lives Matter,” but it’s really not. And if you head over to Ministry of Hemp and check out the piece that Kit wrote, you’ll see there’s a long history here, and it really does start with the war on drugs.

Meet cannabis nurse Eloise Theisen

Matt Baum:
My conversation today is with Eloise Theisen. She’s the co founder and chief visionary officer of Radicle Health. Prior to Radicle Health, Eloise founded Green Health Consultants, which is a medical cannabis clinic that helped patients use cannabis to help treat chronic and age related illness. She was one of the first healthcare practitioners to bring clinical dosing regimens to the cannabis space, and she’s treated more than 5,000 patients using cannabis. Currently, Eloise is an adult geriatric nurse practitioner, and she lives with her husband and two girls. I spoke to her from her house in Northern California. Here’s my conversation with Eloise Theisen. Eloise. Welcome to the Ministry of Hemp podcast. It’s nice to have you.

Eloise Theisen:
Thank you. Appreciate it.

Matt Baum:
You’ve done an amazing amount of work and been on an incredible journey. So let’s just start. Where did this journey begin? And it’s ended with you as the president of the American Cannabis Nurses Association, which is incredible, but I’m guessing at one point you were just a nurse, and you decided to go off into a direction that you probably felt a lot of push back for.

Eloise Theisen:
Yes. I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. I certainly did not anticipate being in this sort of platform. My background is in oncology. So I’ve been in nursing for 20 years, and worked with oncology patients for about 13 years at various levels, managing other nurses, working directly with them. I suffered from an accident that left me in chronic pain. So at the age of 36, I ended up being completely disabled and quickly learned how our standard of care with pharmaceuticals for chronic pain is ineffective. So I had my own personal journey towards cannabis as an alternative medicine, and quickly became curious as to why wasn’t this being offered to me, and why did it work so well?

Eloise Theisen:
And then you start learning about the endocannabinoid system and all the different components of the plant, and my mind was really blown. But I was successful at using cannabis to come off all my pharmaceuticals. So I was really fortunate to get off the opioids, get off the cocktail. I think I was on eight different medications at one point. I was able to go back to school to become a nurse practitioner. And I was working, doing my clinical hours at an oncology office. And every day, patients were asking me about it. It almost became kind of comical. Like, “Do I smell like that? Am I sweating it out? Do I have a green aura around me?” Because the minute that door closed-

Matt Baum:
Right? Like, “Are you going to call the cops?”

Eloise Theisen:
And they would whisper it. They would close the door and they would say, “What do you think about cannabis?” And I said, “Oh, I think it’s such a great idea.” It became pretty obvious pretty quickly that people wanted somebody to help them navigate cannabis as a medicine. How does it work? What should I expect? Is it going to interact with other medications? So I just took a leap of faith and decided to start a practice with a physician that was geared towards helping patients navigate cannabis as a medicine. I started that in 2014, and that’s what led me to eventually my work with the American Cannabis Nurses Association.

Matt Baum:
I think it’s amazing that a lot of the people that I’ve spoken to on this show that work in healthcare have very similar stories, where they were either working in healthcare and they saw how many pain pills and opioids they were handing out and said, “There’s got to be something better.” Or, like you, they had an incident where they became a patient and went, “Oh my God, they are giving me a lot of opioids.” And that slowly pushed them into the cannabis world, which I think it’s amazing you ended up there. I’m sorry you had an incident, but that’s incredible.

Eloise Theisen:
That’s okay. Lemonade.

Treating hemp & cannabis as medicine

Matt Baum:
So you get into this and you start working with the physician and developing regimens. What does that look like? When a patient comes in and says, “Okay, I have this pain.” How does this work? How do you put together a regimen?

Eloise Theisen:
The most common question I get is, “What should I use for X, Y, and Z?” And I wish it was as simple as me saying, “Take five milligrams of THC at bedtime, call me in two weeks.” Cannabis is such a complex plant. The endocannabinoid system is so complex. We’re really trying to still understand a lot of that, and really figure out what are the best protocols, what are best practices? So it’s very individualized. When somebody comes in, I do a very thorough health history. I’m looking at your age, what have you tried, what worked, what didn’t work, how much sleep do you get, what kind of support system do you have, have you tried cannabis before, how much alcohol are you drinking, because you see that a lot in the older population, how much water do you drink, what other symptoms do you have, and then working with the patient to determine their goals of care.

Eloise Theisen:
And we’re really fortunate in California to have access to huge cannabinoid profiles, a lot of different cannabinoids to work with. So I will use best practices, what I’ve found works for, peripheral neuropathy, for example, and start the patient there and provide them with a full treatment plan. Start with this dose. Increase it on this day. This is your target dose. Here’s your potential side effects. It really helps ease them into it and give them more confidence in it as a medicine, because most people are scared.

Matt Baum:
Of course they’re scared. It’s new. But when you regimen it like that, like what you’re talking about, this is the same way that you would introduce any medication, basically. And I like that you’re treating it as a medication. Northern California is where you’re at, right? And California is very green friendly, we’ll call it. What do you say to people in other states that aren’t so friendly, that are looking to getting into something like you’re in, where you’re not just educating, but you’re actually helping patients with cannabis. What do you say to these other people that are fighting, like in North Dakota, and I’m in Nebraska, for example. Is there any hope?

Eloise Theisen:
There is, yeah. I think people look to California as having it together. And I would say that we’re progressive in terms of what we offer, like our cannabinoid products that we have available, but we’re not progressive in how we treat this as a medicine. It still is very much, access is based on where you live and your zip code. When I first got into this, I remember my cannabis attorney. I was so exacerbated at times at just how hard it was. And she’s like, “You’re either a warrior or an advocate.” And I think I actually ended up being both, because you have to fight so hard to educate people and help them remove the stigma that they had. I came with my own stigma, but the American Cannabis Nurses Association has almost 1400 members across the United States. So we have these little gems all throughout our country, our nation, that are educating at the local level. And I think that’s really where our work needs to start. Act local, think global. And we’re fighting local city, states, and federal government.

Matt Baum:
I’m sure. That was My next question is like, what does that look like? 1400 people nationwide. Everyone is obviously fighting different battles. But what kind of pushback are you guys feeling? I would assume it’s pretty intense from insurance companies and medical institutions and whatnot.

Eloise Theisen:
Yeah. I mean, it comes down to… A perfect example is, we’re a nonprofit national nursing organization, we don’t do anything but educate, and we just had our bank account shut down. And it’s like, “Sorry, we don’t deal with cannabis businesses.” And I finally just decided to be really stern and say, “First of all, you need to prove to me how we’re a cannabis business. And if you can’t, I’m reporting you to the FDIC, because it’s discrimination.” How far that will go, I don’t know. But that’s part of the work that we have to do, is to really push back, keep pushing that uphill battle.

Matt Baum:
Seems like the financial battle is the biggest battleground right now, too. It seems like insurance companies are even opening to this a little bit, but it’s the banking industry that seems to be holding everything back. And they’re not even afraid of it because it’s scary or it causes reefer madness. It seems like they’re just afraid that the FDIC is going to shut them down, and say, “No, you’re dealing in something illegal.” Good lord.

Eloise Theisen:
Yeah. We don’t have… Safe banking, it needs to be a priority. Especially when I look at what’s currently going on right now with these armed robberies because of the rioting and looting. There’s no protection for these cannabis businesses who are having their safes stolen with cash in it because they don’t have bank accounts. And I’m certain that the city councils and the state is going to come back and say, “See, we told you that cannabis is dangerous.” And they just don’t get it. It’s like, “Well, if we had safe banking, we wouldn’t have thousands and thousands of dollars on site.”

Matt Baum:
Yeah. You’ve literally forced someone into a cash business. And what happens to cash businesses? They get knocked off. Of course.

Eloise Theisen:
Right, right. Yeah.

Treating older patients with cannabis

Matt Baum:
I’m sorry to hear that. So on a lighter note, switching gears a little bit, you were a geriatric nurse. Tell me about, what are the bulk of the patients that you see? Who are they? What are they coming to you for?

Eloise Theisen:
They’re predominantly female. I would say about 85% of my patient base is female. Usually around 75-76. So they missed that time in the 60s, when they would have been exploring or experimenting with cannabis or psychedelics, so they really are cannabis naive. And they’re usually a little bit nervous or hesitant about cannabis. They come in with this sort of like, “Well, Eloise. I don’t want to smoke it, and I don’t want to get high, and I don’t want to gain weight.” So they have these stigmas that they’re bringing with them.

Matt Baum:
In your head, you’re like, “Actually, you do. You just don’t know it.”

Eloise Theisen:
Yeah. And I do actually have that conversation with them, and I’m like, “Well, tell me. What do you think getting high means?” And they’re like, “I don’t want to hallucinate and lose control.” And I’m like, “Okay, well do you want to feel more communicative with your spouse? Do you want to feel less anxious and less angry and less irritable?” They’re like, “Yeah, actually. I think I do.” So they’re primarily coming to me for age related chronic illness, chronic pain, anxiety, depression, insomnia. I do get some neurological conditions, like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. And then of course, people undergoing chemotherapy. That is another big one.

Matt Baum:
I’m sure. How much of what… And obviously, we can’t go into hardcore data here, but if you had to guess, how much of what you are prescribing would you say is THC versus CBD?

Eloise Theisen:
I would say it’s pretty even. And of course, it depends on the condition. I find that CBD can be great for anxiety. We’re definitely seeing some data to come out to support that. It’s a great antidepressant, anti-anxiety. The chronic pain usually needs multiple cannabinoids, and usually THC is really important there. Interestingly enough, with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients, THC tends to be more effective as well. CBD can be great, but it really depends on the product.

Matt Baum:
Right. Of course. You’ve got to have the good stuff, otherwise it doesn’t make any difference. Do you think, from your opinion, you said a lot of these patients that come in have stigmas they bring with them, is the stigma against CBD as large as it is against THC? Or do you think they just don’t even understand what it is?

Eloise Theisen:
I don’t even think they know sometimes it’s related to the marijuana cannabis plant.

Matt Baum:
That’s fair.

Eloise Theisen:
Yeah. They’re much more open to it because of the quote-unquote high that is not associated with it.

Matt Baum:
Of course.

Eloise Theisen:
But the conversation I try to have is like, “Look. THC is very therapeutic. People just have over-consumed unintentionally because they don’t understand dosing. And that’s where we see adverse effects.”

Teaching doctors and nurses about cannabis

Matt Baum:
So you are one of the co founders and the Chief Executive Officer of Radicle Health. Tell me about Radicle Health. How big is this? How many people are there? What kind of an operation is it?

Eloise Theisen:
There’s a whopping two of us.

Matt Baum:
Oh, wow. At least management meetings are easy, right?

Eloise Theisen:
Yes. That’s right. So Radicle Health was founded in 2018, and we’re an education company. So what we do is create content for healthcare professionals who want to learn about the endocannabinoid system. It primarily was started for nurses, but we’ve expanded to all healthcare professionals. There’s just the two of us that work on the content, and it’s all available online. So people can watch the content on demand and learn about ACS and cannabinoids.

Matt Baum:
Very cool. We’ll have links to that in the show notes, of course.

Eloise Theisen:
Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.

Matt Baum:
Definitely. So these professionals, are they coming to you, or are you going to them?

Eloise Theisen:
It’s a little bit of both. I’ve done a lot of work, boots on the ground, in my community. I’ve done a lot of outreach to support groups, like giving talks to Parkinson’s groups, and also local hospitals, hospices. Then it becomes word of mouth from there.

Matt Baum:
Right. Do you see many… And I’m not trying to put anybody on the spot or start a fight, but do you see… I mean, obviously I’m on your side. But do you see many of these professionals pushing back? Do some of them come at you just to be like, “I want to see if this is BS. And I want to see what she’s got.”

Eloise Theisen:
Yes. I have been harassed and called names. And the most recent experience was last year.

Matt Baum:
Oh, really? Can you talk about it without naming names?

Eloise Theisen:
Oh, totally. It’s funny, because people are like, “Oh, it’s so great what you do. And I’m sure everybody thinks you’re a rock star. You talk about education and cannabis.” And I’m like, “No. People really don’t see the value in it still.” And I was asked to do a talk for physicians at a hospital in Southern California. And I was told, “Eloise, you’re probably going to get five or six people here.” So I was like, “Okay.” And then next thing I know, it’s wall to wall people. It’s standing room only for all the old people. And this guy had come up to me prior to the talk, and he was starting to drill me. “Well, I hear cannabis causes schizophrenia.” And all of those concerns that people have, that it’s addicting.

Matt Baum:
The Reefer Madness playbook, basically.

Eloise Theisen:
Yes. Just going through it. And I was answering his questions really politely. And then the talk started, and then he started interrupting me during my talk with the same questions, now with his audience there. And I finally got to the point where I just wouldn’t make eye contact with him anymore, because I’m like, “I’m not going to entertain your questions anymore. We’ve already discussed this.” And then he just got so angry that he stood up in the middle of my talk and yelled at me.

Matt Baum:
Oh my God.

Eloise Theisen:
“You’re talking about a dangerous drug, and I’m not going to tolerate it.”

Matt Baum:
So this is a crazy person. Just full on lunatic at this point.

Eloise Theisen:
Full on. And stormed out. And I was like, “Okay,” and I just went back to my talk. But inside, I was like, “Oh wow, that was intense.” And then of course afterwards, I had a group of physicians come up to me and say, “Don’t worry about that guy. He’s out there.”

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Of course.

Eloise Theisen:
That was his style. But you certainly do get people who get very angry about, it’s a drug, and you’re promoting the wrong thing.

Skepticism & misinformation about cannabis

Matt Baum:
What about the other side of that? The people that aren’t necessarily lunatics, but just skeptics, real skeptics who want to group… I admit, I am a skeptic. And I think it’s good to be skeptical, because when you can start to see data come in, it’s very difficult to be skeptical. But there are a lot of skeptics out there that put CBD, and THC, and cannabis as a whole in with holistic healing and all this other woo that’s out there. Have you dealt with a lot of that?

Eloise Theisen:
Yeah. I think sometimes, people see it as sort of a hippy dippy medicine. They don’t take it seriously. And I think you’re right. I think it’s important to be skeptical. I think that, often, the pushback I get is, “We don’t have enough research.” Which I will say yes and no. You have to understand the history of the plant and why we don’t have enough research. We also do have good research on some things, like sleep and pain, using cannabinoids for those conditions. We actually have really good data on that. So it’s really about having that conversation of, “Yes, here’s where we do need more data. Here’s where we have some beginning data.”

Eloise Theisen:
And then, when I was watching the whole COVID crisis, how accepting people were of looking at other drugs for off label and starting to administer them without good clinical data or trials. And so, I would love to have that sort of acceptance for cannabis, which I consider to be incredibly safe. Why are we so afraid to… The other pushback I’ll get was, “Well, there was only 40 or 50 people in that trial. It wasn’t big enough.” And again, you could say, “Well, it’s small because people are scared, and you’re not going to get a lot of people who are going to come out and try it.”

Matt Baum:
We’ve also just started testing this stuff, literally. We’ve had 75 years where we couldn’t even talk about it, let alone test it. And not too long ago, I was on Twitter and I had seen somebody had posted something about hydroxychloroquine or whatever. And they had said, “Hydroxychloroquine kills people, whereas CBD has been proven to cure COVID-19.” And I was like, “Okay, let’s back up. I totally agree with you. Hydroxychloroquine is a bad idea. No doubt. But let’s not start saying that CBD cures COVID-19.” And then they’re like, “Well, check out this study. Check out this.” I’m like, “Those are studies. I get it. But this is not helping the cause.” Both sides are bad. We need to just pare it down, treat it like a science, treat it like a real medical profession and a medicine. So you wrote a book in 2019, all about pain, it’s called Pain-Free with CBD. Tell me about that. You haven’t mentioned being an author before this, so all of a sudden you became an author too.

Eloise Theisen:
I wrote a chapter in it. I know. 2019 was an intense year, and I was fortunate enough to write a chapter in the book with Alice O’Leary Randall. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with her.

Matt Baum:
I can’t say that I am.

Eloise Theisen:
But her husband… So she’s actually a very important person in the medical cannabis history movement. Her husband, Robert Randall was the first patient to receive marijuana from the government that was grown in Mississippi. So he was found to have glaucoma at a very early age, like 23-24. And he found that when he inhaled cannabis, he could actually see better and it preserved his sight. So he decided to take on the federal government, and eventually started something that allowed for the government to administer 300 cigarettes of cannabis a month in this tin. And they had other patients and they started the movement back in the 70s. So she wrote the book and asked if I would come in and do the condition piece. And we put in there a chart for potential drug interactions, that’s really designed to give patients or consumers some information that they can hopefully bring back to their physicians and say, “Will you monitor me? This might be a drug interaction.” So that was a lot of fun.

Matt Baum:
What are the largest drug interactions that you’ve seen. I’m just curious. Because you hear, “Oh, there’s none. There’s zero.” And then you hear, “Oh no, there’s a million of them.” And it’s hard to know.

Eloise Theisen:
It’s like you said. We have these well-meaning advocates, I think, that sometimes go to the-

Matt Baum:
Right. A little too well-meaning.

Eloise Theisen:
Yeah. It’s like it starts to become hyperbole. So it’s interesting. And when I first came into it too, I was incredibly conservative, like, “Oh no.” I really have seen very few drug interactions that have required a patient to stop using cannabis. We’ll definitely see some certain blood thinners, warfarin is a known interaction that needs to be closely monitored. We’ll see interactions where the opioid interactions, people use less of it. So some interactions are actually really positive, where you can see they’ll start to decrease their pharmaceutical intake.

Matt Baum:
I would guess vice versa though, there’s doctors that say like, “No, no, no, no, no. We want you to stay on the opioids and decrease this other thing.” And then, we’re not… Great.

Eloise Theisen:
Yeah. Or say, “If you test positive for THC, we won’t prescribe your opioids anymore.”

Matt Baum:
Yeah. We just had a Q&A show, and a guy called in. And he was from Nebraska as well, and had a pain doctor that was saying he’s going to test his wife, and if she tests positive for THC, she’s cut off, done, no opioids, zero. And that’s completely legal in Nebraska, which is just… He’s not a police officer. He is a doctor. It’s just insanity to me.

Eloise Theisen:
Yeah. It sounds like malpractice. The suffering that that patient will have as a result of opioid withdrawal is miserable. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

Matt Baum:
Well, not to mention that she had a very serious Crohn’s condition and was already in pain, and the opioids were not working.

Eloise Theisen:
Of course. Yeah.

Building trust and ending the stigma around cannabis

Matt Baum:
What do you say to people like my grandmother, for example. She’s in assisted living and she’s had a lot of pain because of a surgery she had on her neck. And I would like her to try CBD. She’s terrified of trying marijuana, for reasons that I totally get. I’m like, “Grandma, I do it all the time. I’m fine. Look at me.”

Eloise Theisen:
It’s not enough.

Matt Baum:
No. It’s not enough. But what do we say? I’ve found, talking to my mother and talking to her sister, who are very active in her care, they are very resistant. And I get why they are, and I can come to them with information, but they’re so skeptical. Not even skeptical. They’re afraid of that information, where it comes from. Where do you start that conversation when you meet a patient with a family member or family members? How do you even start that conversation?

Eloise Theisen:
I usually ask them, “Why now? What brought you to consult with me now?” And that opens up the conversation, because they’ll say, “Well, I’m desperate. I’ve tried everything else.” They’re pretty good about revealing their biases or their concerns. So a lot of it is educating them and building that trust and confidence. A lot of times, I’ll say, “Well, why now?” And they’ll say, “Well, my grandson told me I should try it, or my kids told me to try it.” And so, they’ve heard it enough that they’re like, “Okay. I’ll try it. But I want to work with a medical professional.” So that really does help open up the conversation, because there’s already a… Nurses are the most trusted profession.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely. More so than doctors, even. It’s crazy.

Eloise Theisen:
So there’s already a level of trust. So it’s always interesting to hear what brought them to it. It fascinates me every time.

Matt Baum:
Definitely. Well, you’re doing amazing work and we’re super proud of you. And I’m sorry to hear about your recent financial issues, and hopefully you can get past that, definitely. But what do you think in your opinion would be the best thing that could happen tomorrow to make your life easier? This could be governmental or anything, to make…

Eloise Theisen:
It would be allowing for safe banking access and allowing for cannabis… We’ve been deemed essential in so many states during COVID, yet we can’t access any of the same resources or relief stimulus packages that other businesses can. So I just want an even playing field there. And in fact, many of our members, when we surveyed them, want the plant, descheduled. I know that’s going to come with its own challenges, but right now I just want safe access, safe banking, safe access. And I want fairness for all of us in this industry to have the same rights as other businesses.

Matt Baum:
It’s the saddest thing in the world. But every time I asked this question, that is what I hear it. I don’t hear like, “Oh, we want huge tax breaks. We want this.” We hear like, “Look, we just want to be treated like everybody else. Please regulate this. Please put rules on it so we can follow them.” It’s just so sad to hear. But the good news is there are people like you and 1400 other nurses across the United States that are fighting this. And I just want to say thank you. Please keep it up.

Eloise Theisen:
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Matt Baum:
I know it’s not easy right now, but-

Eloise Theisen:
It’s hard being a leader right now.

Matt Baum:
Being a warrior and an advocate, as you said.

Eloise Theisen:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
Anything that you wanted to talk about that you don’t think I touched on, or I’m not hitting?

Eloise Theisen:
Anybody who’s considering exploring cannabis for a serious health condition should really consider working with a healthcare professional to help them get the right product as soon as possible, on the right path.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely. As opposed to that guy you know that can score some weed.

Eloise Theisen:
Yeah. Doug. Your buddy, Doug.

Matt Baum:
Don’t get me wrong. Doug’s great when you’re playing video games, but if you’re in chronic pain, let’s talk to a medical professional.

Eloise Theisen:
Doug may not have everything you need.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
And yeah. Be sure to check out the show notes for the links to Radicle Health and the ACNA, and maybe you have a relative that you’ve been trying to talk about looking into the benefits of hemp or cannabis. We would love to hear from you. Give us a call at (402) 819-6417. Tell us your story. I’d love to hear about it. That’s about it for this episode. Thanks to everybody that’s been downloading and supporting. And like I just mentioned, if you have hemp questions of any kind, call us (402) 819-6417. Leave us a message, and myself and Kit O’Connell, the editor-in-chief of ministryofhemp.com, we heard a rumor that our friend Drew might help us out next time too, could answer it right here in one of our Q&A shows. If you’re too shy to leave a message, that’s fine. You can hit us up on any of our social media. We’re at /ministryofhemp or @ministryofhemp. And you can drop your questions there too.

Matt Baum:
Speaking of Ministry of Hemp, like I mentioned, get over there and check out our Black Lives Matter and hemp post. It’s an amazing read. We’ve also got a great new CBD review for CBD Pure Hemp Oil, and a really good article on CBD topicals. It’s a closer look at why people use them. If you want to help spread the message of hemp and support the show, head over to patreon.com/ministryofhemp, and become a Ministry of Hemp insider. Any amount you donate helps, and it gets you access to things like our podcast extras that I do, early access to articles, and all kinds of bonus articles too. Not to mention, the fact, like I said, it just helps us spread the good word of hemp, and we can’t thank our current Patreons enough for helping out. Thank you so much, you guys. Seriously. I got to get out of here, and I like to end the show the same way every time. Remember to take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will you? This is Matt Baum with The Ministry of Hemp, signing off.

The post A Nurse That Prescribes Cannabis: Treating Hemp As Medicine appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In this episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, Matt talks about quarantine hemp cooking and cocktailing, featuring our recipe for hemp-infused bacon fat peanut butter cookies. Then Matt has a Conversation with Susan Trapp, terpene researcher and co-founder of terpedia.com.

This episode is part of our Women in Hemp series.

Terpenes are some of the most prevalent and diverse organic compounds. They create the familiar scent of many plants but serve many purposes in nature, even self-defense.

Susan has over 20 years of experience in the biotechnology field both as a plant-microbe molecular biology researcher and “beyond the lab bench.”  She has held scientific, management, and early-stage development positions within the biotech industry, academia, government, and start-up community, from algae biofuels to genomes. Dr. Trapp participated directly on the human genome project with Dr. Craig Venter early in her scientific career.

It was a real honor to get such a terpene expert on our show, so get ready for a deep, fascinating dive into terpene science.

Matt also mentions our recently published Meet the Editor video.

We want to hear from you!

Send us your questions and you might hear them answered on future shows like this one! Send your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

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Dr. Susan Trapp, Queen of Terpenes: Complete podcast episode transcript

Matt Baum:
I’m Matt Baum and this is the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education. Hello again, it’s Matt Baum, I’m your host for the Ministry of Hemp Podcast and still in quarantine, hopefully like you are as well. I listened to the last few shows we put out recently and they started with sort of dire warnings, and in the face of a global pandemic that’s probably appropriate, but I want to lighten things up just a little bit to get this show going.

Matt Baum:
That is not to say that everything is fine, go out, get back to work because life is good, we still need to hunker down a bit and we still need to wear masks when we go to the grocery store, socially distance, et cetera, but there are some things we can be doing at home in the meantime, like cooking. My wife and I have been doing a ton of cooking and a little bit of cocktailing as well, and we’ve tried to incorporate hemp into that cooking and cocktailing.

Cooking with hemp under quarantine

Matt Baum:
Back in episode 27 of the show, you might remember I spoke to Hillary Kelsay of Humming Hemp and she was nice enough to send me a bunch of hemp oil and some of their Humming Hemp hearts, which are amazing on just about everything. In fact, just tonight, I made a cast iron roasted chicken quarter with tomato jam and I served it over some fried rice and beans that I had the night before, sort of like a Latin rice and beans thing and I topped it with some of their spicy hemp hearts and just threw it under the broiler for a minute or two to crisp everything up, it was wonderful.

Matt Baum:
My wife has been making cocktails with CBD simple syrup from a company called Azuca, you may remember I interviewed their CEO, Ron Silver, back in episode 33. You can find all of these on our site and of course you can find them on Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you listen to podcasts, but the point is it’s not hard to incorporate CBD into your diet. And right now we have an amazing recipe on the site for peanut butter cookies that are made with bacon fat infused with CBD, you could also infuse it with THC if that’s your jam, whatever, they are in credible.

Matt Baum:
We tried them this past weekend and oh my God, they’re absolutely delicious. The recipe comes courtesy of Chef Sebastian Carosi, who hopefully I’m going to be talking to on this show real soon. I know I talk about it a lot, but I come from a food background and I love cooking with hemp and incorporating hemp into food, not just CBD but hemp itself because the flavor is so interesting. In fact, Humming Hemp’s hemp oil has become my go-to topping for popcorn.

Matt Baum:
It brings this nutty, almost salted sunflower taste to the popcorn that I cannot get enough of. The point is quarantine, it can get boring, sure, but it doesn’t have to be all isolation and doom and gloom. You can treat yourself, you can do some experiments and you can do yourself a favor by introducing some CBD into your diet and easing your anxiety a little bit while you have a nice drink or even a great meal.

Matt Baum:
Speaking of which, I would love to hear your ideas for introducing hemp into your diet. Give us a call at (402) 819-4894, that is the Ministry of Hemp hotline where you can leave a message and tell me how are you cooking and cocktailing with hemp during your quarantine. I would love to hear from you and real soon here, I know I’ve promised it for a while, but Kit and I are going to be doing a Q&A show where we sit down and play your voicemails and talk about them.

Meet Susan Trapp, Queen of Terpenes

Matt Baum:
Kit is the Editor-in-Chief of ministryofhemp.com. By the way, I’ve mentioned a lot and I’m going to talk about him later in the show, but first let’s get to our conversation this week. This time I’m talking with Susan Trapp, she describes herself as the Chief Terpene Officer for terpedia.com. Susan is amazing, she’s probably one of the most intelligent people I have ever interviewed and she is a riot. We had a lot of fun during this interview. She’s just an incredible person.

Matt Baum:
She worked on the Human Genome Project. Very soon, she’s going to be teaching accredited courses on terpenes, and she helped me with a serious pronunciation issue. You’re going to hear me say the word terpene probably a hundred times, the word is terpenes, and I’m never going to forget it now and I’m glad she corrected me. I apologize in advance for how many times I mispronounced it. This is my conversation about terpenes with Susan Trapp.

Matt Baum:
Welcome to the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, thanks for joining me. I brought you here because you are kind of a terpene nerd from what I understand, and today we are going to learn about terpenes because honestly, I read some stuff online, I still don’t totally get it, and I know our audience wants to know so let’s just start with, what is a terpene?

Susan Trapp:
Okay. All right. Terpenes are the largest class of natural products in plants.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Susan Trapp:
Okay? And also actually in nature. And so still the question is what are terpenes, right? So terpenes when you say largest class of natural products, right, so when we … I’m going to break this down. So natural products, right, when we talk about natural products in chemistry we’re talking about, for example, aspirin, silicic acid, right? That is a compound, that is a natural product that is derived from the willow bark, yeah, the bark of a willow tree. And so these terpenes are essentially kind of, they are the same thing. They are these large class of compounds that are produced by plants for a variety of reasons. In fact-

Matt Baum:
So it’s not just cannabis though, it’s several different plants?

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah, it’s all plants, that’s the amazing thing about terpenes. And one of my missions with teaching about terpenes and teaching terpenes at some of these conferences, kind of general conferences, is to really explain and educate people that terpenes are this large class and they’re essentially in your herb cabinet.

Matt Baum:
Okay. What does that mean, they’re in my herb cabinet?

Susan Trapp:
I mean, so you’ve heard of the essential oils.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Susan Trapp:
Right? So for example, like lavender.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Susan Trapp:
Lavender, when you press the oil out of lavender, you get an essential oil. That essential oil is a combination of terpenes, basil, rosemary, lavender, turmeric. When you press those plants, right, an oil comes out and though those oils are primarily full of these compounds called terpenes, right? And they differ. So essentially there’s a different formulation per herb. And so cannabis is really no surprise, and my back …

Susan Trapp:
Yeah. To continue to clarify, so in regards to for example lavender, which smells really nice, right, there are a number of essential oils or a number of terpenes within that essential oil of lavender. Right? Same thing with basil. Basil has a certain smell, so it has a different combination of terpenes that are in basil. Shockingly-

Matt Baum:
So is the terpene directly related to the smell?

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah. So terpenes are what we call in chemistry, the volatile essential oils. So essentially what that means is they are aromatic, so they smell. In our olfactory system, we have receptors for them.

Matt Baum:
Not volatile, like they’re going to explode, but volatile like …

Susan Trapp:
Volatile and then in that they’re aromatic.

Terpene science beyond cannabis

Matt Baum:
Got you. Okay. And now I was of the mindset that terpenes literally only existed in cannabis, but basically what you were saying is the terpene is what gives smell to just about any plan that has smell. Like I assume flowers have terpene also.

Susan Trapp:
Yes. And sometimes not good, but it just depends on that combination of terpenes that are in there. And then there are other compounds, but primarily that essential oil is a combination of terpenes that are produced by the plant.

Matt Baum:
Okay. Now what is the terpene itself? Is it like an atomic level, is it a part of the plant? I mean, is it …

Susan Trapp:
Yeah. I have a number of presentations that I give, and I wish I could show it because it’s easier, I should have pulled it up.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, this is podcast world. Sorry, this is a audio moment.

Susan Trapp:
I know, I need to practice so I can come up with good examples. Because I teach this biology so sometimes I get too technical, but the bottom line-

Matt Baum:
I’ll stop you if you do, don’t worry.

Susan Trapp:
… Like for example, a sugar molecule, right, it’s a pretty simple molecule and it’s a … Usually we call it a pentose ring or hexose ring. So pentose being five carbons or six carbons, compounds, right?

Matt Baum:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Trapp:
And you’ve seen the picture of THC, right?

Matt Baum:
Right.

How plants build terpenes

Susan Trapp:
You see these big compounds. Okay. So glucose or actually, a sugar molecule without even getting into the details of which one are a pretty simple compound, right? And so you can build like a sugar molecule and a sugar molecule, actually glucose, glucose, glucose, glucose, and what you end up with is something like in biology, we would call that cellulose a polymer. So glucose, one sugar molecule is what we would call a monomer or one unit. A couple of them-

Matt Baum:
Right. When you connect a bunch then you’ve got cellulose.

Susan Trapp:
… A polymer.

Matt Baum:
Got you.

Susan Trapp:
Right?

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Susan Trapp:
So terpenes are somewhat the same, not like that at all, but what I’m trying to get at is this is what we call a metabolic pathway.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Susan Trapp:
Right? So that’s how they are produced, right?

Matt Baum:
Got you.

Susan Trapp:
So plants actually do produce sugar. They use sunlight and-

Matt Baum:
Right, that’s part of the deal.

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah. That’s part of the deal. And so plants what they do is they utilize what we would call substrates or building block molecules to produce polymers. It’s a little … I don’t know, this part I should probably explain better. So we have these buildings they’re called isoprene units. And isoprene, that E-N-E means double bond, and that’s more than you need to know in chemistry. But this isoprene unit means there are five carbons. And so-

Matt Baum:
Okay. And they’re all bonded?

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah. Well, typically an isoprene unit is not in a circle, it’s what we call linear compounds.

Matt Baum:
Right, it’s like a line, not a circle.

Susan Trapp:
But they will … Right. And I have a slide where I use scrabble building blocks. So imagine one Scrabble A building blocks. So Scrabble A, an isoprene unit and another isoprene unit bind together, essentially, and you get what we call a monoterpene. So that’s essentially two isoprene units, one C5 carbon compound and another C5 carbon compound.

Matt Baum:
And they make one monoterpene, more or less?

Susan Trapp:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Susan Trapp:
And the majority of terpenes of interest, and even the ones that really have nice smells, and this is a bit of an exaggeration, are monoterpenes. So the majority of terpenes even in cannabis, for example pinene, myrcene, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, right?

Matt Baum:
Yeah, absolutely.

Susan Trapp:
Those are monoterpenes.

Matt Baum:
And the pinene gives things like the pine tree smell, and the myrcene gives stuff like the skunk smell, right?

Susan Trapp:
Yeah.

How plants use terpenes

Matt Baum:
Okay. So why? Why does a plant evolve to stink?

Susan Trapp:
Great question.

Matt Baum:
I mean what is the point?

Susan Trapp:
Yeah, great question. All kinds of reasons.

Matt Baum:
It’s a good stink, I like that stink, it’s …

Susan Trapp:
All right. So the way I usually like to talk about terpenes is they’re essentially, and when I do give public talks, I essentially consider them like the immune system of the plant. That’s an easy way explain it. But the bottom line is they’re there to protect the plant from predators, right? But also there are some terpenes that are considered phytohormones. So phyto means plant, so a plant hormone. During my postdoc we studied bark beetle infestation of pine trees. Right?

Matt Baum:
Right. Yeah. They’re awful, like the ash borer.

Susan Trapp:
Well, but it was fascinating because what happens is the pine tree, right, a bark beetle comes to the tree, and usually it’s a tree that’s already a little bit sickly, like for example a drought where there’s not enough water, right? So the bark beetle comes to that tree, bores a hole. The tree itself has a response and shockingly, those are terpenes. There’s turpentine, resin, right?

Matt Baum:
Really?

Susan Trapp:
Those are actually diterpenes. So diterpenes would be … We can come back to that and you can piece it back together, but you have two building blocks, right, that makes a monoterpene, three of those makes a sesquiterpene, four of them makes a diterpene.

Matt Baum:
Okay. Whoa. And that’s when you start getting into like thick, sappy defense type?

Susan Trapp:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
So turpentine, like which-

Susan Trapp:
Turpentine. Yeah. And turpentine historically, again, these are part of my slides, turpentine or turpentine was the first terpene identified, and essentially it was called turpentine because it was a German chemist who identified it, and that’s where the name terpenes came from.

Matt Baum:
… This is the same thing I’m thinking of, turpentine to remove paint? Right?

Susan Trapp:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
Comes from a tree?

Susan Trapp:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
From terpenes?

Terpenes are everywhere in plants

Susan Trapp:
I mean, and I will continue to impress upon you. Like when I was in grad school and during my post doc, I studied terpenes having nothing to do with the cannabis industry, which I can come back to and explain if you want, but the bottom line, almost, at least back then, every paper that I wrote, and practically every paper or book that I read that talked about terpenes the first sentence was, “Terpenes are the largest class of natural products in plants.”

Susan Trapp:
So again, if you’re a natural product chemist or what not, you’re studying terpenes, you’re studying chlorophyll, there’s all kinds of phytochemicals, and right now I’m blinking, but again … And the reason there’s such a large class is because of what I explained to you, they are built on these very simple isoprene unit building blocks, and so you just …

Susan Trapp:
And for your benefit, I don’t know if you can see this, but isoprene units are here, right? Like these five carbon compounds. I’m going to knock over my coffee. And then you have monoterpenes and sesquiterpenes, diterpenes, sesterterpenes, which I didn’t really study those so I really only think about all the way up to diterpene. So diterpenes is four isoprene units. But my point is as you go all the way up to here, triterpenes, when you get up to these upper ones, right, cholesterol is part of that same pathway.

Matt Baum:
Cholesterol is a terpene?

Susan Trapp:
Yeah, it’s a type of … The precursor for cholesterol is from the same pathway. And what I’m trying to say, so if you were a budding biologist, right, or a budding organic chemist, you learn about these metabolic pathways. So you have a compound and then you have an enzyme and an enzyme. What an enzyme does is it would take those two units and put them together. Right?

Susan Trapp:
Then you have the basics of a monoterpene, but then you have another enzyme that comes and sits down, and essentially we’ll add on what we call a hydroxyl group or an OH group. Right? And then that you just kind of keep adding little what we call functional groups on those terpenes. Then another enzyme comes along maybe, right, and it produces another isoprene unit. So now you have three of them and that’s how you make the sesquiterpene, so that’s like a metabolic pathway. And so what blows people away when I’m trying to say is in biology it’s one huge pathway that makes a polymer. Because when you get-

Matt Baum:
Is this is all? When I think-

Susan Trapp:
… A polymer is based on these unit of isoprene units.

Matt Baum:
… Because when I think polymers, I’m thinking of like plastic polymers and stuff, but you’re saying that this has been happening for millions of years, basically in nature with plants from the grass in your lawn to the pine tree in your front yard, all using the same chemicals for slightly different things, whether it is to keep a predator away or to heal a wound or to attract like a butterfly to pollinate it or something like that.

Susan Trapp:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
Why don’t I know this? I mean, this sounds like it is the most … I was a chef for a while-

Susan Trapp:
It’s pretty cool-

Matt Baum:
… and I cooked for a long time.

Susan Trapp:
… I mean I can get really excited. I mean, but there are a variety of polymers that are natural. So like again, general chemistry, I teach this, this is like chapter five in general biology. There are four food groups, right? Carbohydrates, protein, lipids and actually DNA or nucleotides, right? A basic monomer of sugar and an amino acid is one, it’s the beginning of a protein, it’s the monomer of a protein. But what I’m trying to get at is, so when you have a protein, right, that’s a polymer, that’s a bunch of amino acids building blocks, one right next to the other and then you get this big-

Matt Baum:
That’s technically a polymer.

Susan Trapp:
… That’s technically a polymer, that’s what I’m getting at.

Matt Baum:
I did not know this. Okay. Now why is it-

Susan Trapp:
Same thing with sugars, right? So you have these basic fructose … You’re going to have to let me double-check before you publish this because I’m getting … Because they’re disaccharides and I get fructose-

Matt Baum:
… This is not going up for peer review, don’t worry. Okay?

Susan Trapp:
… Okay, good. I know, but it’s important to respect my PhD. I like to be accurate, all PhDs do. It’s important to-

Cannabis and terpenes

Matt Baum:
So why is that I never heard about any of this until I started learning about cannabis? How come cannabis people talk about terpenes more than anyone else? Because I was a chef, I worked with herbs all the time, we never talked about-

Susan Trapp:
You were a chef? Wow.

Matt Baum:
… terpenes and … Or I mean like essential oils, sure, because those do certain things and add smell and add flavor and whatnot, but there was no mention of terpenes until I started learning about the cannabis world. Why is the cannabis world so obsessed with this?

Susan Trapp:
Well, because they have medicinal benefits, right, and they … Essentially terpenes have been around forever and they’ve been used in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine. I mean, again, I go back to … And like when I give some of these really introductory talks, I probably say over 20 times, terpenes are … And it’s terpenes.

Matt Baum:
Terpene. Sorry.

Susan Trapp:
Like T-E-R, yeah, terpenes.

Matt Baum:
I keep saying terpene, it’s terpene. I’m sorry.

Susan Trapp:
Yeah. You’re sort of [inaudible 00:20:11] or whatever. Terpene, terpene, but yeah, it’s terpenes. And then we also refer to them sometime as terpenoids and I’m not going to get into that, but you hear both terpenes and terpenoids, and it’s just based on a little bit of difference in that compound of what’s on it, which we don’t have to get into. But once we are done with this podcast, you were like you have passed terpenes and cannabis 101 because you’ve heard of not only terpenes but terpenoids, right? Yeah. And the reason that they’re becoming of interest, right, was first of all, everybody was all excited about THC and 30% THC, and we all wanted to get a little higher. Right?

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Susan Trapp:
And then you discover … And there’s been terpene chemistry and cannabinoid chemistry, right, around for a while. The Israelis have been way far ahead of us for a long time, but nevertheless, then they discovered that there are other cannabinoids that are related. And it’s the same thing, they’re related. So those cannabinoids are part of the same THC metabolic pathway.

Matt Baum:
Okay. Real quick, let me ask a stupid question.

Susan Trapp:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
Cannabinoids and terpenes are completely different things, correct?

Susan Trapp:
They are too. They actually join-

Matt Baum:
That was going to sound really stupid for a minute there.

Susan Trapp:
… I mean they are, but actually now that you know a little bit about metabolic pathways, right, there are two pathways that join up, it’s called the hexanoate pathway and then there’s isoprene pathway or isoprenoid pathway that we’ve just been talking about these isoprenes. Those to join, and actually that is what makes up the cannabinoids.

Matt Baum:
Okay. So different, but also-

Susan Trapp:
But you could sort of-

Matt Baum:
… sort of the building blocks up?

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah, they’re same, same but different, or technically they are different, right, but they are two different … They start out with two separate substrates, they have a bunch of enzymes that do things to it, and at some point a part of the isoprenoid pathway and a part of this other pathway join, right, and then you actually make-

Matt Baum:
Then you have cannabinoids.

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah.

The medicinal aspects of terpenes

Matt Baum:
Okay. So you had said that there’s medicinal aspects we’re learning about, can you talk about that a little bit? Like, what are we learning about?

Susan Trapp:
Yeah, sure. And they’ve been around forever, for example like … I mean, I know a little about Chinese herbal medicine, but I’m not a Chinese herbalist or acupuncturist who is trained in-

Matt Baum:
Neither am I, and-

Susan Trapp:
… but nevertheless, the point is if they are the largest class of natural products in plants, right, that means they’re all over these plants, whether it’s a willow tree, turmeric or rosebud or whatever tea, right, those all have these plant compounds that can be extracted and utilized. And that is when you get that beautiful rose smell, that’s geranium.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Susan Trapp:
Right? The linalool has a bit of this lavender smell. Sage is from the same family and it just has a slightly different terpene profile, right, and so therefore it smells a little bit like sage, but it also has linalool in it. Right? And so they’ve been around for centuries, so traditional medicine has been utilizing them, they may not have known they were terpenes, but they’ve been utilizing them for a long time. Right? And I guess I would argue that they knew what they were doing. Same thing with like again, your medicine cabinet, basil, parsley, turmeric, rosemary, all of those have these compounds in them. Right?

Matt Baum:
So-

Susan Trapp:
And so-

Matt Baum:
… you touched on rosemary, let me ask you real quick, the rosemary and pine trees have a very similar smell, is that, that same … What did you call it?

Susan Trapp:
… Pinene?

Matt Baum:
Pinene. It’s the same terpene that’s present in cannabis that smells like pine?

Susan Trapp:
If you were doing a Venn diagram, right, they’ve got some that are the same and some that are different, but there’s an overlap of a couple.

Matt Baum:
Got you.

Susan Trapp:
Most essential oils are a combination of anywhere between like, I don’t know, five and 15 different terpenes in different concentrations, and that’s what gives them their unique smell. And probably you could relate that back to like, that’s in a way why the cannabis industry is growing the way it is, right, because it’s a plant, it’s not a monodrug, it’s not a drug, it’s not a monopharmacy, it’s polypharmacy. You’ve got all these beneficial compounds in this plant that you’re eating, that’s why eating raw and fresh food-

Matt Baum:
Eat is you kale-

Susan Trapp:
… is so important.

Matt Baum:
… eat your romaine lettuce, like your dark greens. Right?

Susan Trapp:
Right, because the dark greens have chlorophyll and pigments and terpenes and many other things in them, and if it’s fresh they’re still active, and so then they help your body with lots of things and you’re taking those in and be able to utilize those little compounds as substrates for your body to do what it needs to do. Like-

Matt Baum:
Okay, dumb question time. Are there any-

Susan Trapp:
There’s no such thing as dumb question, I’m really big on that so-

Matt Baum:
… Okay, ignorant question time. Are there plants out there that don’t have terpenes?

Susan Trapp:
… That’s a great question.

Matt Baum:
Or is it universal?

Susan Trapp:
That’s a great question. I don’t know that for a fact, right, but I would guess probably not. That’s a great question, I need to look that up.

Matt Baum:
Just from what you’ve described, it sounds like it is such a base part of the plant as far as like they all use photosynthesis and whatnot and because of that the chemistry is so basic that it kind of has to be there. Right?

Susan Trapp:
Yeah. I mean, and the interesting thing, so like I was in graduate school, and it dates me, so a long time ago-

Matt Baum:
Two years ago when you were in graduate school. Yes.

Susan Trapp:
… Right, two years ago because I’m so well preserved which is-

Matt Baum:
Again, this is radio they can’t see it so I just feel like-

Susan Trapp:
… I know.

Matt Baum:
… I talked to Susan Trapp and let me tell you, she was gorgeous.

Learning the purpose of terpenes

Susan Trapp:
Right. But many years ago in grad school when I was studying this, they also used to talk about the terpenes. They thought initially that they were the waste products of the plant, there was no purpose. They didn’t-

Matt Baum:
Really?

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah. And I think as I continued to read and by the time I was doing my postdoc, it was like, yeah, or at least that was one of the theories, I read that a lot. So they used to be considered essentially the waste product. And another way to talk about them is, so a plant or even ourselves, right, so you’ve heard of, let’s see, essential minerals and vitamins, right? Those are-

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah. So we need those because we don’t produce them.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Susan Trapp:
Right?

Matt Baum:
That’s why we eat this stuff.

Susan Trapp:
Yeah. So kind of same, same but different with a plant. So there’s such a thing as what we call primary metabolism, so the building blocks for the plant to make sugar, right? And then there’s something called secondary metabolism. It’s called secondary, which is what kind of natural products are talked about because secondary mean is secondary, it’s not essential for life.

Matt Baum:
Got you. Okay.

Susan Trapp:
Okay, so-

Matt Baum:
But it helps.

Susan Trapp:
… the plant is in theory not going to die if it doesn’t have these compounds, and so they used to call them, well they still call them secondary metabolism and, or they used to just think like, “Well, I don’t know what they’re doing, they’re just kind of there by accident because they’re part of this pathway,” but it’s turning out that’s really not the case-

Matt Baum:
We’re learning what they do.

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah. Co-evolution, Darwinian evolution, they’ve evolved for all kinds of things, right? The rose smells … And this is great, I should come up with a good example, which I don’t have for today, but like the hummingbird, right, it’s attracted to the … Probably, I’ve got to find a good example of a smell, right, and it’s attracted to that and the plant’s producing it so they’ve co-evolved together.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, absolutely.

Susan Trapp:
And as I was halfway through the bark beetle infestation story, so the bark beetle infestation, what happens again is that the bark beetle bores a hole, the tree if it’s healthy will cover that bark beetle with this sap, right? And then what’s cool, and there’s probably, well there is more to it than just what I’m telling you, but this is like … I wrote a review paper on this long time ago, but I think there’s now more to the story. But so then the bark beetle says, apparently it produces a pheromone that’s actually also terpenoid.

Matt Baum:
The bug makes-

Susan Trapp:
The bug. Yeah.

Matt Baum:
… terpene?

Susan Trapp:
Yes. It produces a pheromone that is actually a type of terpene. Right?

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Susan Trapp:
And it says, “Hey, bark beetles come on over here.” Like, “Come with me to get this tree, let’s bore some more holes.” And so I like to explain this as that there’s this very cool chemical warfare that goes on, on whether that tree lives or die, and it really depends how healthy that tree is and how many bark beetles get there. And at some point that the tree is not able to produce enough sap or whatever to kill all the bark beetles and then they kill the tree.

Matt Baum:
Okay, weird question. Is the tree creating sap to stop the bugs terpene from calling it out to other bugs?

Susan Trapp:
No, I think it’s just a response, right? Yeah, that’s just a response of the tree to protect itself. So it’s protecting itself from its predator.

Matt Baum:
So it’s plugging a hole is what it’s doing, it’s not … I’m giving it a little too much brain power, I guess maybe.

Susan Trapp:
Right, but that’s just one example and there’s many, so they-

Matt Baum:
But the bug is also making terpenes?

Susan Trapp:
… In that particular case, yes.

Matt Baum:
Okay. Do I make terpenes?

Susan Trapp:
No, actually I don’t think you … Well, I was about to say no. Getting back to this … Where did my chart go?

Matt Baum:
I can’t help you with that, I’m sorry.

Susan Trapp:
Back to this. I know. Back to the very cool chart. Where is it? Let’s see. Yeah, so when you get six isoprene units and you get to the point of triterpenes, precursors like well cholesterol, lanosterol, like the steroids, squalene. Squalene is kind of a precursor for a lot of hormones, so-

Matt Baum:
So we kind of do?

Susan Trapp:
… you could say that we do … Yeah.

Matt Baum:
This is blowing my mind. I mean honestly, I did not see this going where we have gone.

Susan Trapp:
Oh really? All right.

Matt Baum:
So Susan, I think we’ve got to-

Susan Trapp:
I mean they’re pretty … Go ahead.

How Susan Trapp became a terpene expert

Matt Baum:
… we’ve got to base understanding I think now that terpenes are all around us and not just in your weed, in your hemp. But let me ask you from just a personal perspective, how does Susan Trapp get so interested in terpenes that she decided she’s going to devote her whole life to it? How does that happen?

Susan Trapp:
Yeah, that’s a great question as well. All right, so I’m going to babble so you stop me, but all right. Way back when I was a wee lass, right, I decided I wanted to go to graduate school. And actually prior to graduate school I worked, now I’m just pitching for myself, I worked on the Human Genome Project actually way back when.

Matt Baum:
Oh wow, that is amazing.

Susan Trapp:
Yeah. Which was pretty interesting, and so I decided I wanted to go to graduate school and get a PhD. My parents were both medical doctors and I was always very anti-drug.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Susan Trapp:
And so-

Matt Baum:
Nothing wrong with that. I should have been a little more anti-drug, I’ll be honest.

Susan Trapp:
Well, anti-drug, not anti-drug in … Well I mean anti-drugs if your parents are medical doctors, it’s like you say you’re sick, they’re like, “Here, take an aspirin. Here, take a Tylenol,” that kind of drug, right?

Matt Baum:
Got you.

Susan Trapp:
Anti-pharmaceutical, not anti-drug. And so the bottom line is I was always very interested in natural medicine, right? And so I go to graduate school and I was interested in molecular biology, and it was still kind of in the early days, and I stumbled upon … I got into a PhD program, which was biochemistry and molecular biology, biochemistry and chemistry.

Susan Trapp:
And we actually didn’t have that much molecular biology at that time, and so I discovered you have to pick yourself an advisor and pick a topic. And the person I chose was working on natural … He was a natural product, organic chemist, so this … Yeah, you know what natural products are. And he was actually studying terpenes, and he was studying terpenes, fungal terpenes.

Matt Baum:
Of course, fungus does it too.

Susan Trapp:
Yeah, fungus does it too. One of the more topical, and this will be of interest to the cannabis listeners. So what he was studying, there are these compounds, there are fungal terpenes that actually produce toxins which are also terpenes and so-

Matt Baum:
Why wouldn’t they be?

Susan Trapp:
… And one of those is actually, so let’s see, fusariums [inaudible 00:34:04]. So fusarium is a fungus that grows on plants. It usually grows above the Mason-Dixon line, and the wheat crops, but also cannabis. So when people are testing their cannabis for a variety of microbes, right? The testing of pesticides and microbes, one of the things they’re testing is this fusarium. And they’re testing for fusarium-

Matt Baum:
It’s like a mold, right?

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah, that’s a fungus, which produces this compound, which is a sesquiterpene, that’s three isoprene units. Right?

Matt Baum:
My God, yeah, we learned all about it.

Susan Trapp:
Right, called Trichophytons, and they’re pretty toxic. When I was first learning about this, and the way I talk about it is, below the Mason … Most people have not heard of fusarium, they have not heard of Trichophytons, but a lot of people have heard of Aspirgillus, which is a fungus that produces aflatoxins, which is not a terpene as far as I know. I’m pretty sure it’s not a terpene, I’ll have to double-check on it. But anyway, below the Mason-Dixon line, Aspirgillus will grow on peanuts. It’s one of the most known and potent carcinogens known to man. At least again, this is … I’m citing my thesis in 10 plus years of education.

Matt Baum:
Well, you’re the guest, so yeah, blow your own horn, it’s fine.

Susan Trapp:
Well I’m blowing my own horn, but I kind of left the terpene field after graduate school and then I came back, and so there’s a bit of a gap that I’m trying to catch up on.

Matt Baum:
Oh, got you.

Susan Trapp:
But the bottom line is I was interested in that. I mean, the short story would be I was interested in natural medicine and this guy was doing natural product medicine. And he actually had a genomics or a DNA project, and that’s why I ended up working with him on terpene. So he was an expert on these fungal terpenoids, and a group of scientists out of Brazil contacted him because they had cows that were eating this plant, a different plant, it was called Baccharis megapotamica, and that plant was causing what they call mycotoxicosis. And so for those readers it’s like plug your ears right now if you don’t want to hear what’s next.

Matt Baum:
No, let’s get gross. Let’s do it.

Susan Trapp:
It is really gross, I have a picture from my PhD thesis, right, where you can just see the cow that has ingested this, they’ve just got blood coming out of all of their [inaudible 00:36:34]

Matt Baum:
So it’s just like cellular, there’s like falling apart basically?

Susan Trapp:
It’s bad. Yeah.

Matt Baum:
Oh God.

Susan Trapp:
Yeah. And so he came up with this … He used to come up with cool, grandiose hypotheses, that’s what I loved about him, and that’s Bruce Jarvis, and he’s a genuine terpene expert. He’s been studying terpene, terpenoids for 50 years. So it’s an old field as well, right? It’s not even a new field. But anyway, so he wanted to prove that these genes, because at that time he thought they didn’t think that these particular type of compounds, these trichophyton like compounds, so a specific type of terpene, they shouldn’t have been in plants, they were only fungal, and so he was like, horizontal-

Matt Baum:
Okay. He was looking at it and saying, it doesn’t make sense where the cows would get this because this shouldn’t be in the plant, therefore there has to be a fungus involved that is making this.

Susan Trapp:
… Right, or that somehow the genes for those … There’s such a thing as horizontal gene transfer where the genes have jumped-

Matt Baum:
From the fungus-

Susan Trapp:
… from the fungus-

Matt Baum:
… to the plant

Susan Trapp:
… to the plant.

Matt Baum:
That’s terrifying.

Susan Trapp:
Yeah. And that happens. And there weren’t that many cases of that way back when, but there’s plenty of them now because now we’ve sequenced the human genome, you can actually study DNA and the sequences and really get into the nitty-gritty of where those genes come from, kind of even like COVID-19. Right?

Matt Baum:
Sure. Absolutely.

Susan Trapp:
Like they’ve been studying like was it manmade or not? Genomicists and molecular biologists are very clever and they can do a good job of at least surmising with a lot of sound science, but probably that’s not the case, at least-

Matt Baum:
So it sounds to me like you are a hardcore nerd that loves to learn cool stuff. And the terpene-

Susan Trapp:
… I love molecular biology, and I love …. I fell in love with DNA when I was an undergrad and so in a way I found the perfect project in grad school because I was interested in natural medicine. Anti-medical doctor because my parents were doctors I was just anti like, “I’m not going to take drugs, I’m going to get it off myself.”

Matt Baum:
… My dad was a salesman, that’s why I’m in web hosting, you know?

Susan Trapp:
Yeah, right. But I had already been inundated with … I mean I got to work for, and I am tooting my own horn, when I was wee, young lass I worked for guy named Dr. Craig Venter, who’s quite famous now. He’s famous for having sequenced the human genome. He started a number of-

Matt Baum:
That’s something.

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah, he started a number of companies, the Synthetic Genomics or Synthetic … I think, yeah, Synthetic Genomes. I think that’s what they’re called, I have to go look them up. He’s is in San Diego, but he started a number of companies and so … Right. I got to work on the Human Genome Project, I got to learn how to sequence early on. The generation before me when you actually tried to sequence DNA to understand each nucleotide in the DNA, they had to use radioactivity and it was very laborious. Yeah. And so I was like that first generation that you’ve got to just put it on a machine and fluorescently label the DNA, blah blah blah-

Matt Baum:
Yeah, and you see the line-

Susan Trapp:
… you get this output. Right.

Matt Baum:
… and you line the black lines up and everything, and yeah. Okay, so let me ask you-

Susan Trapp:
Yeah, so as you know, I couldn’t let that go.

Matt Baum:
… to sum up because we’ve … Whoa, this has been crazy. But to sum up, if you were to pick one thing, what do you think is the coolest thing about terpenes?

Susan Trapp:
Wow, what a great question. This is good practice, so that part I guess you get to cut out.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, it’s going to come up., someone’s going to ask you this.

Susan Trapp:
Yeah. No, great question. I guess the coolest thing about them is that they really are in a way your medicine cabinet, and I think that’s why they’re getting so much play in the cannabis industry. Like I’ve studied them for a long time, but when I got into the cannabis industry and I started to educate other people and try to explain it just like I’m trying to explain it to you to make these connections on terpenes, and how they’re part of nature, and they’re this huge, large class, which is pretty cool and they’ve been around forever. Right?

Susan Trapp:
And they’re important in the perfume industry, and the cosmetic industry, and the commercial industry of cleaners and toothpaste, peppermint, spearmint, camphor, whatever, but they are this incredible cabinet of medicine, and they’re at our fingertips.

Susan Trapp and Terpedia

Matt Baum:
Susan, you have been amazing and you have completely blown my mind.

Susan Trapp:
I have a website that’s actually starting to look like a real website called terpedia.com.

Matt Baum:
Oh yeah, okay. I wanted to ask you about that, tell me a little bit about terpedia.com.

Susan Trapp:
Terpedia, like I have a mission statement ready to-

Matt Baum:
Oh, hey. Nice.

Susan Trapp:
… We’re starting to get real, right?

Matt Baum:
Getting real all of sudden.

Susan Trapp:
Yeah. Myself and my co-founder, what we envision is a world where cannabis enthusiasts, herbalists and research professionals no longer have to suffer the lack of professional curated terpene content. So terpedia enables viewers to benefit through valid sources, data and literature that facilitates sound science. So really what we’re trying to do is develop a, it’s not quite a knowledge base, but … So it’s on its way to being an actually terpene knowledge base or essentially an encyclopedia of terpenes in the modern world, but-

Matt Baum:
And we can go there now, terpedia.com? We can go there now, there’s a site there?

Susan Trapp:
… Yeah.

Matt Baum:
Awesome.

Susan Trapp:
We’re building it, right? And so the idea behind it is that, so a lot of people in the cannabis industry, they know something about cannabinoids, they don’t know that much about terpenes, and what we’re really trying to do is deliver sound science and sound claims and appropriate dosing. Right? And so what we really want to do is actually … So kind of phase one is get that information out, and get the information that the medicinal benefits that exist, and there aren’t that many.

Susan Trapp:
So terpenes have been around forever, but they’ve been used for commercial purposes. So one thing I didn’t get to say is like, after turpentine was discovered they utilized like type of terpenes to coat the bottom of naval boats, right, so it’s an ancient industry. And then you’ve got these really floral terpenes, cosmetic industry or whatnot. But we haven’t really … And ancient medicine knows about them and uses them, right, but we really don’t have that much medical scientific evidence on what they’re doing and how they work-

Matt Baum:
That’s what … Yeah.

Susan Trapp:
… but what I can assure you of is that they’re being overused just kind of like we all got high off to 20% THC, right, so then we bumped it up to 30, so right now everybody’s like, “Ah, let’s throw in more terps.” And my hypothesis that I try to get across at my talks is more terpenes aren’t necessarily better.

Matt Baum:
Right. It’s-

Susan Trapp:
Sometimes they are-

Matt Baum:
… probably the type-

Susan Trapp:
But usually they probably aren’t.

Matt Baum:
… is more important than the amount, I would guess.

Susan Trapp:
Well, they’re found traditionally in very tiny amounts, you don’t need much to get that floral smell. You don’t need that much to kill … A bark beetle is pretty small.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Susan Trapp:
Right? So it’s producing a pheromone, you don’t need much for that tree to respond.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, that’s amazing.

Susan Trapp:
We probably don’t either because we’ve all co-evolved together. But that kind of data is not out there yet, and so that’s what we’re trying to do is build like a knowledge base where people can come to us, and if they have a product or formulation, we will have the papers, we’ll be able to find the science, we’ll at least be able to help provide them potentially formulations that work for pain, arthritis, the basics, but on top of it, if they want to throw this and that in, we’re going to have that sound science behind it, and we’re building it.

Matt Baum:
This sounds awesome. This sounds so cool.

Susan Trapp:
Ah, thank you.

Matt Baum:
Susan, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for joining us on the Ministry of Hemp. Thank you for roping and riding on the wild West of the terpene frontier, right?

Susan Trapp:
Terpene. Say terpene.

Matt Baum:
Terpene. Oh my God.

Susan Trapp:
And then I want to hear you say terpenoid.

Matt Baum:
Terpenoid.

Susan Trapp:
There you go.

Matt Baum:
I’m going to put a rubber band around my wrist and I whip myself every time I say it wrong.

Susan Trapp:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
Thank you so much, this has really been great.

Susan Trapp:
You’re so welcome, I’m glad we finally got to do this. Thank you for-

Matt Baum:
You are so fun to talk to, by the way, I would love to go to one of your talks. I mean-

Susan Trapp:
… Really?

Matt Baum:
… you’re a riot.

Susan Trapp:
All right.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
This is great. Yeah, seriously. Thanks again to Susan for coming on the show. I’m sorry if some of that seemed a little hectic, but it was my fault not so much hers. There was so much information that she was trying to impart and I wanted to know all of it, and I’m really excited for to see where terpedia.com goes. Of course, we will have a link to terpedia.com in the show notes for this episode.

Matt Baum:
That brings us to the end of another exciting episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. My name is Matt Baum, I’ve been your host, thank you for listening. And if you feel passionate about hemp and hemp education, I urge you to become a Ministry of Hemp insider by going to patrion.com\ministryofhemp and donating to our cause. Anything you can donate makes you an insider, it gets you all kinds of benefits like podcast extras. We recently just posted one where I’m talking to Nick Warrender from Urb about how they come up with the names for their pre-rolled hemp flower joints.

Matt Baum:
You can hear that interview with Nick in episode 36. It’s a fun little extra, but like I said, if you dig what we’re doing here, we could use your help and it really does help, and any amount you give makes you a Ministry of Hemp insider. Please, check it out. And if you have hemp questions, hit us up, (402) 819-4894, leave us a message. And like I said earlier, Kit O’Connell, the Editor-in-Chief of Ministry of Hemp and myself will answer your questions on our Q&A shows that we do, and we’ve got one coming up really soon, I promise.

Matt Baum:
I know I’ve been promising that a lot, but it is coming. If you’re too shy to call, email me, Matt, at Ministry of Hemp, shoot me your question and we’ll read it and talk about it. You can follow Ministry of Hemp at \Ministry of Hemp or at MinistryofHemp on all of your favorite social media platforms if you need more. And by the way, speaking of Kit O’Connell, head to ministryofhemp.com right now and you can meet Kit, our Editor-in-Chief, in a video that we just posted there.

Matt Baum:
Kit is a fantastic writer and a badass hemp advocate. I’m proud to call him a friend and I’m happy to work with him. Check it out, it’s a great video. Thanks again to everybody that has supported the show and donated and downloaded. It is your enthusiasm that keeps us spreading the good word and we ask that you do the same. Tell people about the show, tell people about the site. Let’s spread the good word of hemp and change the world, people, but for now, I got to get out of here. And I like to end the show by saying, remember to take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will you? This is Matt Baum quarantined in Omaha, Nebraska, with the Ministry of Hemp, signing off.

The post Dr, Susan Trapp, Queen of Terpenes: Talking Terpene Science appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In this episode of Ministry of Hemp Podcast, our host Matt talks about the new Cannabis Institute at UC Davis. Then, he interviews PlusCBD Oil‘s National Educator, Maggie Frank, about combating myths, proper dosage, and taking CBD education to the streets.

PlusCBD Oil is one of our Top CBD Brands. Our guest Maggie Frank contributed some education to our roundup of the best CBD skincare products, which also features a review of PlusCBD Oil Hemp Body Lotion.

This episode is part of our ongoing Women in Hemp series.

Send us your feedback

We want to hear from you too. Send us your questions and you might hear them answered on future shows like this one! Send us your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, email matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

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Visit the Ministry of Hemp on Patreon for more information.

CBD education: Complete episode transcript

Below you will find the full written transcript of this episode:

Matt Baum:
I’m Matt Baum, and this is The Ministry of Hemp podcast brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education.

Matt Baum:
As you’ve probably heard, there are a lot of false claims and bad information about CBD out there. And today on the show, we’re going to talk to somebody that is taking hemp education to the streets. Her name is Maggie Frank and she is the national educator for PlusCBD Oil. PlusCBD are good buddies of ours over at ministryofhemp.com. You can find them in our top brand section.

Matt Baum:
Not only are they a great company putting out great CBD, PlusCBD was also one of the first companies to hire and send a national educator out in the wild to teach people about the benefits of CBD, how to take it, how and why it works, and to dispel some of the myths that are out there. But before we get into that, there are some pretty exciting news coming out of California on the subject of hemp education as well.

Cannabis research at the University of California

Matt Baum:
Last year, The University of California, Davis set up one of the nation’s first cannabis institutes. And just recently, they’ve named two researchers, a schizophrenia researcher and a plant expert to lead its new center for the research in study of hemp and marijuana. UC, Davis has named professors, Cameron Carter and Lee Tian as co-directors of its cannabis and hemp research center, which is charged with increasing academic collaboration around hemp and marijuana, and establishing external partnerships related to cannabis.

Matt Baum:
What this means is we now have an American research center on a well-respected agricultural college that is going to actually start doing the first real American research into hemp and marijuana, and that is very important. Carter, the first professor, researches the effects of marijuana in the brain and Tian studies plant metabolism and diseases. Her work includes identifying candidate genes in the cannabis plant affecting the delta nine THC biosynthesis.

Matt Baum:
If you’ve listened to this show before, you’ve heard several people lament the lack of American research, and that’s exactly where the FDA goes when they start looking at Canadian studies or European studies, they instantly want to throw them out because they want to see controlled American research studies. Well, that is what UC, Davis is going to be doing. UC, Davis is just one of several private and public universities setting up cannabis studies and trying to lock down funding for cannabis research, which couldn’t be better news for the future of cannabis in the United States and will certainly help a lot the next time the FDA tries to point out some murky warning about the possible dangers of CBD.

Meet Maggie Frank

Matt Baum:
Next up is my interview with Maggie Frank. I caught up with Maggie from her hotel room in San Diego. She was just about to go do some hot yoga, so I really appreciated her time and I hope you do too. Maggie was super personal and a lot of fun to talk to, so much so that I forgot to press record when we started talking. So, this interview picks up with her talking about her background and where she came from.

Maggie Frank:
My background was nutrition, personal training. And then I, the way I ended up connecting to education within the natural product space, was, I actually worked retail. I was a buyer for what is now Sprouts Farmers Market, which is on the West Coast. And I used to sit with companies and work with who we brought into the store. And it was really through that job that I got to understand the manufacturing side of supplementation and for me, it really clicked with the background in nutrition and personal training. It brought it all full circle.

Matt Baum:
And how did you find your way into hemp then, just through that or was there an experience you had?

Maggie Frank:
Yeah, I found my way through to nutrition through living on a sailboat down in Mexico for two years.

Matt Baum:
Not bad.

Maggie Frank:
Literally like left the standard American world diet behind. I was catching most of my own food or trading with fishermen for fruits and vegetables and stuff.

Matt Baum:
That’s amazing.

Maggie Frank:
It was pretty awesome and I literally saw my health transform. I had always suffered from really bad eczema and bad asthma. There literally is not a winter in my childhood memory that my sister or I were not in the hospital for pneumonia.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Maggie Frank:
Breathing treatments, the whole deal.

Matt Baum:
I did that when I was a kid too.

Maggie Frank:
All that stuff, right? And I got away from the way I was eating, and I got away from the medication, and I literally saw my health transform. My hormone issues disappeared, the inflammation issues disappeared. I had control over the way I felt. And now I know that my parasympathetic system was becoming aligned. It wasn’t as stressed.

Maggie Frank:
And it really just, it inspired me to bring that knowledge back with me and really connect that to people. Because I realized, “Oh my gosh, we don’t have to feel that way.”

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Yeah.

Maggie Frank:
And I learned that bit early on, right? So I was only 21 when I took this trip down to Mexico. So, it really changed the path. I came back, I studied nutrition, personal training. That got me into the natural product space. And then I worked as a national educator for a company called Vibrant Health. They make efficacious super food, clinically formulated probiotic combinations. And they really talk about the benefit of cellular health and how our modern life is setting us up for failure.

Maggie Frank:
So unfortunately, they were having some issues with finances and sending somebody like me out on the road is extremely expensive.

Matt Baum:
Yeah I can see that.

CBD education and PlusCBD Oil

Maggie Frank:
So I left that company and five days later Stuart Tom, who is the VP of human nutrition at CV sciences, who makes PlusCBD Oil called me up and said, “Hey, we’d really like to talk to you about becoming our educator.” And Matt, I didn’t know, I mean, I had used cannabis. I went to school in Santa Barbara, I grew up in Huntington Beach. I definitely had experience.

Matt Baum:
Hard to get away from it, I’m sure.

Maggie Frank:
Right. I’d used it out in Mexico and it was a different-

Matt Baum:
Again.

Maggie Frank:
… caliber, like totally right. We would expect that. But I thought that he had perhaps gotten misinformation about me. I was like, “Listen Stuart, other than knowing I enjoy it. I’m not a hemp expert in any way, and I’m definitely not an endocannabinoid expert in any way.” He was like, “There’s really nobody who is.”

Matt Baum:
Yeah, that’s just it.

Maggie Frank:
Educating his face. He’s like, “We can teach you.” So, I’d be at a kind of now in today’s timing, that opportunity would have never been given to me because there’s people who know this stuff, right?

Matt Baum:
We’ve got people doing the tests now.

Maggie Frank:
Who are now doing what I do, but I just happened to have this weird combination of expertise at a time where nobody was willing to do the job because it wasn’t legitimate yet. And it’s then so, so fun.

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome.

Maggie Frank:
And so inspiring. And just such a wonderful experience.

Matt Baum:
So like you said, there are a lot of people now that are doing the testing and have real medical and research backgrounds looking into this, which is great, but those people aren’t doing what you do. They’re not leaving the laboratory to go out and educate the public. What does that look like? Like what is your job? How does it work?

Maggie Frank:
I consider myself a bridge. I was never the smartest kid in the classroom. I had to work pretty hard at it.

Matt Baum:
Fair enough.

Maggie Frank:
I think that as a result I have a unique way to take very, very complex information and break it down for a normal person. So-

Matt Baum:
That’s teaching.

Maggie Frank:
… how do I have this conversation about the benefits of not only hemp from an agricultural standpoint, environmental standpoint, socioeconomic standpoint, but how do I also take this extremely complex plant of the endocannabinoid system, something they’ve never heard about and really take that to a point where they get excited about the potential that this amazing plant has to really facilitate better physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing while also changing the landscape socioeconomically the way we manufacture. We create bottles for water, we build homes. I mean, it’s a rare opportunity in this world where we get to do good for ourselves and do good for the planet. And it’s also controversial, and sexy, and political and it’s just so cool.

Matt Baum:
It’s tied into everything right now.

Maggie Frank:
Yes. So, I get to have this conversation with people and watch, and it’s a wide range of people. I talk to moms, I talk to great grandmas who are 85 and just want something to help them feel better on a daily basis and feel more mobile. I talk to people who are dealing with sick children. I deal with people who just want to recover from their CrossFit. I mean, the range of people this touches is so huge.

Matt Baum:
It’s all of us.

Maggie Frank:
It really [inaudible 00:10:00] to humanity.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Maggie Frank:
And then I get to see the doctors, people who literally are opening their minds to this come in and talk to somebody like me who, I mean there’s nowhere near…

Matt Baum:
Not a doctor.

Maggie Frank:
As educated or capable as they are in their fields of expertise. But you get to see these lights go off in their eyes. Like, Oh my gosh, this is such a missing piece.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Maggie Frank:
Things that confounded them over the years. It all connects.

CBD education and the medical establishment

Matt Baum:
Can I ask you, are you seeing more doctors accepting… Doctors actually going, “Okay, there might be something here.” Or are you still seeing a lot of pushback?

Maggie Frank:
You see both.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Maggie Frank:
There’s no consistency. I tell people all the time, there are doctors I talk to who literally tell every single patient they see that they should be using this like a super food to support this very profound system that is really in a modern world set up to fail us. The endocannabinoid system wants us to have a balance intake of Omega three and Omega six fatty acids. 93% of America doesn’t do that.

Matt Baum:
Go figure.

Maggie Frank:
And the endocannabinoid system wants us to have a really healthy gut. Most of us don’t do that. Our endocannabinoid system needs us to eat a colorful diet, and herbs, and spices, and most of America’s eating brown and beige. So, there’s a lot of doctors that I’m seeing see this as a way to support the body in an imperfect world. But I’m also still meeting… I don’t meet the doctors because of course they’re not coming to my lectures. But I meet their patients who say, “Listen, my doctor’s just very resistant to any of this.”

Maggie Frank:
And I mean, this is probably a bit of a controversial field, but I feel this is empowering and we all have to be honest about the fact that sometimes we have to kiss a lot of frogs to find our prince. Right? If our doctors aren’t working in a way that aligns with our goals and our chosen pathway for physical, mental and emotional wellbeing, find a new frog.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, it’s okay to question that. I work with a guy, his wife has Crohn’s disease and she has extreme pain from it. And her pain doctor has said absolutely not. Absolutely no hemp-based medicine, no CBD. I won’t have it. And went as far as to say, “We will test your urine. We will test your urine and if you test positive, then we will not give you any more painkillers.”

Matt Baum:
She found another doctor who was like, “I don’t care at all. If that helps, absolutely do it, by all means.” So like you’re getting one message from a doctor saying, “No, not only does it not work, it’s dangerous.” And then you’re getting another message from a doctor’s like, “Not only is it not dangerous, if it helps you and I’m prescribing less opioids, then by all means, please.”

Maggie Frank:
And not only that, but that doctor is also looking for ways to learn more as to why. I get doctors, nurses, specialists, immunologists who come to my lectures all the time. And the reason they tell me they’re there is because they had so many patients who hadn’t gotten relief from other modalities, yet amazing response from this.

Maggie Frank:
And they wanted to be, “I’m able to understand the why.” And it’s so beautiful when they have that perspective. So I mean, honestly though, what we’re seeing in CBD, I’ve seen with probiotics and the medical community. When I started 15 years ago in this world, I mean I was told I was a quack. [inaudible 00:13:49] suggesting that maybe somebody dealing with anxiety or depression, look at that help?

Matt Baum:
Right.

Maggie Frank:
It really wasn’t until the 2012 human microbiome project that we see doctors really opening their minds to the fact that that microbiome is so integral to our health. I’ve seen pushback from the medical community when it comes to things like fish oil.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, absolutely.

Maggie Frank:
Right? So, we always have this very wide range of reactions with our practitioners. And I think that that’s why we as a society need to be empowered enough like your friend did to say, “You do work for me and I understand and respect your opinion, but it doesn’t align with what I want for the body I live in forever. So I’m going to find somebody-“

Matt Baum:
And counterpoint, pushback works on both sides. Pushback is important because when you push back and say, “I don’t know that I think this might help with me.” It’s also good if a researcher or a doctor pushes back and says, “I want to learn more about that before.”

Maggie Frank:
100%.

Matt Baum:
And then we find out, “Yes. Oh look, it’s science. It’s not quackery. This isn’t magic,” you know?

Maggie Frank:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
So, what do your lectures look like? Where do you do like a… If I want to come see you lecture, where would I go?

Maggie Frank:
So, I do a lot of health food stores, stores like Freshtime, independent health food stores, health fairs. So, a lot of times those are sponsored through either health expos or fitness expos, supplement expos. Myself or one of our other educators will speak at those type of events. I do integrative practitioners, some pharmacies. There’s quite a few compounding pharmacies-

Matt Baum:
That’s cool. That’s very cool.

Maggie Frank:
… that sell our products and we’ll host events. Yeah, so it’s a very, very wide range the way I’m going.

Matt Baum:
And who comes? Who are you talking to at these?

Maggie Frank:
It can range as well. It can be retailers who work within the natural products food space. It can be integrative practitioners. I speak to pharmacists, not as often because I’m not as clinically trained as our other educators are.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Maggie Frank:
But I even go and speak to medical groups in hospitals at times.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Maggie Frank:
So there’s definitely a wide range. That’s my least common avenue to go to just because we have the people with the master’s degrees and the PhDs.

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome.

Maggie Frank:
We don’t have any other people who go more direct public.

Support the Ministry of Hemp

Matt Baum:
Let’s take a quick break to hear from Kit O’Connell, Ministry of Hemp, editor in chief about our new patreon page.

Kit O’Connell:
Hi, this is Kit O’Connell. I’m the editor in chief at Ministry of Hemp. I hope you’re enjoying the Ministry of Hemp podcast and the articles we’ve been publishing recently. But today I want to talk to you about the newest way that you can support what we do.

Kit O’Connell:
So, we’re launching a patreon at patreon.com/ministryofhemp. And this patreon will help our readers and fans contribute to what we do. With your help we’ll be able to make our podcast and produce even more great articles about science and information about hemp and CBD. We’ll publish more recipes and more guides, we’ll be able to work with more journalists, chefs, and authors of all kinds.

Kit O’Connell:
Not only that, but by joining our patreon, you’ll become a hemp insider. We’re launching a special newsletter just for our patreons. Each month we’ll work with experts and advocates and other industry professionals to give you an inside look at hemp and offer you ways to help the return of our favorite plant nationwide.

Kit O’Connell:
To get access to this new newsletter. You can donate any amount on our Patreon, even as low as $3 a month. For a few dollars more, we’ll send you some Ministry of Hemp stickers and even samples of our favorite CBD products. If you join before February 15th at $25 or more, we’ll give you a Ministry of Hemp T-shirt as well. So if you love hemp and the work that we’re doing at the Ministry of Hemp, I hope you’ll support us. You can join at patreon.com/ministryofhemp, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/ministryofhemp, which is all one word. Thanks.

Educating the public about CBD

Matt Baum:
So, one of the most common things that I hear when I tell people that I host a podcast about hemp education is they say something to the effect of, “Oh, I tried CBD and it doesn’t work.” That seems to be the first thing they say. And it could be a matter of, “Well, maybe you tried garbage CBD or maybe you didn’t do it right.” What do you say to people in that situation that have been burned, because there’s so much garbage out there?

Maggie Frank:
Well, I mean, that’s a big part of what my lectures are when I go direct to consumer and I’m in a health food store is, number one, de-stigmatizing it for the people who are still scared.

Matt Baum:
Right. Is it marijuana? Is it drugs? Am I taking drugs?

Maggie Frank:
I mean, just all hemp, all cannabis in general. They still are holding on to the propaganda that created the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. So, it’s breaking that down like, “Hey listen, there’s a really good chance that your grandma had Eli Lilly cannabis oil in her cabinet if she was born or lived, went to a doctor during this period of time.” This is silly like let’s… We deconstruct that.

Maggie Frank:
But then a big part of mine is talking about how to make this work for you. And what I find is that there are some very specific mistakes that people make. You touched on one is they don’t pick the right product. We don’t pick our CBD based on cost per milligram. We don’t base our CBD on what we can get the most out of for the most value. We don’t pick our CBD because it has a whole bunch of buzzwords and all these things. But I mean, if somebody is promising you that this will cure your… That’s an indication you should run.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. They are liars.

Maggie Frank:
They have different molecular structures in all of those different bottles and they all say hemp extract. So it’s realizing that they’re not all created equal, first. And number two, really giving yourself the opportunity. So at CV Sciences, our big catch phrase on dosing is start low, build slow, it’s all the way to go.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot. That’s a great… Yeah, start low, and build slow.

Maggie Frank:
Always the way to go. We also talk a lot about how no two people are the same. So, when I’m talking to somebody, they find out I know about CBD, they’re like, “Well, if I took CBD, how would I feel?”

Matt Baum:
Right? What would it do? Would I feel dizzy?

Maggie Frank:
I’ve absolutely no idea. You could, right? If you take way too much, you could.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Maggie Frank:
I have no idea how you’re going to feel. I personally take CBD before the gym every morning.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Maggie Frank:
Because the way that it affects me personally is to make me extremely focused, I feel motivated. I’m like, “Okay, yeah let’s go.” Whereas I know people who take this at the end of the day because for them, the way that their initial reaction to it is, is that they feel a little bit calmer.

Maggie Frank:
I have friends who can take it in the middle of the night if they wake up, have it by their bed and they can go back to sleep.

Matt Baum:
That’s what I just did last night. I woke up and I took some of the American Hemp Oil sleep tincture that they have and right back asleep and you wake up, no hangover. I feel good. I’m don’t feel fuzzy at all. You know? Love it.

Maggie Frank:
Yeah. And if that was me and I took CBD in the middle of the night, I would be up organizing my closet which is like…

Matt Baum:
Fair enough.

Trying CBD: Everyone’s different

Maggie Frank:
Right. Because that’s not when it’s ideal for me to take it. So, I tell people, “You have no idea. I have no idea until you give it a try and play with it.” People will then say, “But what dose?” Again.

Matt Baum:
Again. Yeah.

Maggie Frank:
I have no idea. I’m sorry. It could be one. I’ve seen people do well on one milligram, literally take one milligram of our product and have complete benefit at one milligram, whether they were 80 pounds or 300 pounds. It’s not weight dependent. It’s not pain dependent. It’s none of those things. Right? And then I tell people, we have no idea how quickly you’ll respond. We all hear the story, right? I had a guy, 42 years old, come to one of my lectures. He’d had Tourette’s. He had been diagnosed with Tourette’s early on in his childhood and it was a bad case.

Matt Baum:
Wow. Like really staggering kind of.

Maggie Frank:
Oh, the adverbial expletives. The body movements.

Matt Baum:
Oh wow.

Maggie Frank:
To a point where his mother had done all of his shopping, all… Like he couldn’t, if he went out in society, he was picked on. Right. He couldn’t live a normal life.

Matt Baum:
He probably couldn’t drive.

Maggie Frank:
What? Couldn’t drive.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, I would assume.

Maggie Frank:
Had never gone to a normal school. Had never really had friends. I mean, his mom was really… she couldn’t have her own life because she had this child. So he had guilt about that. There was all these components that fall into when a family is dealing with that kind of an illness.

Maggie Frank:
And he tried everything, medical, holistic. Literally he had tried anything there had been at that point. He found our gold tincture, our drops. He takes one full squirter of our largest size bottle, which equals 10 milligrams of our gold concentrate. Literally 42 years of Tourette’s where he could never live his life. He sits down and 10 minutes later, no more expletives.

Matt Baum:
That’s amazing.

Maggie Frank:
No more physical manifestation.

Matt Baum:
That is amazing.

Maggie Frank:
It literally was the miracle answer for this man, right?

Matt Baum:
And it’s the kind of thing where they’re using CBD in a medication, like a pharmaceutical medication for children that are having seizures.

Maggie Frank:
100%.

Matt Baum:
And that Tourette’s is not far from small seizures inside the brain. As I understand it, I’m again not a science or a doctor.

Maggie Frank:
Not a doctor. Yeah, I know. It’s definitely a neurological component there [crosstalk 00:24:04] trigger.

Matt Baum:
But I can see that, yeah.

Maggie Frank:
Right. But unfortunately, so those are miracles and I love those miracles. Unfortunately, everybody believes that they’re going to have that miracle response.

Matt Baum:
Exactly. That is lightening striking what you just talked about.

Maggie Frank:
Yeah, and it’s inspiring. And usually when I tell that story, I cry and I mean, he got to have a girlfriend. And he was so sweet. His biggest win on that. His mother was getting older and he said, I always knew that she worried about what would happen to me when she was gone.

Matt Baum:
Of course.

Maggie Frank:
I get to tell her now that she can go in peace.

Matt Baum:
That’s wow.

Maggie Frank:
Like it’s just one of those, it’s so amazing. But really the reality for most of us with these products is that it’s going to be part of our health protocol and our answer to whatever it is that we’re trying to deal with, whether it’s maintenance and just lifestyle wellness or it’s stress anxiety or it’s serious, right?

Maggie Frank:
Most people, it’s going to take a couple of days to a couple of weeks playing with dose, time of day with or without food. How many times do I do this? Building slowly and paying attention to their body. On the far end, I recently met a woman who it took three straight months of taking these products regularly before there was any actual physiological noticeable difference to her.

Matt Baum:
Three months.

Maggie Frank:
Three months.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Maggie Frank:
And she was very candid. She said that if she had not been working with the naturopath who was telling her, “I don’t care what you think, you have to stay on this protocol [crosstalk 00:25:43] me.”

Matt Baum:
Right. Just try it.

Maggie Frank:
Right? She wouldn’t have stayed on it, but it wasn’t until three months. Now, this specific woman had been on two rounds of chemotherapy in the last three years.

Matt Baum:
Oh wow.

Maggie Frank:
And had been taking quite a bit of pharmaceutical medication for seven.

Matt Baum:
That’s another side of it. If you’re full of other medication that can slow things down. Right?

Maggie Frank:
Right? It affects the endocannabinoid system’s ability to utilize cannabinoids over time.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Maggie Frank:
So we know that in this woman’s case, we don’t know for sure, but what her doctor believes is that there was quite a bit of work going on underneath the surface before she acknowledged it happened.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. You can’t tell because you’re on so many… And that is not to say don’t go to chemotherapy. No, not at all.

Maggie Frank:
No, and I [crosstalk 00:26:23]. I mean, and I love that about this plant. So, if you’re 100% holistic and that’s what aligns with you and makes you comfortable, awesome. This works.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Making CBD part of your routine

Maggie Frank:
If you’re happy with that east meets west approach and you take a little bit from each, awesome. This works. And if you are 100% conventional, but you’re looking for ways to mitigate symptomology, looking for ways to just increase overall wellness or resilience to your treatments, I mean there’s been very early, of course, research showing that CBD A, the acid bound form in its raw form CBD can actually help people with chemotherapy induced nausea. Awesome.

Matt Baum:
That’s amazing.

Maggie Frank:
If that’s how your proper healing works-

Matt Baum:
That is amazing, yeah.

Maggie Frank:
… I’m all for it.

Matt Baum:
And also that is-

Maggie Frank:
It just [crosstalk 00:27:14] really, it grabs on to all of us.

Matt Baum:
That is one of the things that it sounds like a small thing. Oh, it’s going to help with your nausea, but almost nothing else does help with that nausea, it’s really bad and-

Maggie Frank:
For a lot of people it’s life-changing.

Matt Baum:
I think in a lot of these situations where people that are resistant or they think it didn’t work or whatever, I think a lot of them, from my experience and probably more so from your experience, are thinking of CBD as medicine and they want to come up and say, “How many CBD pills do I take a day?” And you go, “You take two, and you take them with water and make sure you eat something so it doesn’t upset your tummy.”

Matt Baum:
And that’s not how this works. This education that you’re out there doing, how much are you just trying to break down the understanding of this is not medication?

Maggie Frank:
Almost all of it.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, right?

Maggie Frank:
Almost all of it is breaking down how to make this work for you. Breaking that American mentality that if some is good, more must be better.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Maggie Frank:
Right. So, I see a lack of patience, but I also see people far too often super dosing. We see people benefit from three milligrams. But if it’s very hard for me to convince most of America to start that low. They want the most CBD on that shelf for the lowest cost. That’s how they’re painting products.

Matt Baum:
Because you just told me it’s not a medicine and it’s not going to hurt me. I can take whatever I want. Right? I’m taking a million milligrams.

Maggie Frank:
I can take whatever I want.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Maggie Frank:
Often then ended up at a lecture like mine going, this isn’t working for me. I invested $100 into this, it didn’t work. And what I explain to people is that these products work in a tri-phasic way and they have a bell curve response. And what that means is that we get immediate benefits, we get mid-level benefits and we get high level benefits or long-term benefits from modulating the endocannabinoid system with CBD products.

Maggie Frank:
But all of these products also have a bell curve response. And that means that you find a response, maybe let’s say like in my case it’s eight milligrams. That’s where I start to really notice the PlusCBD Oil makes me feel more optimistic, more resilient to stress, I’m less likely to react when somebody cuts me off in traffic, my luggage loss for the 10th time in the last three months.

Maggie Frank:
Now I can take that level up a little bit, play with it, you know? But we have a bell curve, all of us do. And that range is unique to each of us. And it’s the point at which adding more gives no additional benefit, could give less benefit than the low-dose, or could actually make somebody feel slightly worse. People are going over their bell curve all the time.

Matt Baum:
I know I did. When I first started messing around with it and trying to figure it out, I did the same thing. I was like, “Well, I don’t feel anything. I don’t feel anything. Well, I’m just going to do A bunch of it.” And then I was like, “I feel really weird now.”

Maggie Frank:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
And it wasn’t like and-

Maggie Frank: (crosstalk)

Matt Baum:
… my heart’s going to stop, but just like…

Maggie Frank:
Really good.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, it was like a different, like this is a little more than what I’m looking for. And when I dialed it back, I’m like, “Okay, this is that level that I need to be in. Not too high, not too low in that bell curve,” like you’re saying. And then, yeah, I can focus a little better. My ADD is definitely not kicking in like it normally does. I can have another cup of coffee and not turn into a monster, you know?

Maggie Frank:
Yes. Exactly. Yeah.

Matt Baum:
Something like that.

Maggie Frank:
But for some people that too much can be anxiety.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Maggie Frank:
It can make them feel panicked.

Matt Baum:
That’s exactly what I got.

Maggie Frank:
For some people, yeah that tachycardia, that heartbeat racing thing.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Like I feel good, but this doesn’t feel right.

Maggie Frank:
No, [inaudible 00:30:58]. That’s how I feel if I go anywhere above 25 milligrams. I just start to feel like I can’t quite catch my breath.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like butterflies in your chest almost.

Maggie Frank:
It’s not ideal.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Maggie Frank: (crosstalk) you’re good.

Matt Baum:
I mean, you don’t need to go to the hospital necessarily, but it does. I don’t want to go to work like that either.

Maggie Frank:
No, it’s not what we’re looking for when we’re taking something that’s supposed to be balancing us.

Matt Baum:
Exactly. Exactly.

Maggie Frank:
And some people can feel like they have to have a bowel movement.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Maggie Frank:
It can loosen your stool and they can feel that way. Some people if they go too high, too quick or too high one day because they’re like, “Ah, I just feel like I want to do it.” They can feel slightly nauseous. I’ve actually met a few people who threw up.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Maggie Frank:
I mean, it can make people feel slightly dizzy.

Matt Baum:
So that’s what it’s all, it’s starting low.

Maggie Frank:
They’re all trying to take in too much.

Matt Baum:
Start low and build slow and find-

Maggie Frank:
Always the way to go.

Matt Baum:
… that middle lane where you’re going to be and you will feel better. It’s going to make everything feel different, but you will feel better.

Maggie Frank:
You will. You should. And if you’re eating a standard American diet and you’re not somebody who’s really focusing on intake of healthy fatty acids, statistics show us that 93% of America is deficient in Omega three.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Maggie Frank:
Co-administration of Omega three with our hemp extracts is highly recommended. Not only by maintaining that ratio do we lessen our need for phytocannabinoids because our endocannabinoids are more capable of being produced to utilize, but we also really enhance the potential of sensitivity to cannabinoids like CDB if we make sure those ratios are good. So that’s a big area too. I mean, a lot of America who if they would just take more Omega three, they could take 10 milligrams instead of 30.

The future of CBD education

Matt Baum:
Let me ask you, if there was one thing that could happen tomorrow, whether it’s the FDA coming in and saying, “This is how we’re going to treat CBD,” or maybe the government loosens up on it. What would be the thing that you think would help at CBD education the most?

Maggie Frank:
I mean, I guess that that’s the problem, right? That’s the difficulty that there’s so many things that people think they know that they have no idea about when it comes to this category that it’s hard. I mean, I guess the regulation from the FDA and just knowing how we’re all going to move forward would probably be the most impactful thing at this stage. Because right now we’re all just theorizing how we think that this is going and we’re all doing what, not all of the companies but the companies who are trying to do it well, we’re doing what we think we’re supposed to be doing. It would be nice for everybody to have defined terminology on what is full spectrum versus broad spectrum? Are we keeping isolate? Is that still going to be a competition factor here?

Maggie Frank:
Where’s Nanotech and [inaudible 00:33:54]? Are we going to get efficacy studies on these type of new scientific approaches and extraction methods? That would make my job a heck of a lot easier.

Matt Baum:
Well you did just agree on the rules basically. That would make everything a lot of easier.

Maggie Frank:
Yeah. Yeah if we can all just… And really I think that that would make it so much easier for a consumer.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Maggie Frank:
If this was what all the labels looked, if this is how what the terminology meant for every company, if we knew that these were the testing standards and that every company who was selling a product in the U.S in a legal way was required to follow them. You don’t always immediately know that.

Matt Baum:
Right. The same way you would go buy acetaminophen and you would say, “Oh, there’s 25 milligrams in there. I take two of those.” And the box looks the same. It says there’s X amount in here. This is how much CBD you take. Start low, go slow and find where you’re supposed to be.

Maggie Frank:
Yeah. And I would love for them to really… I mean, I would love personally for them to cap milligrams on products sold.

Matt Baum:
I agree. I totally agree.

Maggie Frank:
The fact that we have 15 milligram grass affirm products sitting next to 55 milligram products, it’s confusing. People are, I feel like they’re being marketed into the more is better mentality because companies are willing to give people what they think America wants. And it’s really hard to evolve in a conscious way and navigate your company in a conscious way and only follow the science if everybody else is doing it for money.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Maggie, thank you so much. This has been great and you’ve got-

Maggie Frank:
Okay, Matt.

Matt Baum:
… a hot yoga class I don’t want to keep you from. So, it’s important. We’ve got to stay flexible. Thanks again to Maggie coming on the show. And you will be able to find links to her information and links to PlusCBD in the show notes for this episode.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
Well, that about does it for another episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast. Thanks for joining me and thanks for supporting. And like Kit mentioned earlier, if you want to show your support, check out our patreon where this week we’ve got a special article detailing Ministry of Hemp’s time at South by Southwest. And in this week’s Ministry of Hemp podcast extra, I am going to give you a recipe for a delicious and very simple and easy to make hemp oil vinegarette that you can adjust to your needs to add to just about anything.

Matt Baum:
Thank you to everyone that is already supporting, and like I said, if you want to support head over the show notes where you can find a link to our patreons. Speaking of our show notes at the Ministry of Hemp, we believe that an accessible world is a better world for everyone, so you can find a complete written transcript of this episode right in those show notes I mentioned.

Matt Baum:
And while you’re at ministryofhemp.com, check out Elijah Pickering’s latest article on how hemp fabric is made and why it’s better than traditional fabrics. Next time on the show, I’m going to be talking to Doug Fine about his new book that’s coming out. Doug was an NPR contributor and he is a fantastic author. This is his second book about hemp and this time he’s growing it himself. I can’t wait for you to hear this one. But for now, this is Matt Baum reminding you to take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will you? This is the Ministry of Hemp podcast. Signing off.

The post CBD Education In Action: A Conversation With Maggie Frank Of PlusCBD Oil appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In this episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, our host Matt talks about the 2020 Summer Olympics allowing athletes to use CBD. Then, Matt sits down with Laurel Angelica Myers, COO at Prima, for a discussion about the science behind their new powdered CBD supplement. This episode is part of our Women in Hemp series.

Our reviewer Drew enjoyed trying Prima’s “Brain Fuel” Elixir, a powdered CBD drink mix, and one of three similar elixirs they offer. Check it out if you’re intrigued after listening to this podcast.

Send us your feedback

We want to hear from you too. Send us your questions and you might hear them answered on future shows like this one! Send us your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, email matt@wordpress-559906-1802377.cloudwaysapps.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417.

Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@wordpress-559906-1802377.cloudwaysapps.com

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Powdered CBD supplements: Complete episode transcript

Below you will find the full written transcript of this episode:

Matt Baum:

Real quick before we get started, I just want to thank everybody that has been downloading, and responding and supporting this show. I can’t tell you what it means to me. And there’s a new way to support the Ministry of Hemp Podcast and Ministry of Hemp. Head to patreon.com\ministryofhemp where you can become a monthly supporter of the show, helping us fight the good fight. I’ll tell you more about it in the middle of this episode, but thanks again to everybody, and check us out on patreon.com.

Matt Baum:

I’m Matt Baum and this is the Ministry of Hemp podcast brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education. We talk a lot about CBD here on the show, and adding CBD to your daily regimen can be tough, not because it’s… Well, yeah. I guess it can be hard to find, but the good news is you can go to sites like ministryofhemp.com, check our top brands and find great places to get high quality CBD. The tough part can be understanding how to take it.

Matt Baum:

Different labels say different things. They have milligrams on them. They have percentages of CBD. If it’s an oil, can I put it on food? Should I put it under my tongue? If it’s a pill, how many do I take? What do I need? It can all be really confusing. But one of the products we’re going to talk about today is taking a lot of that confusion out of it, and just allowing you to pour a powdered version into a drink. Which is really cool if you’re an athlete or just somebody that goes to the gym and doesn’t enjoy being sore afterwards.

Matt Baum:

Today on the show, I’m going to sit down with Laurel Angelica Myers. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Prima. Prima is a fantastic example of a transparent company that is doing it right. They’re one of our top brands and they’ve got a whole line of amazing CBD related products, one of which is a new powdered supplement that you just add to your coffee, or your water or just about anything else you’re drinking. It’s very cool and I’m excited for you guys to hear about it. But first, speaking of athletes, let’s talk about the Olympics for a minute.

CBD at the Olympics

Matt Baum:

If you live in the Midwest like I do, it’s February and you’re currently freezing. Summer probably seems like it’s a whole year away. But it’s coming, and so are the summer Olympics. And along with the Olympics come some changes to the world anti-doping regulations. Most notably they have dropped CBD from their no-no list, so athletes can now look to CBD for benefits in relaxation and anxiety when both competing and training.

Matt Baum:

You may remember back in episode 18, shameless plug for my own show, when I was talking about Megan Rapinoe, the US women’s soccer star that started a CBD company with her sister. She’s been pushing very hard along with a lot of other athletes to get professional sports to also allow CBD usage, and so far the response hasn’t been great. But seeing the Olympics, specifically the world anti-doping agency who is famous for banning athletes that have used chemicals that are by no means performance enhancing. This is huge news and a gigantic step for CBD becoming a legitimate part of athletes training regimens.

Matt Baum:

I’m not saying the MLB, NFL, NHL and everybody else is just going to change their tune overnight. But news like this definitely makes it harder for them to keep CBD on their banned substance list. So don’t be surprised if you see US Olympians applying CBD topicals to sore muscles, or adding supplements and tinctures to their sports drinks. And really it’s only a matter of time until professional athletes like golfer, Bubba Watson, who signed his own CBD endorsement deal, is using CBD on the links to ease that anxiety on that three foot putt. Sadly, it’s going to take a little more than CBD to help with my own golf game. But what can you do? And now my conversation with Laurel Angelica Myers. Why don’t we start off with a definition of the word bioavailability?

Bioavailability & powdered CBD

Laurel Myers:

Sure. So bioavailability is the rate at which your body can access and absorb something into the body system.

Matt Baum:

Okay. And I’m asking you to start with that because it’s one of the most important things when we’re dealing with any type of CBD. Prima has a new product that is basically a powder that you can pour into your coffee or your water, and get your CBD supplement. What’s the science behind this? How is this working? Because from my experience I’ve seen CBD bonded with MCT oil, or bonded with other fats and placed in sugars. How’s it working in a dry form like this?

Laurel Myers:

That’s a great question. So I’m going to take a step back and explain some of these steps before we get to the dry powder form.

Matt Baum:

Perfect.

Laurel Myers:

But as you noted, bioavailability is really important because if you don’t have good bioavailability on an ingredient, your body’s not going to be able to absorb as much of it to be as effective as possible. You could have a beautiful expensive ingredient, but if it’s not optimized, then in many ways it’s a waste of money, right? It’s going in your body one end, out the other.

Matt Baum:

Right.

Laurel Myers:

So when thinking about how to solve that problem, because there’s a lot of different ways to solve it, you’ll see a lot of [inaudible 00:05:54] solutions and oil. And what that does is it helps break down the CBD molecules into smaller sizes, so that by making it smaller, it’s easier to absorb. But that’s only one part of the process. Just the fat encapsulation itself won’t help. Think of it like oil and water, right? Your body is 90% water. When you make a salad dressing and you put down the vinegar, which is water-based and then the oil, what happens?

Matt Baum:

Separates?

Laurel Myers:

They do not mix, right? They don’t play nice, they separate. And then what happens when you actually mix the dressing together through this agitation, it’s what you call emulsification. And that’s the most important step in making something bioavailable, is you have to create this suspension of emulsification that essentially tricks your body into thinking it’s water.

Matt Baum:

Right.

Laurel Myers:

Essentially what you do is you find a molecule that, one side of it loves water, and the other side of it loves oil, and it then becomes essentially the middleman that takes those two things and binds them together. So all of that is done in a liquid. Right? So you’re blending this into liquid form, and then what makes it into a powder is simply a drying process. Right? And the reason that we did that is because it’s extremely shelf stable. It’s much more flexible because you can mix it into a variety of different things, and it’s much easier to dose that way. Because you can have single serving individual packets, which we found is really important for people who are living busy lifestyles.

Matt Baum:

Right.

Laurel Myers:

People want the convenience and the ease of, I know I want exactly this much and I want it at this time. You can throw one in your bag when you’re traveling on the plane, or one before bed. If you don’t have it in some type of an easy measurable format, it’s one more layer of complexity.

Matt Baum:

Sure. I know I’ve been using it in the mornings when using the Goto, and then recently… I’ve really liked it by the way, and I ran out of that recently, so I switched to the Brain Fuel before I go to work. And I’ve definitely found… I’ve also taken tinctures, I’ve taken lots of different CBD. I’ve definitely found that the way this hits me is a little different than in a tincture. Is that because of the delivery process, because of the dried powder aspect of it?

Laurel Myers:

Yeah. It’s not necessarily the dryness of the powder. It’s around that the micro encapsulation system that’s actually delivering the molecules to your body. So we could’ve done it in a liquid, we could’ve done it in a powder. For us that’s really around what was going to be the most convenient from a consumer standpoint, but it’s around that encapsulation process. Which is the most important piece. And what that means is you are feeling the effects and the benefits almost immediately. It’s pretty rapid in how quickly you’ll be able to feel that.

Matt Baum:

Yeah. I’ve been doing it with water because I have a bad habit of just drinking coffee in the morning and I’m trying to drink more water. So this is-

Laurel Myers:

I feel you.

Matt Baum:

This has encouraged that.

Laurel Myers:

It’s probably the thing that I’m worst at in life.

Matt Baum:

Yeah, I know. And it’s terrible. It’s like, but I’m not thirsty at all, I’ve had 15 cups of coffee. Not great for you.

Laurel Myers:

Exactly. Exactly.

Creating Prima’s powdered CBD mixes

Matt Baum:

How did you guys choose the flavors that you’re using in these? Because I’ve noticed… I mean, I guess whenever you see a powder that you add to a beverage, you expect fruit or lemon/lime or something like this. These aren’t like that at all. They’re very… I’m trying to… Earthy, I guess is the way that I would put it. They’re light and reserved. Why did you guys choose those kinds of flavors?

Laurel Myers:

Well, I’ll give you a really easy logical answer. Because that’s the flavor of the herbs that we’re combining with the hemp extract to deliver the benefits.

Matt Baum:

That makes perfect sense.

Laurel Myers:

So what we did, one of the core fundamental parts of our product line isn’t just the broad spectrum hemp CBD, but it’s looking at other synergistic botanicals that you can pair with the CBD, to really elevate and amplify the benefit you’re trying to deliver. So when you look at something like sleep, right, combining chamomile, hops, valerian, passionflower, these things that are really going to help induce that state of calm, the feeling of the heavy eyelids to help ease you into sleep.

Laurel Myers:

And when you compare it with the adaptogens and nootropics that are in Brain Fuel, we’ve got ashwagandha, rhodiola, those are things that are really going to help drive a lot of that blood flow to your brain, and give you that really energized, focused feeling. A lot of those herbs and botanicals have inherent flavors in and of themselves. So specifically the Brain Fuel, it does taste very earthy is a good description. And almost has like a nutty component. I like to equate it to a red tea.

Matt Baum:

Yeah, I was just going to say it. It’s has a tea aspect definitely.

Laurel Myers:

Yeah. Yeah. It pairs really well with nut milks and even cocoa has some notes of [inaudible 00:10:50] in there, which I think is interesting. But what we did is we did add some bitterness blockers using a natural mushroom extract, because a lot of these herbs can taste very, very, no pun intended, dirty. Literally like dirt.

Matt Baum:

Definitely. Like that same kind of flavor that people experience when they taste cilantro. I love the flavor, but there are people that taste it and they get that dirt flavor in their mouth.

Laurel Myers:

Yeah. So what we’ve done is we’ve really embraced the natural flavor of the herbs but we’ve tried to balance it out to make it a bit more palatable, and really help round it out. It’s not a flavored beverage. It’s not like a berry flavored boost that you add to your drink. It’s an herbal mix, and we intentionally didn’t include any sweeteners, so there’s no stevia, there’s no sugar, there’s none of that in there. Because we wanted it to be extremely helpful and also really flexible and versatile. Right? Not everybody wants that experience when they’re looking for a healthful beverage.

Matt Baum:

Can I ask, is the process that you’re doing to the herbs, like the first ones you named was the sleepy time one, is that process similar to what you do to the CBD?

Laurel Myers:

No, it’s a little bit different. So a lot of the herbs we’re taking as pure herb extract, and a lot of them don’t have the same bioavailability challenges that CBD does. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a CBD extract, but it comes out almost as a really, really thick, crystallized honey.

Matt Baum:

Really?

Laurel Myers:

So it’s very difficult. Yeah, it’s pretty wild. It’s really viscous. It’s very oily, very different than a lot of these other herbal extracts, which are often already in powder form as the raw extract itself.

Matt Baum:

Interesting. And are you using the same CBD that you’re using in this dry product in other Prima products? Is it the same exact stuff?

Laurel Myers:

Yeah, it is. It is. We have a single origin source up in Oregon, and we control our supply chain and it’s absolutely the same that we use across our whole portfolio. That being said, it is going to vary as an agricultural crop product from lot to lot. So you may have one harvest of hemp that has a different terpene profile than another harvest of hemp. So there is some natural variability within each of those batches of the hemp extract, and that’s just due to its natural nature. And we’re not working with an isolate. An isolate would be just the CBD molecule. We’re working with a broad spectrum extract that includes turpines and flavanoids and some of the other fatty acids. And because of that there’s a bit more variability to it.

Matt Baum:

Okay. And when you add other herbs and whatnot in there, you’re getting even fuller spectrum if you will, I guess.

Laurel Myers:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Matt Baum:

Now this might be a stupid question. Does adding it to a hot liquid versus a cold liquid make any difference?

Laurel Myers:

Not particularly, but just as with herbal teas, you don’t want to add it to boiling, boiling water. Right? That’s going to have a fairly bitter flavor and it’s going to compromise the quality of some of the ingredients. Like with a green tea, you’re not supposed to pour piping hot boiling water. You let it cool for a minute and then pour it on top. But that doesn’t really make a huge impact. It’s just going to make more of an impact on the flavor profile and the robustness of it.

Support the Ministry of Hemp on Patreon

Matt Baum:

Let’s take a quick break to hear from Ministry of Hemp, editor in chief Kit O’Connell to tell you about our new Ministry of Hemp Patreon kit. Take it away.

Kit O’Connell:

Hi, this is Kit O’Connell. I’m the editor in chief of Ministry of Hemp. I hope you’re enjoying the Ministry of Hemp podcast and the articles we’ve been publishing recently. But today I want to talk to you about the newest way that you can support what we do. So we’re launching a Patreon at patrion.com/ministryofhemp. And this Patreon will help our readers and fans contribute to what we do. With your help we will be able to make our podcast and produce even more great articles about science and information about hemp and CBD. We’ll publish more recipes and more guides. We’ll be able to work with more journalists, chefs, and authors of all kinds.

Kit O’Connell:

Not only that, but by joining our Patreon you’ll become a Hemp Insider. We’re launching a special newsletter just for our Patreons. Each month we’ll work with experts and advocates and other industry professionals to give you an inside look at hemp and offer you ways to help the return of our favorite plant nationwide. To get access to this new newsletter you can donate any amount on our Patreon, even as low as $3 a month. For a few dollars more we’ll send you some Ministry of Hemp stickers, and even samples of our favorite CBD products. If you join before February 15th at $25 or more, we’ll give you a Ministry of Hemp t-shirt as well. So if you love hemp and the work that we’re doing at the Ministry of Hemp, I hope you’ll support us. You can join at patrion.com/ministryofhemp. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash ministry of hemp, which is all one word. Thanks.

Standing out in the CBD industry

Matt Baum:

Laura, I want to thank you for being so upfront about the process and whatnot. A lot of people may have said, well, that’s company secrets or whatever. I was thinking about how you said we didn’t make this berry flavored. You could have made this taste like Kool-Aid, but in keeping that herbal flavor, it feels more real, I guess. I don’t know. That might sound silly. But I also very much like that I know exactly how much CBD I’m getting. What was the decision there?

Laurel Myers:

Part of it is that there’s so many options out there, and it’s really hard to know who to trust in the CBD space. There’s no shortage of brands. There’s no shortage of products. This is why you’re doing what you’re doing, right? You guys sit here and you vet and you review, to help customers find the right choices for them. I would say, for us, it’s everything [inaudible 00:16:44]. The entire design and experience of the product. Is this doing what it needs to do? Is this actually working?

Laurel Myers:

And actually working starts with, where’s my ingredient coming from? Is it high quality? Is it extracted in a quality and standardized way? Is that ingredient then optimized in a product that’s going to get me what I want? Because how you get the CBD onto your skin for example, is going to be different than what you want it to do when you’re taking it orally. And you want to make sure that it’s really optimized for both of those experiences, whether you’re looking to balance your skin because you’re dealing with some skin redness or other skin challenges, or because you’re feeling a little bit crazy with your day to day stress and your body needs a breath of fresh air.

Matt Baum:

Right.

Laurel Myers:

Two very different things. And I think one of the things that we do really differently is our science and our science led approach. All of our products are doctor formulated. So it’s not just, do we know how to make a quality product? But we’re working with doctors on looking at the ingredients, looking at the effect we’re trying have. And the problem we’re trying to solve, and making sure that we are using really efficacious plant-based botanicals to help drive that impact. So, it’s not marketing, it’s certainly backed by science. It’s the standards we use, right? It’s not just the standard we have for hemp, but our entire formula.

Laurel Myers:

Is it a clean formula? Is it free of neurotoxins and carcinogens, and all of these things? We actually have standards that are stricter than the EU. Which is something that’s really important to note because in the US we don’t have fantastic standards, certainly around cosmetics and the topical category. The US has only banned somewhere between 10 and 15 chemicals for use in personal care. The EU has banned over 1500. We have a list of over 3000 ingredients we won’t use in any of our topical products.

Matt Baum:

That’s amazing.

Laurel Myers:

And we’re very passionate about that. So it’s not just the CBD and the source of the CBD, and the quality and the efficacy of the design, but the overall safety and quality of the total product. And at the end of the day, is it something that customers need? How is it solving a problem for me? One of the challenges that we certainly feel with the tincture space is people don’t know how to take it. They’re already confused by CBD. They don’t know what it does, what it doesn’t do, how to take it, and now you’re giving them a product that is also confusing on top of that.

Laurel Myers:

How do I take this oil? Do I put it in my coffee, do I swallow it? Do I put it under my tongue? How much do I take? It’s really confusing and that additional confusion means people are probably not going to take it correctly, and then they’re not going to get the benefit, and then they’re not going to believe that CBD works, which is a big problem. So by solving the format, that does a huge, huge service to changing people’s perception on what a powerful ingredient this can be, when taken in the right way, in a way that’s easy for them.

Matt Baum:

Is that where the idea for this started initially, with the whole idea of just how can we take a single shot of CBD, tell someone exactly what is in there and make it super easy to deliver? Is that where this came from?

Laurel Myers:

Yeah. I think it was a big pain point that we saw that we ourselves as consumers, and a lot of the people that we knew, were feeling super confused. And I watched how people were using them and they weren’t using them correctly, and it was a really big challenge. And I heard a lot of people say, “Oh, CBD doesn’t work for me.” And then when you start to dig a little bit and understand why, there are so many ways where it could go south and not work for that person. And so one of our big goals is how do we make this easy? How do we make this something that is portable? I can take it on the go, I can put it in just about anything.

Matt Baum:

That’s what I really like.

Laurel Myers:

Yeah, it’s a really nice experience, right? The Goto, what I love about it, is it basically has a very light, almost cucumber type flavor and that’s just the flavor of the hemp itself. That’s all you’re tasting. And it’s so benign, you can put it in your water, you can put it in your coffee, put it in anything, and it’s so convenient.

Matt Baum:

Yeah, it really is.

Laurel Myers:

And I think that convenience without sacrificing efficacy is really where the root of this is. And I think having also just the single serve, have it on the go. I have three in my purse at anytime, some in my desk, some at home in my kitchen, they are wherever I’m going to be and they’re perfect.

Matt Baum:

Yeah. Definitely. I will say I was skeptical at first, just because I hadn’t seen a CBD product delivered like this. And when they showed up at my house, it’s like, well, let’s just try it. And it was shortly before the holidays and lo and behold, on new year’s day, I found myself a little hung over. And so I started the day with the Goto as I have, and put it right in my water and sucked down a pint of water, and I have to say, 30 minutes later I did not feel bad at all. And it’s in something that I didn’t notice. Maybe on a day to day basis… I noticed, okay, yeah, I feel pretty good. This is all right.

Bioavailability of CBD drink mixes

Matt Baum:

But I didn’t notice it until I had a correction take place basically. And it shocked me. I really liked it and I’ve been enjoying that aspect of, I know exactly what I’m getting, whether I’m dropping in my coffee or I’m dropping it in the water that I’m trying to drink in the mornings. I think it’s fairly brilliant. You had said earlier that it hits you very quickly. What is the difference between… obviously other than it’s administered, you know exactly what you’re getting, but what is the difference between taking a tincture of the same amount, and taking a dry product like this? Will the effects last longer? Shorter? What’s that like?

Laurel Myers:

Yeah. It’s not necessarily about the duration, it’s about, I think, two pieces here. How quickly but also how much, right? So if you’re talking about 10 milligrams of A and 10 milligrams of B, they’re not always created equal. So 10 milligrams of an oil, let’s say you end up absorbing two to 8% of that versus 10 milligrams of an optimized powder, it’s going to be far, far greater. So I think there’s a few different pieces here. And to answer your question regarding a tincture, it depends how you take it. If you put it in your food, or in your coffee, then it’s going to take probably, I don’t know, let’s call it an hour to really go through your digestive system and make its way. But at that point it’s getting fairly degraded by your digestive system as well, and your body’s processing it in a different way.

Laurel Myers:

Again, because it’s oil as opposed to something that is water soluble. Whereas something that is water soluble is going to move through your body more quickly and get to where it needs to go more quickly. Now, certainly the tinctures that go underneath your tongue, the idea there is that it’s much rapid absorbing because it’s actually not going through your stomach. It’s going through your cell membranes in your mouth, but not everybody takes it that way. And even when you do do that, doing that with an oil versus something that’s been prepared in a different type of solution format, is going to have different levels of bioavailability and optimization.

Matt Baum:

Sure. You’re also still swallowing a lot of it at that point too. Not all of it is absorbed.

Laurel Myers:

Yeah. And I will say, look, the science here is still being done every single day. There was a study done probably about two years ago that was looking at the oral absorption. When I say oral, I mean you ingest it, versus oral mucosal, think under the tongue tincture of CBD, and which one is actually more beneficial. Forget bioavailability per se. But those two different delivery systems. And that particular study found that actually the oral format seemed to show greater promise than the tincture. But that was just one study.

Laurel Myers:

At the end of the day, what we know right now is that science is looking at this, studies are being done. People want to understand, and what we know also are people’s experiences. Are they having a positive experience with this? Is this bringing what they want to their wellness routine? And I think for us we’re just thrilled because people love our stick pack. People rave about them. I think one of my favorite quotes is that it felt like my body took a breath of fresh air. And I thought that was really beautiful because it does describe that intangible experience that CBD can bring of regaining some of that balance that you didn’t even know wasn’t there in the first place, until you get it back.

Matt Baum:

Definitely. I’ve got to say you guys made a fan out of me and this is not an infomercial. This is just a podcast. In fact I’m going to beg you guys to send me some more of the Goto because I love it.

Laurel Myers:

I can do that. I can do that.

Getting to know Laurel Angelica Myers

Matt Baum:

That would be great. We’ve been talking about this product the whole time. Laurel, what is your background? Where did the CEO of Prima come from?

Laurel Myers:

Great question. I am a lifelong learner. I am curious about all things and never really sleep. I’m also a huge skeptic, so I will say, when I was first looking at this space, I was like, I don’t know, CBD seems like snake oil. This seems like a whole lot of hogwash. I don’t know if there’s a [inaudible 00:26:08] there. And I definitely had my pretty skeptical glasses on as I was looking at this when I first heard about this, maybe three or four years ago. And then as I started to do the research and learn about the endocannabinoid system and learn about how it works, it was a pretty big moment of awakening for me.

Laurel Myers:

One, because I had no idea my body had this massive system. [crosstalk 00:26:31] all these things and I thought, wow, I’m really neglecting it. And also overtaxing it on a daily basis. And I don’t know, for me, I’ve always been drawn to science. It’s very fascinating, but I am an operational thinker, at the end of the day. I spent the last seven years before founding Prima at the Honest Company overseeing the brand portfolio strategy and product development there. So I’ve developed personal care products, dietary supplements, diapers, wipes, make up, you name it. I’ve got a fairly robust background in consumer product development.

Matt Baum:

Impressive.

Laurel Myers:

That’s where that comes from. And you just learn by doing and asking lots of questions, and learning by getting your hands dirty.

Matt Baum:

Yeah. Getting your feet wet. Yeah.

Laurel Myers:

I didn’t want to go into bypassing the liver and membrane absorption. Because I’m also not a scientist by background. I know this because I work with scientists but that’s certainly… I’m not a chemist, I’m not a doctor, I’m not those things. But I know how to surround myself with really smart people who do, and who teach me and inform the decisions that we make to make sure that we’re bringing the best products to market for our customers.

Matt Baum:

Which is super important. And I like the idea here of a smaller dose, you know exactly what’s in it, which allows users to start low and go slow.

Laurel Myers:

Go slow. Exactly.

Matt Baum:

And I think your product is an-

Laurel Myers:

And listen to your body.

Matt Baum:

-excellent introduction to it. This powdered product. I think it’s a fantastic introduction because, like you said, you know exactly how much you’re getting. I really like that aspect of it.

Laurel Myers:

And the other component with that too, because this is so individualized, and everybody responds differently, having that single serve measurable packet being a level that you can experiment with. And say, you know what, today I’m going to do two, I’m going to do two in my coffee of that Brain Fuel because I feel like that’s what I need. Or I’m going to do half of one because maybe 10 milligrams is too much for me. But when you have a premeasured packet that’s really easy to go up and down and figure out what works for you. And that’s the other piece of it is as well, is giving people flexibility to have control over their own bodies.

Matt Baum:

Definitely.

Laurel Myers:

And figure out what’s going to work for them.

Matt Baum:

Laurel, thank you so much for your time today. This has been fantastic and huge thanks to Laurel and Prima for coming on the show and talking about their new product. Of course, you’ll be able to find the links to that in our show notes. And while you’re at Ministry of Hemp dot com be sure to check out the review of their Brain Fuel supplement by our very own Drew De Los Santos.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:

That about does it for another episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast. We want to thank everybody who has been downloading, calling us and supporting us and like Kit said in the middle of the show, if you really want to show your support, check us out on Patreon.com. I’ll be posting Ministry of Hemp podcast extras there. We’ve got one for free so you can check it out this time. It’s just Laurel and I rapping about the CBD business. And it didn’t quite fit in our interview but I thought it was still really good information and I’m going to try and include more stuff like that weekly over at Patreon. So please check us out. Patreon.com\ministryofhemp.

Matt Baum:

Over at ministryofhemp.com you may have forgotten it is Valentine’s day this weekend, so check out our guide to the best CBD Valentine’s day gifts of 2020. Kit and the gang have put together a really cool list of stuff including some delicious CBD chocolates from Incentive Gourmet. If you didn’t hear my interview with David Little CEO of Incentive Gourmet, check it out. It was last week. It was a lot of fun. If you want to get in touch with us at Ministry of Hemp, you can find us all over the place. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or you can even call us at (402) 819-6417. Now that’s a phone line we reserve for your hemp questions.

Matt Baum:

Maybe you want to learn more about we talked about today or anything hemp related. Call me, leave a message and Kit and myself will answer your questions on the show. We’ve done a couple of Q and A shows and they were a ton of fun. I got another one coming up soon. We love to hear from you. And if you’re too nervous to call, you can always email me, matt@wordpress-559906-1802377.cloudwaysapps.com. At Ministry of Hemp we believe an accessible world is a better world for everybody. So you can find a complete written transcript of this episode in the show notes. Next time on the show, we’re going to be talking about taking hemp and wellness education straight to the people. So I hope you tune in, but until then, remember to take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will ya? This is Matt Baum with the Ministry of Hemp podcast, signing off.

The post Powdered CBD Supplements: A Conversation With Prima COO Laurel Angelica Myers appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In this episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, our host Matt talks to Hilary Kelsay, CEO of Humming Hemp about their new hemp snack bars, adding hemp hearts and oil to your diet and the nutrition benefits of eating hemp. This is the latest part of our ongoing Women in Hemp series.

Then Matt shares his Spicy Fried Hemp Heart Shrimp recipe straight from the Ministry of Hemp test kitchen.

Recipe: Spicy Fried Shrimp with Hemp Hearts

Prep Time: about 60 minutes (frying time is variable)

Servings: Serves 2-4

Ingredients:

1. 1 cup yogurt or kefir, plain
2. 2 tsp Sri Racha or Sambal hot sauce (more if you like it spicy)
3. 1 cup hemp flour (or all-purpose flour)
4. 3 Tbsp of Humming Hemp Hemp Hearts (I used the spicy version)
5. 2 tsp salt and pepper
6. 1 lb shrimp, peeled and deveined
7. 3 cups canola or peanut oil
8. Shrimp brine (2 tsp salt and 1 tsp baking soda)

Directions:

1. Shell shrimp and toss with shrimp brine, refrigerate for 15 minutes to an hour.
2. Heat oil in pot to 375 degrees.
3. Toss all dry ingredients together
4. Pour yogurt (whip with a little water to loosen) or kefir and hot sauce into a separate container and stir well.
5. Press shrimp lightly in paper towels to dry.
6. Dredge shrimp in the dry mixture, then into the wet mix, then back into the dry mixture and rest on parchment or glass pan.
7. In small groups fry the shrimp with a dry metal sieve or tongs until golden brown.
8. Remove and place on a paper towel to drain excess oil.
9. Enjoy!

Sponsored by Prima

This episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast is sponsored by Prima.

Prima has a full line of amazing CBD products. Our staff are a big fan of their CBD elixirs, easy drink mixes you can add to water, coffee, or your favorite refreshing beverage. Check put Prima Brain Fuel Elixir for the perfect way to start your day with some added focus.

We also recently teamed up with Prima to talk about the best natural sleep aids that could help you rest better.

Use coupon code ‘MINISTRY15’ for 15% off your complete order at Prima. Thanks again for sponsoring our podcast!

Send us your feedback!

We want to hear from you too. Send us your questions and you might hear them answered on future shows like this one! Send us your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, email matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

Subscribe to the Ministry of Hemp Podcast

If you like what you hear be sure to subscribe to the Ministry of Hemp podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podbay, Stitcher, Pocketcasts, Google Play or your favorite podcast app.

Hemp hearts & healthy eating: Complete episode transcript

Below you will find the full written transcript of this episode:

Matt Baum: The Ministry of Hemp Podcast is brought to you by Prima. Prima has a whole line of amazing CBD products available at prima.co. Head over there and use the code MINISTRY15 for 15% off your purchase just for being a Ministry of Hemp listener. That’s prima.co. I’m Matt Baum and this is the Ministry of Hemp Podcast brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education.

Matt Baum: It’s officially mid January, so we find ourselves in the dog days of winter. And I don’t know if you’re like me, but one thing I like to do when it’s cold outside is stay home and cook. So I’ve had a lot of food on my mind lately, and today on the show, we’re going to talk to someone who wants to bring hemp into your kitchen in some really cool ways. Her name is Hilary Kelsay and she is the CEO of Humming Hemp. We’re going to talk to her about their Humming Hemp nutrition bars, their hemp hearts, their hemp oil, and so much more. And after that I’m even going to lay a little recipe on you that’ll teach you how to get some hemp into your own diet. But first, let’s get to my conversation with Hilary Kelsay.

Meeting Hilary Kelsay

Matt Baum: Tell me a little bit about you. You didn’t just start off as a CEO of a hemp startup. How did we get to hemp?

Hilary Kelsay: Right. So I am the wife of an American beekeeper and we own and operate a successful Pacific Northwest honey company called Humble Honeycomb. And it was through the honey company that I learned about hemp. I was at a trade show and this was in 2017, early 2017, and there were some American hemp farmers there. They just wanted to see if we could put our bees on their hemp fields to make hemp honey. And this conversation became quite an involved conversation. And then quick little fun tidbit, you can’t make honey out of industrial hemp because you need both pollen and nectar, and industrial hemp doesn’t quite supply that for a honey.

Matt Baum: Is that the issue of the hemp flower itself basically?

Hilary Kelsay: Right, right. So yeah, there’s not enough nectar. So the bees would be able to get some pollen, but there would be no nectar for the bees to take back to the hive.

Matt Baum: Sure. That makes sense.

Hilary Kelsay: These farmers just kept telling me about what they were doing and I was so moved by their entrepreneurial spirit and their forward thinking. And then they started telling me about all the nutritional benefits of hemp as a protein and Omega rich super food. Right? So I came home from this trade show to my beekeeper husband, and we have three kids under the age of five.

Matt Baum: Oh wow.

Hilary Kelsay: Yes, I’m a busy full-time mommy as well. I said, “Why would we not take American grown hemp to the market?” I said, “We already have the distribution network built because of the honey company. We already have the relationships. These people already know us. Why wouldn’t we package it and take it to market?” And he gave me the big double thumbs up and said, “You go do that. Let’s stay married. You go do that, and you make it big. Take it big. Make it go beyond the Pacific Northwest. And share your love with everybody.” So that’s what I did.

Matt Baum: Right if you find work basically, type stuff. Let me know if you find work and send money home.

Hilary Kelsay: Exactly, exactly.

Matt Baum: So from there you start Humming Hemp from there and you’re making these Hummingbars, as you call them. And I see one is honey and cinnamon. Are you using the same honey that your husband started making?

Hilary Kelsay: Well, we have a lot of honey connections, if you will. So it is because of our honey company that we are able to have such a great tasting bar. I would put it that way.

Matt Baum: Okay, fair enough.

Hilary Kelsay: But what we did initially is here in Richland, Washington, we have a great just entrepreneurial scene, and it’s just full of entrepreneurs. So I went out and talked to some of my friends and said, “Hey, you want to start a hemp company?” And they got very excited. And so I formed a team of local entrepreneurs here in Eastern Washington, and that’s exactly what we did.

Hilary Kelsay: And so how we started, we took what we called, at Humming Hemp, we call them our pantry staples because we love hemp so much, we want every American household to have hemp oil, hemp protein powder, and hemp hearts in their pantry to consume on a daily and weekly basis. Right?

Matt Baum: Sure.

Hilary Kelsay: And those products are awesome, but we all know that the household adoption rate of those products is still fairly low. So then it evolved to, okay, wow, we have this amazingly delicious, I’m speaking of hemp heart in particular, super food that people don’t know about. And if they do know anything about it, it’s pretty much misinformation. Right? And there’s just a very small tribe of us who really know it and understand it and are already eating it.

The nutritional power of hemp hearts

Matt Baum: So can we talk about the hemp heart for just a minute while we’re on the subject? Like what is it that you love about the hemp heart? And let’s talk about a little bit of misinformation and the real information.

Hilary Kelsay: I love that they are the most powerful and convenient super food on the market. So at Humming Hemp we’ve coined the phrase “powerful nutrition”. And what that really means is hemp’s got more protein per ounce than chicken, it’s got 10 times more iron per ounce than spinach, it’s got four times more potassium than chia seeds. You know, I don’t want to hack too bad on chia seeds, but they’re really trying to keep their super food status. And so they’re touting potassium right now. And it’s like, “Hello, hemp hearts have four times the potassium.” Right? And then let’s talk about the omega fatty acids, the most balanced omega fatty acids on planet earth with the perfect ratio of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids.

Matt Baum: That’s that three to one ratio that is on your website. Right?

Hilary Kelsay: Exactly, right.

Matt Baum: Okay. The fact that there’s four times as much protein is chicken kind of blows my mind.

Hilary Kelsay: Oh, I know.

Matt Baum: I had no idea.

Hilary Kelsay: Right? And so if you look at the main food trends right now it’s plant based and it’s protein, and that’s everything hemp is, it’s a complete plant based protein and you don’t have to cook it. You don’t have to soak it like other seeds and nuts. You know, for the keto world, hemp hearts have 50% fewer carbs than almonds. And so what we’re really trying to show people, Americans that you can do, is that you can snack on hemp hearts straight out of the bag.

Matt Baum: Just like a nut.

Hilary Kelsay: Exactly. So we have two flavors of hemp hearts. We have a spicy and a honey Aleppo, and they’re in these, it’s a new brand block for us, if you will. Yeah. We encourage you to just literally snack on them with a spoon. They are so amazingly delicious, and they’re convenient and they’re versatile. The most convenient and versatile superfood there is.

Matt Baum: So what do I do with my hemp hearts? Let’s say I’m cooking, and I’ve got hemp hearts. I’ve got eight ounces of your hemp hearts, I’m looking at right now, like the plain ones. What can I do with these in my pantry?

Hilary Kelsay: You can sprinkle them on literally everything and make whatever you’re eating richer with nutrition and richer in taste.

Matt Baum: You’re adding protein, basically.

Hilary Kelsay: Yeah. Yep. You’re adding all of that protein and omegas.

Matt Baum: That’s very cool. So this would be something that if I were a vegan, I’m not, but let’s say I were, this would be a great place to add some protein to your diet basically.

Hilary Kelsay: Absolutely. And I am a vegan. Well, the biggest honey eating vegan there is.

Humming Hemp’s Hummingbars

Matt Baum: I don’t fault any vegans that eat honey. I’ve heard the arguments and I just don’t know where I come down on that. So now, let me ask you, everything you guys do is vegan, right, at Humming Hemp?

Hilary Kelsay: No. So let’s go back to that Hummingbar, speaking of not vegan. So we love hemp hearts and obviously I have a fond affection honey. And so we really started to pose the question and then answer it of, how do you take the most powerful, convenient, sustainable, we could stop there for second if you want to, sustainable super food on the planet, and put it in a form that Americans have already adopted, love eating and trust? Right? And for us, me being a busy mom of three kids under the age of five, it was a protein energy bar.

Matt Baum: Makes sense.

Hilary Kelsay: So we set out to deliver the most delicious and powerful nutrition bar we can. And what we did is we combined American grown hemp heart with raw USA honey.

Matt Baum: Okay.

Hilary Kelsay: And that’s the Hummingbar. So we have five great flavors, but the base of every single flavor is American grown hemp hearts and raw USA honey.

Matt Baum: So vegan, yes, but if you’re the kind of vegan that doesn’t eat honey, no.

Hilary Kelsay: Exactly.

Matt Baum: And I would argue if you’re that kind of vegan, you’re missing out. So I mean, you should be eating honey. It’s delicious.

Hilary Kelsay: Exactly. I know. It’s so good for you.

Matt Baum: So tell me about the hemp that you guys are using for the grains and the oils and whatnot. Are you growing this yourself or does this come from a local farm?

Hilary Kelsay: We are not. So we partner with a handful of small to medium American farmers who are growing industrial hemp specifically for food. Because there’s so many genetics out there for CBD and whatnot.

Matt Baum: Of course.

Hilary Kelsay: So these farms and [inaudible 00:10:25] are specifically for food.

Matt Baum: Okay. And the food based hemp that’s being grown, I mean, do they have to worry about THC levels, like everybody else, like the CBD market? Or is it the industrial stuff that’s food grade, is there something where you don’t have to worry about that at all because the CBD levels and THC levels are so low?

Hilary Kelsay: Well, I’m a big fan of not reinventing the wheel. And so our progressive neighbors to the north, Canada have been cultivating industrial hemp for two decades, right? 20 years. They just had their 20th year. They’ve grown it for food and textiles for a long time. And so the seeds and the genetics are there that are good and that are proven. And so that’s what we’re seeing a lot of our American farmers do, rather than maybe potentially get some bad seed out of Colorado or whatnot. We don’t want our farmers to take that risk and not have products that they can take to market.

Matt Baum: Absolutely. So the Hummingbars themselves, I’m going to guess these are your biggest sellers. They look really slick.

Hilary Kelsay: Yeah. So we literally launched those, so all of 2018 with me in my kitchen with my kids, eating them, copious amounts of test Hummingbars. And then we finalized our recipes and formulations and commercialized them at the very end of 2018. Did our first production run at the beginning of 2019, in January. And then in March, just two months later in early March of 2019 we launched the Hummingbar at Expo West down in Anaheim, California. We came out of Expo West with national distribution with Kroger as well as a handful of a few other small chains across the country. And then from there it’s just been a big snowball effect and we are so excited.

Matt Baum: So should I think about, like this Hummingbar, should I think about it the way I would think of like a Clif bar or a Larabar? Something I can throw in my bag when I’m going on a bike ride or something I can have after the gym? Is it the same type of idea?

Hilary Kelsay: Yeah, it truly is the anytime bar, same exact idea, right? You’re going to put it in your gym bag, the busy mom’s going to rip it open in the middle of the grocery store when her screaming kids are screaming. It’s that good for you, permissible snack that is absolutely delicious and you can know, no matter who you are or what you’re doing, that it is good for every single cell in your body, right? So if you’re the male cyclist, it’s for you. If you’re the teenage girl, it’s for you. If you’re my three year old toddler, it’s for you. If you’re the busy mom, it’s for you. I mean, no matter who you are, the Hummingbar is for you and it is delicious.

Matt Baum: And it’s gluten free, so you really don’t have to worry about any food additives or food allergies either. There’s no nuts and no gluten. Right?

Hilary Kelsay: Exactly. Exactly. It’s free from most of the main allergens. We are processed in the facility that also processes peanuts, so that’s always a concern for folks. But it’s part of that. I mean, our honey cinnamon literally only has four ingredients: American grown hemp heart, raw USA honey, and then cinnamon and sea salt. And that’s it. And so our bars range from four ingredients up to technically nine ingredients, our pumpkin seed and spice, we have to literally lists all the different spices that make up pumpkin spice. But the core of every bar is minimal ingredients that you know, that you have already been eating, that you trust, you can pronounce. There’s nothing added and nothing fortified. All of the macro and micronutrients come from the ingredients themselves.

Using hemp protein powder

Matt Baum: That’s very cool. Tell me about the hemp protein powder. Is this the same type of thing that I’m thinking like, I’m making a smoothie because I’m going to the gym, I would add a hemp protein powder instead of some weird GNC muscle guy powder or something?

Hilary Kelsay: Exactly, yes. So it is green, it is raw. It is sustainable. It’s rich, nutty, and nutritious tasting. And it is so, so good for you. Not everybody’s a fan of the hempy, earthy, grassy taste of hemp. But if you do like it or if you can get past it, it’s one of the cleanest, most sustainable protein sources on the planet.

Matt Baum: See, personally I really like it so I don’t have a problem with any of the tinctures I’ve tried or the powders that I’ve added to things, it doesn’t bother me. It’s got almost got like a tea type flavor to it and I kind of like that.

Hilary Kelsay: Yeah, I like it too. People are always like, “What does it taste like?” You know, hemp in general. And I’m like, “Well, it tastes like a sunflower seed and a pine nut had a super baby.”

Matt Baum: That’s a really good description. That is an excellent description. I’m going to steal that from you. That’s good.

Hilary Kelsay: And they’re like, “Oh, I love pine nuts.” And I’m like, “Oh, you’ll love hemp.” And then lo and behold, they do.

Matt Baum: Lot cheaper than pine nuts too. You don’t have to go out to the forest and find them. You know, it’s incredible.

Sponsored by Prima

Matt Baum: Let’s take a quick break to hear about our sponsor this week, Prima, they’re over@prima.co on the internet, and they have a full line of amazing CBD products with free shipping on orders over $75 and a free 30-day return guarantee. The good people of Prima were nice enough to send me some of their new beverage infusion samples. There’s one for the morning, one for noon and one for night. I have been making a daily regimen of the brain fuel one before I go to work, and I got to say, I really like it. It’s not sweet. It’s got a nice sort of earthy almost tea flavor to it. You can pour it in your water or your coffee, give it a stir and it dissolves almost instantly, and the effects hit you pretty fast. I’ve really liked it so far. And they also have one that is for resting easy, if you have trouble sleeping. And they have another one that’s just called The GoTo for your normal daily homeostasis. I got to say, I am a really big fan.

Matt Baum: And they have some really cool technology behind it too. If you’ve been listening to the show, you know that CBD bonds with oil very well, but oil does not bond with water very well. This new powdered CBD that they offer makes the cannabinoids in CBD that you’re trying to get much more bioavailable, and that is what’s really important, optimal bioavailability. If you like this show and you want to support Ministry of Hemp, please head over to prima.co, check out their whole line of CBD infused skincare and their new powdered elixirs. Head to prima.co now and use the code MINISTRY15, that’s MINISTRY15, no space, for 15% off your purchase. And any purchase over $75 gets free shipping and free 30-day returns.

Matt Baum: We’re big fans of Prima here at Ministry of Hemp, so much so that we are going to have them on the show very soon. Head over to prima.co that’s P-R-I-M-A.co, and shop their whole line of skincare, therapeutic body care and wellness essentials made for the whole you. At Primo, it’s all good.

Using hemp seed oil for healthy eating

Matt Baum: So tell me about the hemp oil. So this is also made from the seeds. It’s extracted from there.

Hilary Kelsay: Yeah. So the pantry staples. So we covered the hemp hearts, right? So those are shelled hemp seeds. So think sunflower seed is what I like to tell people, the hard outer shell is removed and what remains in the hemp world is called a hemp heart. And then we just covered the hemp protein powder. So that too is a raw straight out of the farm field hemp product. It’s just ground into a protein powder.

Matt Baum: So this is the only one that you really doing anything with, you’re expressing the seeds basically.

Hilary Kelsay: Yeah, but it’s all cold pressed. No solvents, no chemicals. So it’s just straight out of the farm field, it’s just a different process, right? We didn’t shell it into heart, we didn’t grind it into a protein powder, we’re cold pressing it into an oil. And hemp oil has a smoke point of 300 degrees Fahrenheit. So it’s not a cooking oil. It’s a low temperature finishing oil or a supplement. So we have a little eight ounce bottle that people use for omega supplementing. So we have a lot of that in the natural channel. And then the more conventional grocery store channels love our 375 milliliter glass bottle, and it sits in the conventional oil set, and people like to use it for bread dipping with balsamic, for drizzling on soups. It makes amazing salad dressing.

Matt Baum: That’s exactly whre I was going to go with that. You can make a salad dressing with a benefit as opposed to just putting olive oil or canola oil, which is just going to make you a little fat, you know?

Hilary Kelsay: Yeah. No, it’s so true. And then my husband’s favorite use of it is he uses it instead of butter on his popcorn, he pops a bag of popcorn and then he tops it with our flavored hemp hearts and hemp oil. And it is absolutely delicious.

Matt Baum: That sounds excellent. What kind of flavor does the hemp oil have? Is it very neutral?

Hilary Kelsay: You know, I love it because it’s like Frankenstein green and then it’s pretty nutty.

Matt Baum: Okay, that sounds delicious. Similar to like a sunflower seed oil?

Hilary Kelsay: Yeah.

Matt Baum: Okay. That makes sense. Now let me ask you, you’ve talked a lot about the nutrition and whatnot, do you come from a nutrition background? How did you get interested in this?

Hilary Kelsay: I think nutrition ha just always been in my DNA. I’m a big believer and always have been that food is medicine. Everything we choose to put in our bodies affects every cell in our body. Now, don’t get me wrong, we just all came off the holiday season and we all indulged. And I’m also a firm believer in eat, drink and be merry as well. But on a day to day basis, I’ve always been very mindful of what I put in my mouth and how I’m fueling my body, and preventative maintenance, if you will. And now even more so that I’m a mama of three little babies, you know, it’s like I want to be around for a long time, and so if I eat good and have good nutrition, I can avoid a lot of illness in my life and be there for my loved ones.

Matt Baum: Absolutely. So let me ask you, where do I go to get this? You said you had a deal with Kroger. I know we have a Kroger here. I’m in Nebraska and we have Kroger here. How far have you penetrated outside of the West Coast?

Hilary Kelsay: Oh my goodness, we are all over. So our Kroger distribution is national. So just get on our website, find a location closest to you. If for some reason we’re not close to you, you can always purchase at humminghemp.com. But I mean, we’re down in the Carolinas, we’re in Colorado, we’re in the Pacific Northwest, we’re in Northern California. We’re all over. And 2020 is definitely going to be another year of rapid growth for us.

Matt Baum: Awesome!

Hilary Kelsay: Yeah, we’re excited.

Focusing on hemp nutrition

Matt Baum: Speaking of growth, have you guys felt any pushback? Like a lot of the CBD farmers or CBD companies that I’ve talked to had experienced serious pushback with their local government and senate. But you’re one of the first people I’ve talked to this dealing with hemp as a food item. Did you have any of the same headaches?

Hilary Kelsay: We haven’t. We haven’t. Right. So again, we’re just leveraging what Canada’s been doing for 20 years and I’m using it for our company as a launch pad forward. Right? They’ve already paved the way. Manitoba Harvest is literally in every grocery store across the country. Our products are now sitting side by side theirs. You know, I’m an Oregonian, I’m in Washington now obviously, but Bob’s Red Mill carries hemp hearts and stuff. So you have these big, proven, trusted food companies that have hemp in their lineup. And so we’re just following right behind them and we haven’t had push back.

Hilary Kelsay: The other thing we are choosing to do is, we drew a firm line in the sand and said, “Okay, CBD is awesome. It’s bright, it’s shiny.” Us CEOs get distracted by shiny objects, right, that can be exciting and make us money. And we’ve just had to say, you know, “This is who we are as Humming Hemp. These are our core values. We’re all about food and nutrition and how hemp…” Because for us that’s the definition of him for our company is that powerful nutrition. And so we said, “We’re not going to cross the line and start putting CBD in our food or any of that. Even if there’s part of the market that wants that, we’re not going to do it, so that we can avoid the FDA push back.” There’s other companies that are doing that, that are on the front lines paving the way and I’m happy they are. And we watch them and we respect them, but for us that wasn’t the move we wanted to make.

Matt Baum: It sounds like you’re saving yourself a serious headache. So good for you.

Hilary Kelsay: I know, I know. One of the things I love too is just our whole message that hemp is literally for everyone. Right?

Matt Baum: Right.

Hilary Kelsay: So whether you’re already a Birkenstock wearing stereotypical hempy hempster, or just whoever you are, it’s for you, right? If your favorite food is macaroni and cheese, hemp is still for you, just top your macaroni and cheese with him hearts, it’s delicious.

Matt Baum: Yeah. Instead of breadcrumbs. There you go.

Hilary Kelsay: Right, right, have your carbs and put some hemp on it.

Matt Baum: And way better for you, yeah.

Hilary Kelsay: On our website we have a picture of an ice cream cone being topped with hemp hearts, and everybody’s like, “Oh, this just seems so contradictory. Why do you have an ice cream cone?” And it’s like, “No, this is who we are. You are going to be who you are and you’re going to eat what you want to eat, but you can always make it more powerful and more nutritious and delicious by adding hemp to it.”

Matt Baum: Sure. I mean, just because it’s ice cream doesn’t mean it can’t also be good for you. I mean, sure, I love rolling ice cream in peanuts or whatever. And think of all those new places that you go to where they have the rolled ice cream and they’re stuffing it. What if you put something that was delicious and good for you in it? I mean, it just makes sense. We don’t need to stick cigarettes in our ice cream to make it more delicious. I mean, come on.

Hilary Kelsay: I like it. I like it.

Matt Baum: Hilary, thank you for coming on the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. You obviously have a real passion for this.

Hilary Kelsay: Hemp can change the world. I want to one day fix world hunger with hemp, and I really think we could.

Matt Baum: I don’t disagree. I think you’re right on. Well, awesome, Hilary. Thank you so much.

Hilary Kelsay: Thank you.

Matt Baum: I don’t want to take up anymore of your time. You’ve got babies and bees, and a farm, and a husband. My god, I can’t imagine.

Matt Baum: If you’d like to add some hemp to your diet or try the Humming Hemp bars, you can find links to Humming Hemp and Humble Honey Company in the show notes for this episode.

Cooking with hemp hearts

Matt Baum: Kelsay was nice enough to send me a whole box full of their samples and there’s a bunch of great stuff in there including their hemp hearts. And so I figured, why not get them out and mess around in my kitchen with them. And I did just that. The other night I made a red curry for my wife and I, I took some red curry paste and some coconut milk and made the curry base. Not going full in there. But I did dry roast some sweet potatoes and some onions as well. Dry roasting is great because you don’t cover anything in oil, so you’re not masking any flavor, and the flavors of the sweet potato and the onion really come out. And when you do introduce them into the curry, they just soak it up like a sponge. Absolutely delicious. But for the final element of this curry, I wanted to add a little crunch. So I decided to try a take on an old fried shrimp recipe that I used to use at one of the restaurants I worked at.

Matt Baum: Step one when you want to make any shrimp dish is to brine your shrimp. It’s quick and it’s easy, and it makes for an amazing finished product. Basically, if you’ve got a pound of shrimp, you’re looking at about a teaspoon of salt and a fourth teaspoon of baking powder, and just toss it together, give it a good whisk, throw it in the fridge for 15 minutes and up to an hour. You’re going to have nice crunchy shrimp in the end.

Matt Baum: Next up, we’re going to set up a basic dredging station. Dredging basically means you have your liquid and then you have your dry ingredient that you’re going to coat your protein with. In this case, we’re going to take a cup of either yogurt or kefir, which is like a yogurt liquid. Make sure that you’re using plain. We don’t want flavored yogurt here. If you have to use regular yogurt, that’s fine. You can whip it until it breaks down consistency a little bit and you can even add just a little bit of water if you need to if you think it’s not thin enough. Now, I fully believe in seasoning every step of the dredging process, so I like to add a little sriracha or you could use sambal, both of which are Asian hot sauces that are going to just lift the flavor and add a little bit of spice in the end.

Matt Baum: Next up, we get together our dry ingredients. So we’re going to go for one cup of hemp flour. Now if you don’t have hemp flour, you can use normal all purpose flour as well, but we’re trying to get hemp in our diet here. Then I added three tablespoons of the Humming Hemp spicy hemp hearts, because I love spicy, directly to the flour, along with a tablespoon of pepper and a tablespoon of salt. You want to mix that real well. The whisk is perfect for this.

Matt Baum: Now it’s time to dredge the shrimp. And you want to start with a dry product, so if they’re still a little moist, throw them between some paper towels, give them a nice little pap, don’t squeeze them too hard, we’re not trying to destroy them. From there, the shrimp go into the flour, hemp heart, salt and pepper mixture. I like to use a small sieve to shake off the excess, and then I drop them directly into the yogurt. From there, a different sieve scoops them up, I drain off the extra yogurt, and back into the dry mixture for one more coating. Again, shake off the excess and then you can either transfer them to a glass baking dish or some parchment paper.

Matt Baum: Now it’s time to fry our shrimp. So I use a small pot with about three cups of canola oil over a medium flame until it gets up to about 375 degrees. A candy thermometer is really good for testing a temperature like this. But if you don’t have access to one of those, you can dip your fingers into your dredging liquid and then into your flour mixture, wad up a little ball of that and drop it in the oil. If it starts sizzling, you know you’re at a good cooking temperature.

Matt Baum: You don’t want to fry the shrimp in too large of batches because they can stick together, they won’t all cook at the same time. So just make sure you go a few at a time. Watch as they start to brown up, and when they do, use that same sieve that you were using to shake off the excess dry ingredients, and scoop them out and set them on a paper towel lined plate so they can drain any excess oil. Keep in mind you’re using hot oil here, so you want to make sure that your sieve is metal and that it’s not wet, otherwise you’re going to get snapping and popping.

Matt Baum: Now if you have an air fryer, you can probably skip all of this and just throw the shrimp in the air fryer after they’ve been dredged. I haven’t had a chance to try it in mine yet, but I assume it’s probably still pretty delicious. Once all your shrimp are fried, they are ready to eat, and they’re going to be absolutely delicious. The hemp hearts adds this amazing crunch. Like I said, I served this with a red curry over rice and I just dropped the fried shrimp right on top for a nice little crunch. Not only did the spicy hemp hearts add some nutty, crunchy goodness, they made the dish more nutritious too. They’re definitely a healthier ingredient than the corn meal that I would’ve normally used to fry the shrimp.

Matt Baum: I’ll be sure to include my recipe for spicy hemp heart fried shrimp in the notes for this episode, which you can find at ministryofhemp.com.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum: That about does it for this episode of Ministry of Hemp Podcast. Huge thanks to Hilary Kelsay for coming on the show. And I would love to hear from you about your ideas about getting him into your diet. You can always shoot me a message at matt:ministryofhemp.com if you want to send me an email. Or you can follow us on Twitter @MinistryOfHemp. And of course hit us on Facebook/ministryofhemp. By the way, you can give us a call if you’ve got questions: (402) 819-6417 is the Ministry of Hemp phone line, and we love to answer your questions on the show, so please give us a call. At the Ministry of Hemp we believe that an accessible world is a better world for everybody, so you can find a complete written transcript of this episode in the show notes at ministryofhemp.com. While you’re there at ministryofhemp.com be sure to sign up for our newsletter so you can be the first to hear about all the cool articles that Kit and the gang are throwing up online.

Matt Baum: Next time on the show, I hope you’re still hungry because we are talking CBD and chocolate. But right now it’s time for me to get out of here. So this is Matt Baum reminding you, take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will you? This is the Ministry of Hemp Podcast signing off.

The post Hemp Hearts & Healthy Eating: Talking With Hilary Kelsay of Humming Hemp appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In this episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, our host Matt sits down for a conversation with Raven Faber of EngErotics for a conversation on motherhood, engineering, starting a business, sex toys and CBD. This is the latest part of our ongoing Women in Hemp series.

Raven is a black woman who started her career in STEM and ended up founding a healthy, educational sex toy company, EngErotics. Using her engineering background Raven has developed sex toys that work for people of all sexual orientations, genders and body types. Matt sat down with Raven to discuss their recent addition of CBD products to their line and how CBD can affect and even help improve intimacy.

Previously, we reviewed EngErotics Oh!Nectar, a CBD-infused oil which can be used for intimate massages or as a lubricant. If you’re interested in trying their products, you can use coupon code The_Ministry to get 10% off your first EngErotics order.

Send us your feedback!

We want to hear from you too. Send us your questions and you might hear them answered on future shows like this one! Send us your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, email matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

Subscribe to the Ministry of Hemp Podcast

If you like what you hear be sure to subscribe to the Ministry of Hemp podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podbay, Stitcher, Pocketcasts, Google Play or your favorite podcast app.

Sex & CBD with Raven Faber: Complete episode transcript

Below you will find the full written transcript of this episode:

Matt Baum: I’m at Matt Baum, and his is the Ministry of Hemp Podcast brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education.

I’ve been talking to a lot of women who are doing very exciting things in hemp on the show recently, and today we’re going to talk to another one. Her name is Raven Faber, and she is the CEO of a company called EngErotics. Raven doesn’t directly work in CBD or hemp, but she does bring CBD into your business. You see, Raven works in sex toys and she comes from an engineering background and she is amazing. She’s so fun to talk to and you guys are going to hear my conversation with her real soon. Now, some of you might be saying, “Well, what does CBD have to do with sex toys at all?” You’ll see, trust me, but when I started thinking about the differences between the hemp market, specifically the CBD market and the sex toy market, they have a lot of things in common. Both industries have been battling a lack of education and understanding that can shunt them to darker disreputable places.

When it comes to CBD, you’ll find less than reputable companies making all kinds of medical claims about how it’ll cure your allergies and make you see better and cure your cancer. The same thing knows with the erotic sex toy industry. For too long, you’ve had to go to very male humor driven porn shops, full of essentially joke memorabilia that doesn’t do anyone any good. Raven found a way to, not only help people enjoy sex, enjoy themselves and accept themselves for who they are, but introduce CBD into their sex life as well with some pretty cool results. While we don’t get into the nitty gritty of things, today’s episode is going to be pretty explicit, so if you have little ones, again, this might be a good headphones experience, but I’m really excited about talking to Raven, and I think you guys will think she’s really cool too. Here’s my conversation with Raven Faber of EngErotics.

Meet Raven Faber

Raven, welcome to the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. Nice to have you aboard.

Raven Faber: Yeah, thank you for having me. This is this really cool.

Matt Baum: Before we go into like the CBD stuff, tell me about EngErotics. Tell me how about how this came about because it sounds like you were kind of a nerd and you got interested in some stuff and you just took it to its logical conclusions over there.

Raven Faber: No, still am. I’m currently a nerd. Yeah, EngErotics is my first baby, I guess next to my actual babies and my cat, which is my fur baby. I still am very much a nerd. I’m an engineer by profession and I practiced in the corporate world for 10 plus years, about 12, 13 years before. Well, actually, I founded EngErotics while I was still working on the tail end of that, but yes, I’m a structural engineer. Went to CU Boulder here in Colorado and got my bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering and my master’s degree in civil engineering. My area …

Matt Baum: Okay. Let me stop you real quick here.

Raven Faber: Yeah.

Matt Baum: How do you go, and this is … I’m not doubting what you do. I think what you do is necessary and important and kick-ass. Thank you for doing it, but how does one go from structural engineering to engineering erotica? Well, not erotica, but erotic tools and whatnot.

Raven Faber: Yeah. I feel you. Well, first of all, there are a lot of similarities between structural engineering and sex toys and sex in general because structural engineers, we engineer things to stand up straight and not fall down. Erections, we erect things.

Matt Baum: Ideally that’s what the erection does, right?

Raven Faber: Yeah. I’m also trying to erect things over here.

Matt Baum: Fair enough.

Raven Faber: The story is, is that my career in engineering and my career in sex toys, they were running alongside each other in parallel, believe it or not. When I was in grad school, I was broke, and I didn’t know that the recession was going to be a thing. I was just trying to get … I was about to go to grad school. I actually started in direct sales. So, I was a sex toy sales lady. I did sex toy parties. I started doing that in grad school as a way to make some extra money. I was like, “Yeah, I’ll do this thing and make some money.” What I didn’t know is that I was going to like it a lot and I didn’t know I was going to be really, really, really good at it.

I actually continued to be a sex toy consultant on the side while I was being an engineer during the week, working 40 plus hours a week during the week. Then, on the weekends I’d go make some extra change, sling and dildos and talking about vibrators. That’s how I learned about sales and being … and not just sales, but being able to sell something that’s so personal and maybe even like taboo and dirty. Taboo, big air quotes, taboo and dirty.

Matt Baum: The Ministry of Hemp does not think it is taboo or dirty, but yes.

Raven Faber: I figured.

Matt Baum: I understand what you’re saying. This is a very [inaudible 00:05:58] show and we will not use those words.

Raven Faber: Yeah, you guys would have to bleep me out every other word.

Matt Baum: No, don’t worry about that.

Raven Faber: Learning how to sell a product and put the client at ease when it comes to buying their first vibrator or their first butt plug, whatever it is. I met all kinds of women. I’d say like I did this like for nearly a decade. From the time that I was, oh gosh, I was just barely 22 up until, gosh, my late 20s, and for reference, I’ll be 34 in March. I was an engineer in the corporate world and a sex toy sales lady for about the same length of time. During that time, I really liked selling. I liked it and I was finding that the direct sales route was not really what it was cracked up to be for me.

I wasn’t really getting everything that I needed out of it. I started to notice that in a variety of the things that were being offered because its direct sales. I would never bash anybody if that’s what they want to do, but you get your kit and you have your catalog. Most consultants, you don’t really get to choose what you’re offering. You just surely don’t have any say in the design process.

Matt Baum: So, this is the scientist nerd in you started to go …

Raven Faber: Yes, exactly.

Matt Baum: I think I can make a better vibrator than that.

Raven Faber: Yeah, exactly. I started to notice design flaws, things that could be very easily fixed, but they were just designed a little bit differently, and I started noticing some real gaps in the market. I noticed that a lot of what we were offering and how we were marketing it, very, very heteronormative. I know for the longest time, I’m not going to mention any company names obviously, but I know for the longest time that the idea was to have a fun ladies only party. You can imagine how that’s going to get muddy because you meet somebody who identifies as a woman and maybe they have not gone through their transition. It’s painful and expensive from what I understand. It’s like, listen, I’m not going to do ball checks at the door and reach my hand under somebody’s skirt. It made me really uncomfortable, that whole premise.

Then also, the things that we were offering they weren’t necessarily inclusive to other sexual identities, other gender identities. It was a very … yeah. We’ve gotten better over the years, but historically, the sex toy has been very status quo, very heteronormative.

Making better sex toys

Matt Baum: It’s so bizarre me. That blows my mind because it just seems like if there’s one industry that should fundamentally understand this stuff, you know what I mean? And be like, “Look, we’re not taking anybody’s crap and we’re not judging anybody. If you want a toy, we got it for you.” It seems like it should be the sex toy industry. Right?

Raven Faber: You would think that. Granted, things have gotten so much better over the past eight or 10 years, but there was a period of time where it just wasn’t that, it really was not that. Think back to, this was well before I knew anything about toys, because I was a little, I was a child, the late ’80s, early ’90s. You’d go get sex toys from the CD shop on the bad side of town and you had a very basic veiny throbby looking dildo.

Matt Baum: Yeah, and there were garbage. It was just garbage. It was stuff that you bought for parties and jokes and whatnot.

Raven Faber: Yeah, they weren’t being marketed like they are now. They certainly weren’t being marketed to women. They weren’t being marketed to queer couples, trans couples, it wasn’t there. We still have a long way to go, granted, and I’m finding that there are other companies that are trying to rehabilitate their image for lack of a better term, but there are a lot of really great companies in sex tech right now that are really doing, like leading the charge.

Matt Baum: A lot of women fronted companies I’ve noticed too, it seems like a lot of women got into the industry and said, “What the problem is? There’s too many dudes that are running this and you guys all think it should be geared a certain way.”

Raven Faber: Well, gosh yeah. We’re seeing, like it’s 2019 and we’re still trying. Like women, we’re still trying to get our seat at the table. There was this whole to do last year at CES and Laura de Carlo and they rightfully …

Matt Baum: Okay, CES. I don’t know what that is.

Raven Faber: The Consumer Electronic Showcase. Yeah, it’s in Vegas. It’s where you go to see all the latest tech gadgets, robotics, drones, the SAT and the other …

Matt Baum: Sure. It’s going on right now, right?

Raven Faber: It’s going on right now. It’s going on this week. Yeah, I know somebody who’s there with her invention and it’s quite amazing. We’re still fighting for a seat at the table. They have been having like VR porn and sex robots and stuff like that at CES, but as soon as you have a woman owned company with a vibrator that’s for women’s pleasure and that’s what it is, like no, no, no, no. This year is a bit different. There’s a big handful of sex tech companies that are at CES this year. I’m so pleased because that’s …

Matt Baum: It’s awesome.

Raven Faber: I’m so pleased. I’m just like …

Matt Baum: The more open we can be about this, the more normalizing we can be about it, the better we will all feel, literally.

Raven Faber: Well, yeah. The thing is that it’s a big market. It is a huge market. There are so much designing to be done, so much money to be made, and when the tide rises, all of the boats are going to rise, all of them, every single last damn one. Yeah, so when I started noticing these gaps in the market, this need for better design, better materials. I can’t even remember if I knew … I don’t even think I’d heard the term sex tech. I just knew that, I am an engineer, I take in circuits, I like building stuff. For anything that I don’t know how to do like when you go to school and you’re an engineer, well you have a bunch of other friends that are also engineers too.

Matt Baum: Sure. You call the right nerd. They tell what screw needs to be tightened or whatever.

Raven Faber: Yeah, pretty much.

Matt Baum: Obviously, I’m an engineer, I know what I’m talking about.

Raven Faber: Obviously. The engineer’s always right. All you got to do is just dig down real deep and just be like, “I feel like an engineer today.” Just real, real deep, find your inner engineer.

Matt Baum: So, you knew sex tech existed, you just didn’t know it was sex tech.

Raven Faber: I didn’t even realize what it was called.

Matt Baum: It just wasn’t a thing yet.

Raven Faber: I just wanted to build, can I curse?

Matt Baum: Yes, you can curse. That’s fine.

Raven Faber: I wanted to build shit. I’m cursing.

Matt Baum: Trust me, this show is already explicit.

Raven Faber: I just wanted to build some shit and I didn’t even know what the company was going to look like. I didn’t know. I just knew that it was on my radar. I started thinking about it probably two years before I actually founded EngErotics. I’m still in the corporate world and a friend of mine introduced me to a, they’re no longer in business, but a startup called Orgasmatronics, and I had the pleasure of meeting their founder, their CEO and their team. It just blew my mind. I’ve told each and every one of them that, that was really like the catalyst. That was the inspiration. That was really when I knew without a shadow of a doubt that yes, there was a place for engineering and science in the realm of sex toys, because of that company, although it was not founded by a woman, it was founded by a physicist with a PhD. I’m like, holy shit.

Matt Baum: A nerd, there you go.

Raven Faber: What is going on? And he’s doing videos about eccentricity and frequency and rotational vibration. He had his whiteboard, and he’s putting this on YouTube and writing equations and shit. I’m like …

Matt Baum: Like yes, yes, this is what we need.

Raven Faber: Yes, where was this course in college? Where was this? Unfortunately, the company went under and I was really sad to see that happen because what they were bringing to the table was really cool. The concept, just Orgasmatronics. I was like, yes.

Matt Baum: Great name.

Raven Faber: Yes, absolutely. I speak very highly of them because they were really my inspiration and affirmation that, yeah, this is a thing. Yes, absolutely.

From sex toys to CBD

Matt Baum: Let me ask you. From there, because I have to, obviously the show is about Hemp so we need to bring it back to hemp, but from there you start building your own superior, well engineered sex toys driven for women, for trans couples, for just about anybody who needs one. How do we get to CBD?

Raven Faber: Oh gosh.

Matt Baum: How does this [crosstalk 00:15:27]?

Raven Faber: We could be, “Yeah.” I’m like, “This is a hemp show.” We might have to do edition two on this.

Matt Baum: Yeah, no doubt.

Raven Faber: Because it’s a wild ride and there’s a whole like thing about the sex toys and what we do because there’s a difference between being the inventor and being the engineer and that’s a whole different thing. CBD, all right, yeah, CBD. CBD came to find me quite literally. I didn’t even know we were going to be working with CBD. I had no clue. I had no idea at all. We have a private group on Facebook, the EngErotics community. It’s basically like, we have conversations, you and I are having, do Facebook lives. It’s where I gather feedback because I want to give the people what they want.

Matt Baum: Yeah, of course.

Raven Faber: It’s a safe space where we can talk about sex and all that stuff. One day somebody posts in the group, “Hey, Raven. What do you think about CBD infused lubricant and THC infused lubricant?” To be completely honest with you, I had been out of the loop because I’ve been in the corporate world for a long time and the firm that I was at right before I made the leap to become an entrepreneur, I think I can call myself that these days. I think I qualify. Sometimes I’m like, “What the hell am I doing with my life?” I honestly had no clue because I had been … my previous firm in the firm before that, they did randoms and there was a zero-tolerance thing and so I didn’t touch anything.

Matt Baum: Gotcha.

Raven Faber: So yeah, I didn’t use any topicals, I didn’t vape, I didn’t smoke anything. I went to school in Boulder.

Matt Baum: It was around.

Raven Faber: We’re 420 friendly.

Matt Baum: Yeah, it was around.

Raven Faber: Yeah, absolutely. I just couldn’t, because I didn’t want to risk losing my job and so I said, “I have no clue. Let me ask.” Because there were other people that I knew in the space. One of the first people that I asked was one of the founders at Steep Fuse Coffee in Boulder, Colorado.

Matt Baum: Okay. I’ve heard of them.

Raven Faber: Yeah, Devin. Him and I went to high school together.

Matt Baum: Oh cool.

Raven Faber: Yeah, I reached out to him and I was like, “Hey, I got this question, don’t know. I’m reaching out to people. I need people who are current 420 hemp CBD THC people tell me what’s going on because I don’t know how to answer this question.” Long story short, the idea was pitched to me that perhaps maybe EngErotics should dive into this realm and create CBD infused intimate body care products. I thought about it and I realized there was certainly a need for that. On the chemical engineering side, on the formulation side, because sex toys and CBD, they don’t seem like they’re related, but they actually have a lot of things in common. Neither one of them are regulated for quality and safety.

Matt Baum: That’s one of the things when I first heard your name and what you were doing, I said to myself, “Oh my God, this makes perfect sense. How did no one think of this yet?” That’s what blew my mind.

Raven Faber: Well, that’s the thing. I’m sure that many people have, but it’s like a lot of people have an idea, just about everybody has an idea. I have no doubt that there are probably half a dozen other people that maybe thought about launching a company like this, but it’s in the execution. Too often, like, “I have an idea and one day I’m going to do this idea.” And it takes a lot of work to actually … yeah, the execution is … I was very intrigued, very intrigued, and I’m like, I think that there is definitely a need for this and we’re going to see regulation for quality and safety on the CBD side long before we do on the sex toy side, unfortunately.

That’s because of societal stigma and whatnot, but there’s even something stigmatized and taboo about CBD. I hear it every day like, “Oh, I want to I want to give my mom in-law, one of yourself sticks for her whatever, she’s got pain.” Whatever the case may be, “But she has never touched anything cannabis related. I don’t know how she would feel about it.”

Matt Baum: She’s afraid of marijuana or like …

Raven Faber: Yeah. Once we started diving into it. I was really blown away by what the demand was. I was really shocked by how many people didn’t realize you could use CBD to enhance the sexual experience. I was even more shocked to learn that people did not know that there’s no regulation here. There’ve been plenty of people that have been injured by subpar sex toys with toxic materials, butt wider, but you never hear about those things. But if you find somebody who’s an ER nurse or an EMT, those stories.

Matt Baum: Oh yeah, they’ve got plenty of them. Sure.

Raven Faber: Yeah. Sex Sent Me to the ER, I forgot channel it comes on, but there’s a reason why it happens.

How CBD enhances sex

Matt Baum: Can I ask? When you said how CBD enhances, can you explain that? How does it work? In your products, maybe just walk me through one of your products how it’s used and what it’s used for?

Raven Faber: Well, CBD has been, as I’m sure … tell me if I’m telling you something. You’re at the Ministry of Hemp. You know all of this shit.

Matt Baum: No, but we’re here to learn. Don’t worry about it. We’re here to learn.

Raven Faber: We know that it can act as a vasodilator and get more and more blood flow going, and when there’s more blood flowing into an erogenous area, the sensitivity is apt to increase.

Matt Baum: That makes sense.

Raven Faber: Yes. When you apply a CBD topical to the clitoris or you use it internally, on the G spot or you use it on the penis, it has the potential to create more sensitivity for an enhanced experience. Of course, your mileage may vary, everybody is different. Depending upon things like age, do you use tobacco? What’s your medical history? What kind of medications are you on? Have you been using alcohol tonight? These are all things that, I know like when I’ve been drinking, my reaction to CBD is a little bit different because like I feel a little bit …

Matt Baum: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve had CBD in cocktails and stuff and it is a different sensation.

Raven Faber: It’s different. It’s very different. I always tell people, part of the fun is really experimenting to see how it works for you. I always tell people, I find that for a number of people it helps to prolong the experience.

Matt Baum: Really?

Raven Faber: Yeah. It’s like while increasing your sensitivity, getting you out of your own head, especially if you’ve been vaping, I’m not limiting it to … we don’t do vape, but just say you decided to vape CBD, it helps you to get out of that anxious level. I’m a mom. My head is like all over the place and sometimes it’s like, for us women especially, when we’re worried about the kids, we’re worried about doing the … we got to do the school project and all of that stuff. How the hell do you get in the mood for sex when your mind is just like scattered? Or maybe, for us women who are postpartum, it’s like, we don’t look like we did when we were 21. I sure don’t. It’s like gosh, I feel so self conscious and after having used CBD, it’s really a good way of getting out of your own head and getting into a more relaxed headspace so you can have an orgasm and that’s just the mental benefits outside of anything that’s happening in your vagina, on your vagina, on your vulva.

Matt Baum: You’re not thinking about it, you’re just enjoying.

Raven Faber: Yeah, absolutely. But I’ve had clients of mine write into me and tell me about how it’s helped them to increase lubrication, how it’s helped them … they have more sensitivity, they’re able to have more orgasms. It’s helped prolong their partner. It’s been all across the board and since people are so different, it’s like, I can never tell people like, it’s going to do this, this, this for you. All I know is it’s going to be good.

Matt Baum: That’s the same with any CBD product. That’s the same.

Raven Faber: Yeah.

Matt Baum: Anyone who’s making the hardcore claims, it does this, it does that is probably a liar, but we know it helps with anxiety, we know it helps, like you said, take you out of that headspace, it helps mellow you out. And it would make sense that yes, if you introduce it into an erogenous zone, chances are it’s going to absorb the same way and have similar properties.

Raven Faber: Yeah, absolutely. I am not a doctor. I am an engineer. None of us are doctors. We’re all engineers and scientists. Our formulations specialist, she’s very good at telling us this is what you can and cannot say. It’s why we do our labels the way that we do and this, that, and the other. But I can tell you that a number of our clients have written into me and said, “Hey, I have this condition in my intimate area and it’s made it easier for me to have sex.”

Matt Baum: That’s incredible.

Raven Faber: Yeah, I wonder if we’re in this area where there’s new hope for women who have things like vaginismus, vulvodynia, endometriosis. I wonder if we’re like in this space where, there are a lot of women that have … they want to have sex, but it’s very painful, very difficult, even impossible for them to have sex. Maybe this could help them. I tell people like, “Listen, go to town. It’s going to do what it’s going to do. I can’t guarantee that it’s going to do something specific. Your results will vary. They will vary, but I can say that you’re going to have a really good time.” It’s been a very rare occurrence that somebody’s told me like, “Your product didn’t do anything for my sex life.” I’m just so thrilled that our products are helping people and people are loving what we’re doing. Yeah. It came to me. CBD came to find us.

The EngErotics product line

Matt Baum: What do you guys offer right now, CBD wise at Eng? Is it EngErotics or EngErotics? What do you call it?

Raven Faber: EngErotics. Think engineered erotic.

Matt Baum: EngErotics. I kept looking at it. I’m like, how am I going to … ENG, ENG?

Raven Faber: Yeah, it’s okay. It’s all right. We offer a few different things in a variety of different versions right now. We started our product line with our soothing self stick. We retroactively named it the original formula, and it is formulated with coconut oil and cocoa butter. It contains 500 milligrams of CBD. When we launched that, we had a bunch of people that were like, “Well, hey, I want to try it too, but I’m allergic or sensitive to coconut oil. What can you do for us?” So now we also have a coconut free version of the soothing South stick and it’s formulated with mango butter in lieu of the coconut oil and deodorized cocoa butter. So it’s a virtually, I mean, they’re both … neither one of them are scented, but the coconut free version it doesn’t really sound like anything.

We started with a 500 milligram soothing South sticks and then we created our extra strength, 1,000 milligrams South sticks, again original formula and coconut free. Then after that, came the soaking sand bath shots, which if I’m being honest, I didn’t even want it do. I was like, “What do you guys mean you want us to make …? You want us to do what?

Matt Baum: Like a bath bomb basically or? Where you just drop it in?

Raven Faber: No. We don’t do bath bombs. My formulation specialists and I, we had a really long conversation about bath bombs and why we don’t do them. It basically boils down to efficacy. With CBD being oil soluble …

Matt Baum: It is so good to hear somebody say something that makes sense in these [inaudible 00:28:19].

Raven Faber: Yeah, I threw that. I said efficacy. Damn it. How many people …? It’s not a buzz word. It’s something that we really care about. Our soaking sand bath shots, they come in four ounce vials. They look like kinetic sand, if you ever played with that as kid. I play with it now. I got kids, so whatever, I do one.

Matt Baum: It’s super fun. Yeah.

Raven Faber: Yeah. So, you dump the whole thing into your bath tub. They’re 20 milligrams of CBD each. They come in a variety of different scents that we custom blend in-house. Dump the whole vial into your bath water and you soak, and it feels like your body has had a glass of wine, but your inhibitions are not affected at all. So it’s like your whole body is just like “Oh.” The bath shots will get you right. The cool thing about those is that they’re formulated in such a way where the CBD is evenly dispersed throughout the water. If you’ve got a big fancy tub that you can soak right on up to your neck, that’s a very good thing.

Matt Baum: Right. Is it like an oil that comes sits on the top of the water when you get in, it just coach you? Is it like that?

Raven Faber: No, it doesn’t even sit on top of the water. It’s evenly dispersed. Just hangs out.

Matt Baum: Really?

Raven Faber: Suspended yeah, on the top, like from the top down to the bottom. Our testing showed that the efficacy was much better. We don’t plan on doing bath shots, or excuse me, bath bombs. We don’t plan on doing bath bombs. Our people, our followers, they’re like, we want something for the bath. I was like, “What does that have to do with getting it in at night?” And they’re like, “Well, you got to relax and you got to …” I was like, “Oh.”

Matt Baum: There you go.

Raven Faber: But you see, I’m a mom. I haven’t had time for that shit. Since we release those, I have become an occasional bath taker. I still don’t have time, but I take time out to use my own bath shot. So we have those. Then we have them our Oh!Nectar massage oil. We don’t have a CBD infused lubricant because personal lubricants are classified as a class two medical device by the FDA. Yeah.

Matt Baum: Makes sense I guess.

Raven Faber: Yeah. Listen, we’re still on the come up. I don’t have like a whole pile of money to fight the FDA, so we don’t want to piss them off. But we’re marketing … it’s a massage oil and it is safe for intimacy and it’s very good for erotic massage, it’s good foreplay, it’s good for intercourse, it’s good for back door play. It’s good with toys. It’s not safe with latex though because it’s oil-based of course. But those come in a variety of different sense as well. We also have an unscented version in both the bath shots and the Oh!Nectar. Then last year we released, we call it body polish, and it’s a CBD infused sugar scrub. Very gentle. It’s good for your intimate areas. To have a CBD infused bath with a partner or a group of people, we don’t judge.

We’re not here to … And you get that real sensual scrubbed down and you want to get the vibe right. You can’t just jump right into it. You can’t just like, boom, there it is. Draw that bath, soak in the CBD, get your little scrub on that sort of thing.

Matt Baum: Right. Foreplay baby, some romance. Come on.

Raven Faber: Yeah, and it’s like, gosh. I’m like, I feel like such a hypocrite because it’s like … with two kids, it’s like, “Where the hell … I’m lucky if I get a quickie.”

Matt Baum: Yeah, I got 15 minutes, let’s get in. Let’s get going.

Raven Faber: The kids are asleep. Do I want to watch TV? Do I want to go to sleep? Do I want to have sex? Pick one. Maybe two, but you can’t have all three. Otherwise, you can’t, you’re exhausted more so than you already are. Yeah, so that is what we currently offer. Going into 2020, we’re going to be doing some R&D with water soluble CBD.

Matt Baum: Very cool.

Raven Faber: But we’re focusing mostly on toy R&D for 2020. We have a pressure sensitive dildo that we’re working on. I’m very excited.

Matt Baum: That’s very cool.

Raven Faber: Yeah, it’s cool. We’re essentially picking up where Orgasmatronics left off with the team’s blessing, of course.

Matt Baum: Of course.

Raven Faber: I talked to each one of them and I’m still in contact with them. I said, “I would be privileged and honored to work on this and to bring it back and get it to where it needs to be.” Yeah, so we’ll be focusing mainly on mechanical device R&D in 2020. Maybe releasing a couple of new things on the CBD side, but probably not. We’re not in any rush. Our current product lineup is really solid. People seem to love it. I love it.

Matt Baum: I’m excited to try it. I think I’ve got a box coming and I’m super excited to try it.

Raven Faber: Yeah, no, you have a box coming. I’ve got to send that email and …

Matt Baum: Awesome. There’s something to be said about, and I was looking at your site, it’s a great site and it’s very inclusive …

Raven Faber: Thank you. Thank you.

Matt Baum: … and it’s very body positive. There’s something to be about going to a place like that where you know, someone not only thought about this but they put work into it, and not just their own products but the products you’ve selected, and I think you’re doing an amazing at job.

Raven Faber: Thank you. I have to say, I would be remiss if I didn’t shout out the designer who did my website, but her name is Laura Russo and she runs the EA graphic design. She is the reason why we have the look and feel that we do. Because initially I was pumping all my money into R&D and we didn’t really have money to focus on aesthetics. So, she did our website overhaul, she did our rebranding and she really helped us level up.

Matt Baum: She did a great job. It feels like a safe place to go to buy stuff like this.

Raven Faber: I think she nailed it.

Matt Baum: And there’s plenty of other dark corners on the internet.

Raven Faber: I want for people to …

Matt Baum: Where you should be careful.

Raven Faber: It’s really important. I think you nailed it. A lot of people don’t feel safe with this, like what if somebody finds out? What if I go to a sex toy store and I see somebody that I know?

Matt Baum: Right, when my boss is there, or what if somebody sees me outside?

Raven Faber: Yeah. It’s really at the heart of what we do, aside from safety and quality and science and engineering, all that jazz. It’s making people feel safe and cared for and we really want to be a place, like we want to set the tone that you can have a big air quotes because it’s a podcast, prestigious, respectable engineering firm that’s working on sex toys. There’s no reason why this can’t be respectable per se.

Matt Baum: Absolutely. Like we said earlier, the more open we are about it and the more comfortable we make people with it, the better we will all feel about it. I think it goes …

Raven Faber: We have to normalize the conversation.

Matt Baum: I think it goes beyond the fact that you guys are being respectful or you are being reputable. I think it’s the fact that you listen. I think it’s the fact that you listen.

Raven Faber: We try so hard.

Matt Baum: And you feel what people want. That’s how you said CBD found you. I think it is amazing and that’s why I brought you on this show because you’re the only person I’ve heard of doing this and I think it’s incredible.

Raven Faber: Being a minority, being a black woman, there aren’t really a lot of founders in either the sex tech space or CBD that look like me.

Matt Baum: Absolutely. Or just women period, let alone black women. It’s crazy, but it is changing.

Raven Faber: Yeah, and it’s the same …

Matt Baum: We’ve seen a lot of that changing. I’ve been interviewing a lot of women that are coming into this industry, the hemp industry that is, not so much the sex toy industry, but they’re coming in and saying, “Sell, there’s a right way to do this and I’m going to step in and do it. Whether it’s forming or creating a tincture or …” I just spoke to a woman that is making hemp nutrition bars that are amazing. She was like, “I saw a niche and I went for it.” It sounds like that’s exactly what you’ve done. Raven, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show. This has been fantastic.

Raven Faber: Oh gosh, this is amazing.

Matt Baum: Thank you so much.

Raven Faber: I’ve never been on a podcast before.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum: As you obviously heard, I had a blast talking to Raven. She is the coolest. She is a mom, she is a scientist, she is a nerd, she’s in the CBD and she makes sex toys, which puts her right up there in my top five most interesting people that I’ve probably ever spoken to, and of course, you will be able to find links to EngErotics and all of their products in the show notes for this episode.

Next time on the show, bring your appetite because we are going to be talking hemp in food again and I might even do a little bit of cooking. As always, I want to thank everyone that has been supporting the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. You guys have been great and you can hit me with all your opinions, your thoughts and your questions. You can email me at matt@ministryofhemp.com, or you can call the Ministry of Hemp phone line at (402) 819-6417 and leave a message, and you might just hear your question answered on the show by myself and Kit O’Connell, editor in chief of ministryofhemp.com. Speaking of ministryofhemp.com, make sure to get over there and check out Kit’s picks for the best CBD salves, creams and topicals of 2019.

While you’re there, be sure to subscribe to Ministry of Hemp newsletter so you can be the first to hear about all the exciting news reviews and educational stuff that we are doing at ministryofhemp.com. If that’s not enough for you, follow us on Twitter @MinistryofHemp or on facebook/ministryofhemp. As always, you can find a full written transcript of this episode in the show notes as well because at the Ministry of Hemp, we believe that an accessible world is a better world for everybody, but right now, this is your host Matt Baum saying, be sure to take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will you? This is that the Ministry of Hemp Podcast signing off.

Editor’s Note: We initially picked an incorrect photo of Raven Faber for this article, using a clip art model instead. The photo has been corrected. We regret the error. -KO

The post Sex & CBD With Raven Faber Of Eng Erotics appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In this episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, our host Matt talks with Franny Tacy. Franny is the founder of Franny’s Farm where she grows hemp for products sold in her multiple Franny’s Farmacy locations and online. This is the second part of our ongoing Women in Hemp series of interviews.

First, Matt discusses the future of multi-use hemp varietals and what they could mean for farmers and the environment. Thanks to Let’s Talk Hemp for the scoop.

Sponsored by Hatshe

This episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast is brought to you by Hatshe.com. Be sure to check out their full line of topical CBD products to help active people with recovery and doing more of what they love.

For a limited time, Ministry of Hemp listeners can enter the code hemp15 at checkout to receive 15% off your Hatshe purchase.

Send us your feedback

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Talking with Franny Tacy: Complete episode transcript

Matt Baum: The Ministry of Hemp Podcast is brought to you by Hatshe. With a full line of CBD topicals that are designed to help you keep doing the things that you love to do, this female athlete owned company not only promises very high quality CBD and all their products, but they also work with local nonprofits to constantly evaluate their manufacturing waste stream, their packaging, shipping methods, and their ingredient sources. Go to H-A-T-S-H-E.com, that’s hatshe.com, and use the code hemp15 for 15% off for all of our Ministry of Hemp listeners in their online shop. Again, that’s hatshe.com, H-A-T-S-H-E.com, and use the code hemp15.

I’m Matt Baum, and this is the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, brought to you by Ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education.

The promise of multi-use hemp

Matt Baum: I talk a lot about farms on the show and we’re going to talk to another farmer today, but one of the reasons is because that’s where hemp comes from, and it’s important that we have a good starting place. Of course, at Ministry of Hemp we encourage everyone to use the best of organic farming practices mixed with modern farming practices when they make sense and they make a better plant, and they’re better for the soil, of course. One of the things I’ve been asking a lot of farmers and people producing hemp products is the idea of a multifaceted hemp plant. One that’s not just used for CBD, but one plant that can be used several different ways. For the flower, for the hurd and fiber, and for the grains even.

I get a newsletter in my email from a site called LetsTalkHemp.com. It’s a great site. You should check them out. In their latest newsletter there was a link to an article by Steven Hoffman where he is talking about predictions for hemp and the hemp industry in 2020, and one of them touches on this very subject, and that is using the whole plant. According to this article, in the coming decade, we’ll see a focus move beyond CBD to the whole hemp plant.

This is a quote from Marysia Morawska, a horticulture educator at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, and she says, “I think a lot of farmers are going to realize the cannabis plant is not a CBD plant. What we’re going to see is a movement toward a trifecta or even a quad usage plant, so something that’s utilized for the hurd, for the fiber, for the flower, and for the grain. And once we realize what those genetics are, we’ll end up realizing that each region specifically has growing styles that will be differentiated by the genetics of that region, and we’ll move into a place where processing will include not just CBD.”

Basically what she’s talking about is developing a hemp plant that does all of the above. It’s a plant that be used for CBD, can be used to make hempcrete, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago on the show, it can be used for hemp seeds for eating and hemp oil for cooking. A multifaceted hemp plant that farmers can sell not just to one supplier, but to four suppliers. It’s an amazing idea.

Before we get all cringy about the whole idea of genetic modification, this is probably the future of hemp. Already legal farmers all over the United States are choosing hybrids that work best in their region to grow the type of hemp plant they want. Whether it’s one that is high in CBD and low in THC, or high in fiber for textiles or hempcrete. Currently the vast amount of hemp grown legally in this country is grown for CBD, and like we’ve also discussed, there is a CBD bubble that is going to burst. When it does, farmers are going to need to look for a hemp plant that they can do more than just produce CBD flower with. That’s where this idea comes in, and I think it’s one of the most exciting things about hemp and its future on American farms.

CBD is great, don’t get me wrong. I use it every day. But there is so much more that hemp can do, from textiles to plastics to woods and even concrete. Now just imagine if you could develop one hemp hybrid that can supply all of that in one plant. I don’t know that there’s another crop out there that would be that versatile. Not just for farmers at the marketplace, but also for our environment.

There’s agriculture scientists that are hard at work right now developing this multi-use hemp plant, and it is coming and soon. Maybe not this year, but hopefully. And when it does show up, it will be the farmers that have to grow it. So in the meantime, we’re going to keep talking to them on this show. In fact, we’re going to talk to one of the busiest farmers I have ever met in my life today.

Meet Franny Tacy

Matt Baum: We’ve been running a series in the show about women in the hemp industry, and I’m talking to a pretty amazing one today. Her name is Franny Tacy, and she represents not only Franny’s Farm, but Franny’s Farmacy. She has been a firefighter, a pharmacy rep, a teacher, a world traveler, a hemp farmer, and a friend to some of the cutest goats you will ever see.

I spoke with Franny from her farm in Leicester, North Carolina, just outside of Asheville. And if you haven’t been to Asheville, it’s absolutely gorgeous, and the countryside is unreal. If you’re a child of the ’90s you might remember the TV show Dawson’s Creek, and it just happened to be filmed in and around Asheville if you’d like to see what I’m talking about.

So I was looking at your website a little bit ago and you call yourself the Hippie in High Heels. Lay that out for me real quick before we go into your origin story.

Franny Tacy: Okay. I worked in pharmaceuticals for 12 years, and that’s what the doctors called me. That was my nickname throughout the pharmaceutical industry. I was a specialty rep in respiratory sales.

Matt Baum: Okay.

Franny Tacy: I did training and marketing. That’s where a lot of my business experience and all the stuff, we have our own manufacturing for our product line, where a lot of my experience came from.

Matt Baum: Okay. Where did the farm come from? That sounds like from a very young age you were a farm kid.

Franny Tacy: Yeah, my dad was a farmer. My parents divorced when I was really young. So I’ve got my dad who was a cattle farmer, grew up riding horses, and my mom was super big time corporate business woman. She worked in the financial world.

Matt Baum: And you ended up taking a little bit of both of their magic and turning it into what you do now, Franny’s Farmacy, basically.

Franny Tacy: Yes. I’m the middle child. Three girls.

Matt Baum: All right, that explains it.

Franny Tacy: So I’m the typical middle child. Nobody knew who I was or where I was, but I was always doing something mischievous.

Matt Baum: Gotcha, gotcha.

Franny Tacy: Or adventurous. Because I was very curious.

From firefighting to North Carolina hemp farming

Matt Baum: So tell me your origin story. You grew up on the farm, you went into pharmaceuticals, you went back to the farm, and now you were involved in CBD. Tell me your origin story. How does this happen?

Franny Tacy: Well, by the time you get to 50, most people have done a lot. But I hear I’ve had a few lifetimes. So yeah, I mean, I grew up. I always wanted a farm from the time I was little because I grew up on a farm and loved that. So in college, I have a family full of engineers and Episcopal ministers, and I went to ag school, which was unheard of.

Matt Baum: Okay.

Franny Tacy: Then transferred into forestry, and I have a biology degree. I worked in forestry, I lived in the woods, I’ve been in every national park, camped for months. All this stuff. I am just a nature mama. That was my family’s nickname for me.

Matt Baum: Were you like a forest ranger when you say forestry?

Franny Tacy: Yeah!

Matt Baum: Really?

Franny Tacy: I was the first female firefighter in Idaho.

Matt Baum: Oh wow.

Franny Tacy: Yeah, in 1990.

Matt Baum: Oh my God.

Franny Tacy: Yeah. That was just not that long ago. I know. Yeah.

Matt Baum: Wow.

Franny Tacy: Isn’t that crazy. So that’s when I lived out West. Then when you have a $40,000 forestry degree, at some point you’re like, oh, I need to do something. So I went back and got a master’s in education.

Matt Baum: Okay.

Franny Tacy: Teaching is not the way to do that, but I loved teaching. I did six years in teaching and have a masters. Smithsonian Institute Scholarship for teaching with the brain in mind, was what I was working on in my PhD when I got into pharmaceuticals.

So now we’ve got all the things. Our lifetime is always what brings us to this. So in pharmaceuticals, I was called the Hippie in High Heels, the Anti-Drug Rep. The more and more I was involved in that industry, and being like a really big health freak that I am, it afforded me the opportunity to get out of college debt, buy my farm, and get out of that industry.

Matt Baum: That’s amazing.

Franny Tacy: So my story is pharma, P-H-A-R-M-A, to farm, and now to Farmacy. So we had the farm seven years ago, before hemp was even on the radar.

Matt Baum: Okay.

Franny Tacy: I was teaching. My hobby has always been farming. So I got city chickens in the ordinance in Asheville, because I wanted to raise my own chickens. That was before their farm. I worked with farmer’s markets, and all my best friends and hobbies was farming.

Matt Baum: Sure.

Franny Tacy: That’s what I did.

Matt Baum: Sure.

Franny Tacy: I cooked, I had a garden, a city garden, and fed 19 people. Finally, I mean my whole neighborhood, as much as I fed them, they were very thrilled that I finally got my farm. They’re like, out of here!

Got the farm, and I was teaching business of farming classes. And that is when, for the state of North Carolina, we farmers, all collectively, gathered together to figure out how we could grow hemp. North Carolina was the 11th state that came online with an industrial hemp pilot program. It’s the only state that was funded by farmers. Our state would not back us with money.

Matt Baum: Of course.

Franny Tacy: The farmers here in this state gathered together to raise $200,000, put together plans and everything so that we could grow.

Matt Baum: Yeah. Something very similar is happening in Nebraska, where I’m from.

Franny Tacy: You know, people dog politics a lot, but this was a really good situation. It was one of those at like 11:58 it passed at night, and we got the call the next day, and we’ve been working on this for like almost two years.

Matt Baum: Okay.

The first woman hemp farmer in North Carolina

Franny Tacy: So you get to the point where you’re like, whoa, we’ve got to grow now? We’ve got three weeks. It should be in the ground. Where are we going to get it? It’s illegal. So thus begins a whole other story of how I became the first female farmer in to plant hemp. Which I didn’t even know until after eight months after I planted it.

Matt Baum: So before we get into that, how did you get to hemp? You said you loved farming and you were very outdoorsy. How did you find hemp? What was your first experience with that?

Franny Tacy: Well, I’ve always been a supporter of cannabis in and what that plant can do, everything from fiber and food, for a long, long, long, long time, and very into plant medicine and herbs. It just makes sense to me. It just always made sense.

I knew the story. I mean, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.” All this stuff came to me decades ago when I was out West. So it’s not like I had this epiphany like a lot of people now that have what I quote hemp fever.

Matt Baum: Right.

Franny Tacy: They’re like, I’m going to grow hemp. I’ve always been a supporter of it, and I’m a huge supporter of agro economy throughout the US. I love history and science, and it just fits. We need to return. I’m so passionate about what this plant can do for our economy and for farmers across the country.

Matt Baum: Okay. How much hemp are you growing on the farm right now?

Franny Tacy: So right now we’re in our third year and a lot is transitioned. I’m super proud, this was a huge goal. And a growing and agro economy is supporting now seven other farms that grow for us with our standards.

Matt Baum: That’s awesome. That is awesome.

Franny Tacy: Which is so amazing. I mean, it’s a lot of responsibility.

Matt Baum: How does that work, though? Did they find you, or did you go find the farms?

Franny Tacy: They found us.

Matt Baum: Okay.

Franny Tacy: I mean, I had about 800 applicants for people that want to meet the criteria in a work and grow, and there’s a lot of it. Region is one thing. We’ve put these farms under an NC state research program. So at our own farm right now, because we were already an established farm, we were an agrotourism farm. We had gardens and animals and goat yoga. We were on Vice TV and Lodging. I’ve kind of evolved the hemp for us to fit the model of our business plan here. So we grow about a quarter of an acre now.

Matt Baum: Okay.

Franny Tacy: We do different varietal trials with Front Range Biosciences and Triangle Hemp. We have a hemp history tour. We do workshops. People can come and learn. I do a ton of consulting. And this is become the hub for us doing our clone research and a bunch of other things to support these other farms.

Matt Baum: This is nowhere near just a farm. You’re a full on like education system, it sounds like.

Franny Tacy: Oh, listen. If you can dream it, you can achieve it, they say. Right? Well, I’m such a dreamer.

Matt Baum: I can’t believe how much time. How do you make this work? You have a farm, you’re teaching classes, you do goat yoga. You know?

Franny Tacy: I mean, we have three people that live and work on the farm.

Matt Baum: Okay.

Franny Tacy: I mean, it’s my passion. So I do this 24/7, even in my sleep in a lot of ways.

Matt Baum: I believe it. I believe it.

Franny Tacy: Started with really amazing women, a Women In Hemp nonprofit, which we use different fundraising and awareness and educational events to raise money to fund female researchers at NC State that are doing all the data collection and trials and so forth on our farms.

So there’s a lot of moving parts, but it’s so much collaboration.

Matt Baum: Yeah. So not only are you trying to do it right and you’re going for it the right way, but you’re doing it with lady power too. That’s awesome. I like that.

Franny Tacy: Yeah.

Matt Baum: That’s very cool.

Franny Tacy: I mean, that’s the reason I was chosen as a featured farmer for Hemp History Week last year in 2018. Not because I grow the biggest bud or because any one thing I do great, I just am an advocate for this industry and have helped in collaborations with data and research, because I’m kind of a science nerd from pharmaceuticals and all that stuff.

Matt Baum: Right. Right.

Franny Tacy: Just connecting and collaborating. That’s how we do it, with a lot of muscle and brain power.

Growing better hemp & making quality CBD

Matt Baum: So tell me about your hemp that you’re growing. You said you have standards and whatnot. What are you trying to grow and what are you using it for? What are you doing with the hemp?

Franny Tacy: So we’re vertically integrated, because when you’re first, there’s nobody to call for help. You’ve got to figure it all out.

Matt Baum: Yeah. Hey guys, you’ve got to do it yourself.

Franny Tacy: So that’s what we did. We have manufacturing and we have distribution. In our manufacturing, we have 50 different products right now.

Matt Baum: Oh my God.

Franny Tacy: Yeah, and [inaudible 00:16:02] we have a GMP, good manufacturing practices manufacturing plant, and we’re actually about to launch a public offering so that people can buy stock in that, and we’re going to expand it. We’re running 24/7 right now.

Matt Baum: Wow.

Franny Tacy: But how this ties into the hemp growing? That’s a really great opportunity if people are looking into it. There’s a lot of opportunities for farmers and for industry and business folks, and people that love it, but just want to support it from the outside.

So with the different breeders we’re working with, and we believe in working with breeders, don’t get your clones from mojo next door.

Matt Baum: Right.

Franny Tacy: There’s a lot to that.

Matt Baum: You know exactly what you are getting, basically. You can say I want it bred like this and I want it to do this, and you know exactly what you’re getting.

Franny Tacy: Well, we want the consistency for data, and how are these going to do in this area? So with Triangle Hemp, we use BaOx. And just theirs, not anybody’s. Just want to know that their genetics as the baseline for our products.

Matt Baum: Real quick, what is BaOx? I don’t know what that means.

Franny Tacy: BaOx is a hemp variety that’s grown for cannabinoid production.

Matt Baum: Okay. Gotcha.

Franny Tacy: So that’s where the CBD oils come from. We send that through extraction.

Matt Baum: Okay.

Franny Tacy: Then depending on what product it goes into, there’s different ways. Most of our products contain full spectrum, they’re used with a distillate.

Then we also, in all our dispensary’s, we have two corporate stores. But we franchise, so we have other business owners and will have 10 stores, six now, 10 by the end of first quarter.

Matt Baum: Is that all in North Carolina, or is it up and down the coast?

Franny Tacy: It’s North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Connecticut. Soon to be Connecticut and Florida.

Matt Baum: Wow.

Franny Tacy: Yeah. So there’s franchise opportunities as well.

Matt Baum: So and someone comes to you and they say, I like what you’re doing, I want to franchise, and you oversee it?

Franny Tacy: Yeah.

Matt Baum: That’s amazing.

Franny Tacy: And we’ve got it all dialed out. Here’s the plan, here we are, and I’m at every grand opening. So I’m excited about getting to travel, see some new places, and enjoy the towns and the people.

Matt Baum: Definitely. So, okay, you’ve got a thing on your website that says from farm to farmacy, which I love that. That’s fantastic.

Franny Tacy: Yes.

Matt Baum: I have a feeling you have some marketing background too, because you’re really good at this from what I can tell.

Franny Tacy: Well, thank you.

Vertical integration in hemp

Matt Baum: But explain that to me, your process, how you guys go from the farm to Franny’s Farmacy?

Franny Tacy: So like I was saying, vertical integration. So we take all of our hemp that’s grown everywhere, biomass goes into super sacks that goes to our processor. Then Front Range Biosciences is who we’re working with for all our top cut varietal trials, which is smokable flower, the buds.

Matt Baum: Right.

Franny Tacy: Then the trim from that that’s used in pre-rolls and all that type of stuff. We have a lot of genetic trials going on. It all goes through processing, always under the Franny’s watch, and then it goes into our manufacturing.

So we have different forms of it that is used through manufacturing. We have our topical division of manufacturing, then we have our edible division of manufacturing. And that’s where the expansion is going. Then we have our distribution center. We ship to every state in the country. We’re drop shipping. We white label, private label, about to break into some international markets finally.

Matt Baum: Oh wow.

Franny Tacy: That’s been a super long process.

Matt Baum: That’s impressive.

Franny Tacy: Yes. So our distribution center is where everything comes out of when you’re doing online orders. I love going in distribution. There’s boxes of products and foam.

Matt Baum: Oh yeah.

Franny Tacy: All the excitement.

Matt Baum: Just pure insanity.

Franny Tacy: That’s where everything ships out to all our dispensary’s. It is the hub. That’s like a big heartbeat there. There’s a lot going on. Then we have all our stores. So that’s how she goes. Vertical integration.

So our product is going all the way through that. So me and the NC State researchers are taking it from the farm processing.

Matt Baum: Sure. Do your stores only carry Franny’s Farmacy stuff, or do you carry other brands as well?

Franny Tacy: We carry other brands that are not competitive with ours.

Matt Baum: Okay, so they’re doing something different.

Franny Tacy: So we have our Franny’s Farmacy tincture, we wouldn’t carry something else. You know?

Matt Baum: Sure.

Franny Tacy: One of our alchemists also has a vape line, so we use some of their products. We’ve got a lot of the edibles and foods. When you go in our dispensaries, it’s like a hug. It’s a market.

Matt Baum: Yeah.

Franny Tacy: So you can get food and you can get other things. So there are some products that are not ours.

Supporting international hemp farmers

Matt Baum: Okay. Any textile stuff?

Franny Tacy: But mostly they are our proprietary hemp, blends. Yes.

Matt Baum: Any textile stuff, like clothes or hats or anything?

Franny Tacy: We have hemp hats.

Matt Baum: Oh, cool.

Franny Tacy: And right now that’s really, really a passion of mine. I’ll be in China for a few weeks this summer.

Matt Baum: Wow.

Franny Tacy: Visiting Patagonia and Astral Farms. So I’m a spokesperson or representative for several hemp lines that are really into the fiber. I just got my Astral shoes that are hemp boots to wear in Cuba. I leave for Cuba in a few days.

Matt Baum: Oh my God, I am so jealous.

Franny Tacy: We’ll be visiting 17 farms, 10 to 17 farms there we have on the agenda with the videographer and really understanding more agro economy, that’s what feeds our world.

Matt Baum: Yeah.

Franny Tacy: Not industrial agriculture. So between Peru and Cuba and all these places, it’s still building that. We are all connected. We all are human.

Matt Baum: Absolutely.

Franny Tacy: Food is one of the things that binds us.

Matt Baum: Tell me about Peru. You just got back from Peru. What were you doing there?

Franny Tacy: Oh, I spent three weeks in bliss of exploration, adventure, many amazing farmers. So I spent some time with farmers that were in the jungle and in the mountains.

Matt Baum: Wow.

Franny Tacy: Then seeing how community, the food brings everybody together, the market, and all that in the cities, casting a web of interconnecting agro economy, culture, food, and farming.

Matt Baum: Let me ask you. In a place like Peru, obviously this is pretty new in the States and we’re getting it figured out right now, what is hemp farming like in Peru? Is it friendlier? Is it looser? I mean, I assume it’s something that’s been going on for awhile.

Franny Tacy: No.

Matt Baum: Really?

Franny Tacy: Absolutely not.

Matt Baum: No kidding?

Franny Tacy: No. When I went there, there was actually an international hemp symposium that was not actually right in Peru, but outside of that. It is being grown in certain areas, but it is heavily guarded right now. It is not mainstream at all.

Matt Baum: Really?

Franny Tacy: There is a lot of confusion in there about how hemp is different from marijuana.

Matt Baum: No kidding? I don’t know why that is so shocking, but, I mean, yeah.

Franny Tacy: I know, because everybody thinks there’s like Rastas and there’s all this stuff.

Matt Baum: Right.

Franny Tacy: But it is still very, very, very much like we experience here.

Matt Baum: So it’s like hemp in North Dakota, basically.

Franny Tacy: As I’ve been along the educational highway, people just don’t know or understand and they assume it’s marijuana.

Matt Baum: Right.

Franny Tacy: So they’ve got some things to address before it really becomes mainstream.

Matt Baum: Really?

Franny Tacy: A huge interest there is on the food side of it, and it’s very, very interesting.

Matt Baum: So what about Cuba? What is Cuba like? Is it any looser there? Or what do you expect when you go to Cuba?

Franny Tacy: I am trying to be completely present and completely open to ask these questions, and they’re such good questions. Maybe we’ll get to have another discussion after.

Matt Baum: I would love to.

Franny Tacy: But I’m trying not to predict. I’ve got the videographer with me and we’re doing the docuseries while we’re there. So I’m there to learn.

Matt Baum: Yeah.

Franny Tacy: On our farm, we actually have Sundaze, D-A-Z-Y, on the farm, and the spring that launches. We do Peruvian meals and we have discussion topics about it, and I’ll share some of the information.

Matt Baum: I’ve got to get down there. This sounds incredible. I have got to get down there.

Franny Tacy: Come on. You are welcome here.

Matt Baum: I would love to. Oh my God.

Franny Tacy: Yeah, January 26 is when we’ll do our one on Peru, and then we’ll do one on Cuba.

Matt Baum: So when you go out and you meet these people, you just come back with more ideas, and better ways to do this, and people that you know in other countries now that you can hook up with and whatnot. Is it literally just a learning, or are you also teaching?

Franny Tacy: Oh, it’s both. It’s learning and teaching, because that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Matt Baum: Of course.

Franny Tacy: Win, win. Like in Peru, all the people that I was talking to, I mean, when it comes to farming too, I know how to butcher any animal on a farm, do [inaudible 00:25:34].

Matt Baum: I believe it.

Franny Tacy: From the kill all the way to the table. I even raise it. I’ve got a wealth of experience. So anything they need help. Laying on a concrete floor for a new pavilion going up. And just talking, just learning. I mean there is so much to figure out. And our Women in Hemp nonprofit is also going global, and there’s a lot of people, and a lot of what I do is talk about women have been written out of agriculture.

Matt Baum: Absolutely.

Franny Tacy: So a lot of my personal passion is finding out the stories, what their parents did, and what their grandparents did, and what was the role? Bringing women back to the face in the light of what they’ve done throughout history, and what they’re doing right now, and trying to find ways to support them and their communities.

Matt Baum: Right on sister. I like it. That’s awesome.

Franny Tacy: But I did not come out and go, oh great, I’ve got it all figured out. It is just like it has been here.

Matt Baum: Well, none of us do. Right. None of us do. We’re all learning, and the more that we learn, the better we get at this. Right?

Franny Tacy: Yeah, and the more you know, the more you don’t know sometimes.

Matt Baum: Absolutely.

Franny Tacy: Sometimes I’m like, I’ve got million more questions.

The future of Franny’s Farmacy

Matt Baum: Let’s go back to Franny’s Farmacy for a minute. What are you most excited about that you guys are doing right now? What’s selling the biggest?

Franny Tacy: Our number one product is the tincture, which people also refer to as the oil, or the drops you put under your tongue. Everybody tries to call it a bunch of things. That’s still our number one selling product. Our number two is our salve, which is insane all the success stories, all the testimonials on that. We sell insane amounts of that, and it’s all hand filled. It’s a very hard one to do systematically through manufacturing.

Matt Baum: I’m sure.

Franny Tacy: That’s part of the reason it’s so popular. But people love, the bath bombs are really popular. Chocolates and gummies and all the smokables.

Matt Baum: Yeah. That seems like something that’s really taken off this year really, smokable CBD and smokable hemp.

Franny Tacy: Yep.

Matt Baum: That seems to be very new.

Franny Tacy: And in North Carolina, we have been in a battle with that.

Matt Baum: I’m sure.

Franny Tacy: And we have dispensaries in South Carolina. I’ve had to stand up in the dispensary when they were shutting them down and pulling flower out of dispensaries without any legal right and say, guess what? I’m right here. I’m right here. We have flower. And I invite the police. You all come in. I’ve invited people to arrest me a ton of times. They don’t do it. I can’t figure out why. It’s probably because it would be way too great of a marketing plan. [crosstalk 00:28:29].

Matt Baum: Yeah. Exactly.

Franny Tacy: You know, a letter has nothing to do with it being legal.

Matt Baum: Right.

Franny Tacy: That’s what was happening in North Carolina and South Carolina. The government sending out letters and making raids that were really illegal. So I challenged it and we’ve never had a pull, but it’s been a real battle here.

Matt Baum: Are you still seeing that, or is it starting to mellow out a little bit?

Franny Tacy: It’s mellowing out a little bit as people are redirecting their focus. Right now, with the holidays and everything, everybody was out of session. They were taking a break. But I assume it’s going to heat back up here at some point.

Matt Baum: I’m sure. I’m sure.

Franny Tacy: Until there’s some type of conclusion.

Matt Baum: Well, we’re in an election year, too, so we’ve got to get out and huff and puff and save the children , right?

Franny Tacy: Exactly. Exactly. It’s an election year. Oh, gracious. [inaudible 00:29:25] for the ride.

Don’t forget the goats

Matt Baum: So completely off topic. Tell me about the goats. I’d see these pictures of the cutest damn goats I have ever seen, and you’re holding them. Tell me about the goats. I love goats.

Franny Tacy: Okay. They are so adorable and so funny. So agrotourism farm, we have farm camp here in the summer. Goats are so personable and funny. So we’ve had goats.

Somebody sent me a link a couple of years ago, three years ago, from it happening in Oregon. So we’re like, all right, well let’s do it. It’ll be fun.

Matt Baum: Yeah.

Franny Tacy: So we had baby goats, we did goat a yoga. Then when it was Halloween we did disgoat yoga, and everybody dressed up in disco outfits.

Matt Baum: Good Lord.

Franny Tacy: We had strobe lights. And they’re little and they’re bouncy, and they’re just like-

Matt Baum: And they love it.

Franny Tacy: They go through all stages. As babies, they fall asleep really quick, and people just pass them around. Then they go through the pinball bouncing phase.

Matt Baum: Right.

Franny Tacy: And then they get older and they just want to run through your legs for a cheese ball when you’re in a warrior position. I call it joyful yoga. It’s fun. It brings people out. Asheville is a huge hit for weddings as a wedding destination. So we have all these groups that come in and they’ll have tee shirts made and all this stuff.

Vice TV was coming to town, actually, on a very interesting subject of gerrymandering.

Matt Baum: Yeah. That’s been in the news a little bit in North Carolina, actually.

Franny Tacy: Yes, there is.

Matt Baum: Little bit.

Franny Tacy: So they were looking for radical smart people, the business people that were also doing crazy things, I guess.

Matt Baum: Right. And they happened to find you.

Franny Tacy: And they happened to find me. I was like, hi, [inaudible 00:31:14]. I was like, I’ll talk to you about politics, and put a goat on your back, and continue to smile. It all changes all the time.

Matt Baum: That is so cool. Are they working goats? Are they in the fields? Are they eating?

Franny Tacy: They actually are working goats, because between goats, sheep, two cows, and a donkey, that’s how we manage all our pasture land is by rotating them. So we have seven rotational pastures.

Matt Baum: That’s the old school way, man. That’s how you do it.

Franny Tacy: Yeah. Goats are browsers. They’re going to eat the brush.

Matt Baum: Right.

Franny Tacy: Sheep and cows are grazers, they’re going to eat the grass. So it helps us manage the land and keep it healthy, and they’re fertilizing it as they go. We’re a completely regenerative farm.

Matt Baum: That is so cool. That is so cool. I’ve got to get down there and see this. This sounds amazing.

Franny Tacy: You do! There’s so much hidden that people couldn’t even know or understand how everything was planted with intention. We have Blueberry Hill. We’ve got bees, a pollinator garden, an agroforestry project. Mulberries around all our pastures because they create a protein rich dense leaf that falls in the leaves, it’s a deciduous, to give our animals a little protein snack before they go into the winner of no grass. We’ve got hay.

Matt Baum: This is amazing. This is absolutely amazing.

Franny Tacy: That really, really goes back to what I did in college, is what I was developing, ecosystem and forest management plans. So I did a logging projects on nine acres of our farm, and created a different habitat for animals, and tulip poplar groves, and walnut groves. Yeah. Oh yeah. It never stops.

Matt Baum: Franny, I can’t decide if you’re a saint or a unicorn, to tell you the truth. You’re amazing. This is incredible.

Franny Tacy: Oh, you’re amazing. We all are amazing.

Matt Baum: Oh, stop. Stop.

Franny Tacy: Everybody is amazing in their own right. It’s just what is their hobby? Mine is thinking about a lot of things at one time.

Matt Baum: I can tell. Thank you so much for your time. This was fantastic. You a very busy woman.

Franny Tacy: Busy doing good things.

Matt Baum: That’s right.

Franny Tacy: Having the time of my life.

Matt Baum: That’s right. Keep it up, sister.

Franny Tacy: Thank you so much.

Matt Baum: We appreciate it.

Franny Tacy: If you need anything, you let me know.

Matt Baum: I absolutely will. Thank you so much, Franny.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum: As you heard, Franny is an amazing woman doing amazing work in the hemp business. You can find more information about Franny’s Farm, Franny’s Farmacy and their products, and, of course, goat yoga in the show notes for this episode.

That about does it for this episode of Ministry of Hemp Podcast. One final thought on female farmers. They are a group that has grown by 27% in the last five years. That is a pretty impressive number. Do not forget to support your local female farmers.

I hope you dug today’s episode, and if you want to let me know what you thought or you have a hemp related question, you can call me at (402) 819-6417. That is the Ministry of Hemp voice line. Leave your message there and you could have your question answered on a future show. You can also shoot me an email directly to matt@wordpress-559906-1802377.cloudwaysapps.com with your questions, your comments, or anything you’d like to hear on this show. You can follow the Ministry of Hemp on Twitter, @MinistryofHemp, on Facebook, backslash Ministry of Hemp, and we love to hear from you.

Speaking of ministryofhemp.com, be sure to stop by and sign up for our newsletter so you can get notified about all the cool stories that Kit, our editor in chief, posts over there. He’s got a great one about the FDA and some statements they made on CBD. There’s some really good clarification in there and I highly recommend checking it out.

As always, you can find a complete written transcript of this show in the show notes for this post, because at Ministry of Hemp, we believe a more accessible world is a better world for everybody.

Until next time, remember to take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will you? This is Matt Baum with the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, signing off.

The post Franny Tacy, The First Woman To Farm Hemp in North Carolina appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

First, our host Matt discusses the recent passage of the SAFE Banking Act in the U.S. House of Representatives and what it means for hemp businesses. Then we begin our Profiles of Women in Hemp with a conversation with Jane Pinto, founder of First Crop.

We want to hear from you too. Send us your questions and you might hear them answered on future shows like this one! Send us your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, email matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Ministry of Hemp Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you really want to help us out, we’d love for you to rate or review the show.

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More about women in the hemp industry

Here are some other articles we’ve published about women in the hemp industry:

• Exploring Hemp in India with Mansi Shah of Hemp Fabric Lab
• Becoming a hemp advocate, with Cait Curley
• Women owned CBD brands we love

Women In Hemp & Hemp Banking Update: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the full written transcript of this episode:

Matt Baum: 00:04 Welcome to the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. My name is Matt Baum. Today on the show, we are starting the first of what I’m calling a series focusing on women in the hemp industry. Today we’re going to listen to my conversation with Jane Pinto from First Crop. Jane is amazing. She is not unlike interviewing a unicorn. She is spiritual. She is excited. She is powerful, and she is helping hemp farmers to bring their product to the public and making sure they do it in a safe and responsible way. Jane was wonderful, and I can’t wait for you to hear this interview, but before we get into that, let’s touch on a little news first.

Hemp banking update

Matt Baum: 00:52 Just a couple episodes ago, we were talking about banking and how difficult it is for anyone in the hemp business to legitimately process electronic payments or get loans from a bank. Well, there’s actually very good news this week. The SAFE Banking Act or the Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act of 2019, which is sponsored by several different bipartisan representatives, just passed in the US House of Representatives with a bipartisan vote of 321 to 103, which is crazy because there are no more bipartisan votes in Washington, DC. The hemp industry is feeling pretty good. It looks like this could pass the Senate, and the SAFE Act is going to be introduced, and it’s going to get voted on.

Matt Baum: 01:39 What it would do, it would allow marijuana related businesses and states with some form of legalized marijuana and strict regulatory structures as well as businesses selling hemp derived products, that’s where the hemp comes in, to access the banking system. 2019 was not a great year for hemp crops. The farmers battled rain and drought and hail, mold, everything you can possibly imagine that would kill a hemp plant. This year’s harvest, which is the first since hemp was made legal throughout the US under the 2018 Farm Bill is estimated to come in at 115,000 to 138,000 acres, and that’s according to votehemp.com. That sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing when you think about the millions of acres that are devoted to major cash crops.

Matt Baum: 02:30 I know you hear me saying the word marijuana, but due to the confusion over the legality of hemp, most banks and credit card processors have been hesitant at best to provide services to what they call cannabisnesses. Some of them have even canceled banking and financial services for very legitimate hemp businesses because they were afraid they were selling marijuana. Well, the good news is if the SAFE Banking Act passes US Senate, then everyone is going to have access to legitimate banking and legitimate electronic payment processing. From there, hemp becomes a legitimate business.

Matt Baum: 03:12 What can you do? Call your senator today and make sure that they plan on voting for the SAFE Banking Act to legitimize hemp and hemp businesses in your state. Now, my conversation with Jane Pinto.

Jane Pinto, hemp entrepreneur

Jane Pinto: 03:34 I have been entrepreneurial literally it feels like from a very young person, and I think everything I’ve done along the way really has led to this place, this transformative place with hemp because all the businesses I’ve been in and started with wonderful people along the way have truly been about not just what are we doing? Who are we doing it with, and how are we doing it, and why are we doing it?

Matt Baum: 04:14 Right. There’s thoughtfulness behind it basically.

Jane Pinto: 04:16 Always been mission-based, always been impact businesses.

Matt Baum: 04:20 That’s awesome.

Jane Pinto: 04:21 Have no interest in working to just work. I call it work-work living.

Matt Baum: 04:27 Sure. You’re a bad capitalists like me then.

Jane Pinto: 04:32 Oh yeah, but I do believe in capitalism very much because I-

Matt Baum: 04:35 I do too. I’m just not very good at it. That’s the problem.

Jane Pinto: 04:40 I believe in regenerative capitalism. I believe in reciprocity. I believe that we should be really successful and we should share that success in service.

Matt Baum: 04:51 That sounds wonderful. Do you come from an agriculture background?

Jane Pinto: 04:56 I have absolutely nothing to do with agriculture, nor have I ever … Except that I love mother nature and our planet, and that is why I am involved with these great men and great women in hemp. I am.

Getting into the hemp business

Matt Baum: 05:14 How did you end up here? What brought you to hemp?

Jane Pinto: 05:17 This is how I got there. I was in the food business. I had started a company with a great group of people that was healing food allergy kids like my child had life-threatening food allergies, nothing for her to eat, nothing healthy, delicious or safe. We went into that free-from world so you get into the natural products industry and into that marketplace, and you start meeting incredible people and then all of a sudden, because you want the best ingredients and you want to know who farmed them and how they farmed them, that’s how you get into agriculture. That’s how I got in, was through Don’t Go Nuts through Pinto Barn, the the previous company that I founded. In that industry, I met so many great people.

Matt Baum: 06:09 Did you say it was called Don’t Go Nuts?

Jane Pinto: 06:12 Yeah, Don’t Go Nuts.

Matt Baum: 06:13 That’s a great name.

Jane Pinto: 06:14 It was the food line.

Matt Baum: 06:15 I like that.

Jane Pinto: 06:18 Yeah, food is great.

Matt Baum: 06:19 From there, you started-

Jane Pinto: 06:20 The families do go nuts trying to keep their kids safe with that.

Matt Baum: 06:22 Oh, absolutely. It is awful right now.

Jane Pinto: 06:28 You start working with the farmers and then the suppliers and we had to do a field to fingers process and practices so we knew where everything was coming from and it was safe. I started to meet the farmers, and that changed me. We really did.

Matt Baum: 06:45 They’re incredible. They’re incredible people to do what they do on a daily basis and work as hard as they do for as little money. It’s true passion and it’s amazing. You used the term field to fingers. What is that? Tell me about that.

Jane Pinto: 07:00 Well, field to fingers was that we knew who grew it, how they grew it. If it was gluten-free, we knew there were no fields around to crosspollinate. We knew where it was shipped from, what supplier held it. We knew cross-contamination and all the way through our manufacturing facility, all the way to the kid’s fingers. We knew what the quality and safety was with that product, so we knew they were safe and they would be well for meeting it.

Matt Baum: 07:28 I really like that, field to fingers. I’m going to steal that and use it. That’s good.

What is First Crop?

Jane Pinto: 07:32 Yeah. Well, we’re soil to soul at First Crop.

Matt Baum: 07:36 Tell me about First Crop. You are helping small hemp farmers currently, right?

Jane Pinto: 07:42 Well, First Crop came together because of all the incredible people I met in food. I met this wonderful man along the way, Michael Bowman, who is called Mr. Hemp. About four years ago, he and the other people who have founded this company with me because we all had been talking about it for quite a long time, we really started to watch policy and see what was going to happen. What I learned, because of who it sounds like you and I are, everyone else was looking at there are five lanes of hemp. This is going to be a multi trillion dollar business, 100,000 products. What I love is that it pulls carbon out of the air and puts it back into the soil, and that helps every living being on this planet. We have to take care of it.

Jane Pinto: 08:36 We’re out of time. We got to grow things and make things that save our planet, and then we need those products to also heal our bodies and our souls. That’s why I think hemp is … I approach this plant with heart and humility because I actually feel it’s a pretty sacred transformative delivery to us right now. I truly believe that, Matt.

Matt Baum: 09:01 Hearing you say that, you sound … The same words came out of some of the Native American growers in Nebraska, in Colorado that I met. They sounded exactly like what you were saying and saying that this is not a plant that we own, and we should not treat it that way. This is a plant that can help us, but we have to grow it right and we have to take care of it and it will take care of us.

Jane Pinto: 09:29 Well, that’s exactly right. I hope and pray that we have set First Crop up in a regenerative ecosystem that really honors that process all the way from the loamy soil, how we treat it, what nutrients we put in, how we can nourish it throughout the coming years, the type of seeds we use, the partnerships with our farmers that elevate them and their rural communities because we have a foundation that will give back to them. We share our profits with the farmers, and that for me really makes this a kinship instead of where the people who grow hemp and then we sell it and we buy it and we make this. We’re a regenerative system, and I don’t think our world is going to survive without regeneration and reciprocity.

Matt Baum: 10:21 Flat out it’s not going to. No question there. The science bears it out no matter what anybody tells you. It’s interesting because I talked to a couple of people recently that spoke about what they called the marijuana mavens, the people that came in and said there’s money to be made here, and we just have to grow as much as we can, as fast as we can and flood the market with it, just like in soybeans or corn or any other crop out there. It seems like you and this person realize that we have a unique chance here to grow a plant that really hasn’t been modified since we stopped growing it 75 years ago and do it the right way.

The healing power of hemp

Jane Pinto: 11:05 Oh, it’s pure. It is transformative. It is humble. It’s pure. It’s a healer.

Matt Baum: 11:14 Yeah, definitely. No question. I’m taking CBD daily, and it’s helped with pain in my hands. What does First Crop do?

Jane Pinto: 11:23 It’s a healer right from the minute we put the seed in. You know what I mean?

Matt Baum: 11:27 Sure.

Jane Pinto: 11:27 That tap root starts working on our earth and then it grows up and then it just pulls carbon out of the air and puts it back in the soil. What more could we ask?

Matt Baum: 11:37 Exactly.

Jane Pinto: 11:37 Nevermind what it does once we get it out of the earth. You can use every bit of this plant to do something that is regenerative for our planet after it’s already regenerated … done regenerative practice on our soil. It’s beyond words really.

Matt Baum: 11:59 I laugh because it’s true. You’re absolutely right. Can I ask, how does First Crop, I called it first corp, I apologize, how does First Crop help farmers?

Jane Pinto: 12:08 That’s okay. We don’t want to be corpses [crosstalk 00:12:10].

Matt Baum: 12:10 No. Exactly. Not yet. It sounds a little too big banking to me.

Jane Pinto: 12:17 I want the loamy soil but not so fast.

Matt Baum: 12:19 Right, exactly. How do you help small farmers? Where does First Crop come in?

Jane Pinto: 12:25 Well, we like to say instead of teaching and helping them, they’re actually teaching and helping us. We partner with them so that by bringing the resources and expertise that we have on the team in regenerative farming, in seed gen, in genetics, in planting soil to soul that we bring them … They’re the flowing river. We’re the banks. We’re just helping them and partnering with them to make sure that they take this risk and there is a reward that is not only in carbon currency, it’s in capital currency, it’s in full currency, all of that because it’s a big deal for a farmer to trust that they cannot do what they did the year before and do this and know they can feed their families.

Matt Baum: 13:24 It’s got to be terrifying to make that choice.

Jane Pinto: 13:27 Yeah. I think because Michael Bowman and David Hill and Dave Weir and Dave Armstrong, who are my partners, co-founders in this, and then we have incredible women helping always in product development, in relations. I just think that when we bring it all together, there’s trust and credibility to the farmer that we’re going to walk them through this process. Look, we’re learning too. This is a new thing. Anyone who says they’ve got it or they’re the ones, they miss the whole point. We’re all the ones together.

Matt Baum: 14:05 Exactly. They’re probably lying if they say they’ve nailed it and they’ve got it.

Jane Pinto: 14:10 Yeah.

Helping farmers grow hemp

Matt Baum: 14:11 Let’s say I’m a tobacco farmer, and I contact you guys, and I say, “I want to grow hemp,” what is step one? When you guys come in, what do you tell me is step one?

Jane Pinto: 14:20 Sure. Step one is I would put you immediately with David Hill, Dave Armstrong and Michael Bowman because that’s their lane. The farmer comes to us however they come, and then that that team, the First Crop Commons team talks to them about exactly what our program is. Here’s a copy of our contract. Here’s what we’re paying. Here’s what you’re going to get from us, and here’s what we need from you. We really talk this regenerative partnership.

Matt Baum: 14:53 You’re accepting some of the financial burden too to help the farmer get started.

Jane Pinto: 14:59 We accept some of the upfront cost of the seeds. This year, they paid half, we paid half, and then upon time of harvest, they would pay the other half. We’re working very hard to get our first harvest done and see where we are because our ultimate goal would be that we are seed providers to these farmers so that together we know their soil is ready and that their seeds are the best that are possible, and then we go through the growing process with them, then we go through harvest with them. They have to have their own people to do it, but we’re their partners and guides. Everybody is going to harvest and dry. Our first extraction facility, our First Crop Commons, first one is going to be up and running and doing its job in another month. The extractor arrives Friday.

Matt Baum: 15:58 Cool.

Jane Pinto: 15:59 The building is up and we’re ready to go. That’s a model we hope to replicate around the country.

Matt Baum: 16:04 Do you help with the other end as far as introducing the farmers to people that want … producers that want to make CBD or CBD products or is it just up to-

Jane Pinto: 16:15 No. We buy it.

Matt Baum: 16:16 You buy it.

Jane Pinto: 16:18 We buy everything from them, and they know when they sign the contract at the beginning of the season at planting, at getting the soil ready, we tell them we’re going to buy it from them at … Of course, there are all these conditions, and I don’t want to speak about things that aren’t my lane but-

Matt Baum: 16:41 Got you.

Jane Pinto: 16:42 … the efficacy of the product and all of that. We work together and all of that, but we buy their product, and then we have our own brands that we are bringing to market in January. Many people on our team, our brand developers and sales and marketing, talents from other industries, mostly food and skincare and all of that. I really feel like we’re in the right lane. We’re going to do pharma and skincare and topicals. In 2020, start with our food and really bring this beautiful transformative product to wellness and food too.

Matt Baum: 17:21 That is very cool. I’ve spoken to some people who weren’t happy with how the industry was working, so they went out and found farmers that were doing it right or they started their own farm. I really liked the idea that you guys are saying, look, we will come to you and help you get started and plant this, and then you sell it to us, and we’ll help you make money. That’s incredible.

Jane Pinto: 17:44 Yeah. Well, they get paid a good and fair, beautiful market price for their product that they deliver, that they harvest, and then they get 5% profit sharing. Everything we do with that product in the branding world-

Matt Baum: 17:59 That’s amazing.

Jane Pinto: 18:00 If we can grow this to where we believe we will, and we will grow it there, these farmers will have profit sharing with us. It’s not just what they grew, but it’s all the way to the shelf into the soul.

Matt Baum: 18:12 See, I don’t think there’s another crop or product or even manufactured product where the people that grew it or made the raw materials get anything on the backend. That is truly incredible.

Jane Pinto: 18:26 Thank you, Matt. We really feel excited about that. We feel like it is something we’re doing that is true respect and reciprocity for the farmers. We can’t live without them.

Matt Baum: 18:39 Again, bad capitalism but the right way to do it.

Jane Pinto: 18:44 Right. Good capitalism. Reciprocity is profitable.

Matt Baum: 18:48 We have to stop thinking of the evil capitalism as the good capitalism. Right?

Jane Pinto: 18:52 That’s just the way of … I hope and I believe it’s the way of the future. If we don’t do this for our planet and for each other, we won’t be here. I think people are waking up to this.

Matt Baum: 19:07 You said you’re working with several different farmers. What states are you guys in right now?

Jane Pinto: 19:12 This first year, we’re in Northern New Mexico and Colorado. We are having planning meetings this Thursday and Friday on where we’re going next. I believe we have a beautiful group of farmers in the Selma area, and I believe that will bring transformative healing on so many levels. I hope that’s our next big group of farmers.

Matt Baum: 19:42 That’s amazing.

Jane Pinto: 19:43 We’ve been talking with them, and they’re incredible people. That soil is beautiful, and that feels like regenerative practices and transformative acts on every level.

Matt Baum: 19:58 Wow. That’s amazing. You said your extractor is coming next week.

Jane Pinto: 20:03 Yes.

Matt Baum: 20:04 What kind of extraction are you guys going to be using?

Jane Pinto: 20:07 We’re using an extractor from Cool Clean. We really respect those guys, their practices, their technology and who they are. That’s CO2. We really want pure … I would say we’re more boutique artisan than some extractor that can do a whole state. We’re not one of those 100,000-square foot facilities. We’ll have small footprints in many places. Making a big difference is really how we feel our path will go.

Matt Baum: 20:46 That also allows to help more people locally as well as opposed to one big place with a few jobs. You can spread it out and spread the love, right?

Jane Pinto: 20:57 Yeah, definitely. We just want to share this with the farmers in their rural communities. I think we can make a big difference that way. I think we’ll really have a pure quality product, and we’re going to be certified organic at our different First Crop Commons where our extractors are, and we will definitely be partnering and be … We’ll be partners in communities. That’s what I think really matters.

Matt Baum: 21:29 You guys have quite the scheme going here. I like it. It’s undermining the way we think of farm to table, but it makes a whole lot of sense. You know what I mean? As opposed to just going and buying produce from people. You’re helping them to create it the way that you need it created to do what you need it to do and the responsible way for the land as well. That’s brilliant. It’s like guerrilla environmentalism, if you will.

Jane Pinto: 21:59 I hope so. I know that is our true intention. I know it’s how we are all moving forward and how we’re living and being. I believe it’s time for businesses like ours, and I know there’s many more, and I’m so happy about that. People are really looking at how to do things better.

The nurturing power of women in hemp

Matt Baum: 22:16 Women like you too. Don’t forget that, women-driven businesses, female-driven business popping-

Jane Pinto: 22:21 What?

Matt Baum: 22:27 I said women like you. Don’t forget that. It’s really important.

Jane Pinto: 22:30 Hey, listen. That’s right. I love my male brothers. I am someone who’s had a long, beautiful marriage. I understand that there’s been oppression with women, but there’s been oppression with men as well.

Matt Baum: 22:47 Sure.

Jane Pinto: 22:48 We have to just get in harmony, hold each other’s hands now, treat each other with a lot of respect. I believe the more female hearts that come forward and bring vision and just transformative soul companies to the world and bring their great brothers beside them and great sisters, man. We’re in good shape.

Matt Baum: 23:09 Absolutely.

Jane Pinto: 23:11 We’re going to be in good shape.

Matt Baum: 23:11 You know what? I think the men whine about it more than the women. I think you guys are way tougher than we are to tell you the truth.

Jane Pinto: 23:18 Highly possible, Matt, but you guys are pretty great too.

Matt Baum: 23:22 Hey, we do our best. As poor, dumb old boys, we do what we can, but it’s very cool. I haven’t been in the hemp world very long. I’m learning along with people that listen to this show. This is about my hemp education. In meeting a lot of people, I cannot believe how many women are coming up in this industry, and I can’t speak to the rest of the agriculture industry, but it sure does seem like there is a much larger percentage of female-driven farmers, businesses, producers, lawyers even that are behind the hemp industry. I think it’s fantastic.

Jane Pinto: 23:57 Well, I don’t think it’s by mistake. I think there is a divine universal power. If women are the … They bring love first, nurturing, fierceness. They’re just pure and true. That’s what this plant is. It makes total sense to me that if this is a transformative plant that comes from heart and humility that it would be drawing women around the globe and will continue to because that’s what we care about. We care about being involved in those kinds of things. Mother Earth is calling us all to do this. I believe we will see great women in hemp, great women.

Matt Baum: 24:43 Sister Jane, it sounds like you’re doing it the right way, and I’m glad you’re out there. I don’t want to take up anymore of your time. This has been excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Jane Pinto: 24:51 Thank you.

Matt Baum: 24:51 I’m glad we got it figured out finally. You said-

Jane Pinto: 24:55 Yeah, we got it figured out.

Matt Baum: 24:56 Yeah. You said January is when we can start looking for your products.

Jane Pinto: 25:01 Absolutely. We’ll definitely be … First Crop will be out as soon as we can and completely in gratitude to everyone in this hemp world who’s helping each other, and we’ve had so much help from so many people in the industry, and you’re one of them. Look at you doing these stories.

Matt Baum: 25:18 Yeah. Someone has got to get the good word out there.

Jane Pinto: 25:21 Thanks so much.

Matt Baum: 25:22 Ministry of Hemp will be sure to follow you. When your stuff does start coming out, we’ll be sure to talk about it on the website. I’d love to have you back on when you guys are getting ready to actually go to market and we’ll talk again.

Jane Pinto: 25:34 Thank you so much.

Matt Baum: 25:35 Absolutely. Jane, you have a wonderful evening. Okay?

Jane Pinto: 25:39 Okay. You too. Be well.

Matt Baum: 25:40 All right, thank you.

Final thoughts on women in hemp

Matt Baum: 25:49 Jane is one of an ever growing population of women in the hemp business. I don’t know if it’s because the world has changed and more women are getting involved in agriculture and that’s why I’m noticing so many women working in the hemp industry, but it really is encouraging. It’s women like Jane that are going to help keep this business in check and make sure that farmers are growing at the right way and producers are handling the product responsibly and treating it with respect. Thank you again to Jane and First Crop. You can find out more about Jane Pinto and First Crop in the notes for this very show.

Matt Baum: 26:31 That about does it for this episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, but I want to thank everybody that listens in and helps out. As always, you can call us and leave your hemp related questions at (402) 819-6417. I’m getting ready to do another hemp Q&A show with Kit, the editor-in-chief of Ministry of Hemp. You may have heard some of the earlier ones we did. They’re a lot of fun and you guys have such great questions. If you don’t want to call in, you can always email me, matt@ministryofhemp.com or you can drop your question on Twitter at Ministry of Hemp or Facebook\ministryofhemp. We want to hear from you guys. If you like the show, please give us a star rating. Give us a thumbs up, whatever works best at your favorite podcast app, but it really does help get this information into the ears of people that want to hear it.

Matt Baum: 27:44 The Ministry of Hemp Podcast is written, produced and edited by me. When you do that, I really appreciate it. Thank you. As always, you can find a full written transcript for the show in the show notes along with all of our social media, our phone number, and any other links that I mentioned. They’ll all be right there.

Matt Baum: 28:04 Thanks again for listening and downloading, but for now, remember to take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will you? This is Matt Baum with the Ministry of Hemp signing off.

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