In this episode, we talk to Gino and AJ from L.A. Speedway, a delivery service that has been operating in LA for a few years now. We talk about how they got their start in the delivery business, and how they have been dealing with the new laws that have been passed by the City of Los Angeles. We also talk about the new zoning laws that the City has passed, and why they don't allow delivery services to operate in certain areas of the city. Finally, we discuss how they are handling the situation and what they are doing to make sure that they are able to continue to do their job in order to provide the best service to their customers. We hope you enjoy this episode and that you find some value in it! Don't Tell Mom: e-mail us what you think of this episode! Timestamps: 1:00 - Gino's story of how he got started in delivery services 4:30 - How to get your weed back 6:00 What's the best delivery service in LA? 7:15 - What's going on with delivery services in LA 8:40 - What are the best way to run a delivery business 9:20 - What kind of laws should be passed in LA ? 11:30 13:00- What are you looking for? 16:30- How do you get your stuff back? 17:15 18:20- What s going to happen with your weed? 19: Is it legal in LA Speedway? 21:15- What do you need to be allowed in LA?? 22: What s the best place to deliver it? 27: Is there a license to grow it in LA?! 26:40- What can I do with my pot? 29:20 32:50 - How do I get my weed back in California? 35:40 36:00 + 33:00+ - How much money should I get? 37:00 Can I keep my weed in a bag? 39:30 + 35: What do I have? 40:00 What s I m going to get back from Los Angeles? 45:00 Is it safe to grow my stuff? 41:00 How much do I need to get my stuff back in a year? 42:00 Do I have a license?
00:00:19.000First of all, Gino's been my friend for a long time, and he's basically...
00:00:24.000He's the guy that turned me on to this Whole LA marijuana delivery scene that is going on in LA which was amazing for comedians and for anybody who has a medical card where you could just call this cool dude and he would tell you what the great stuff is and you hang out with him and talk with him and you could buy it and it was all totally legal and above board.
00:00:48.000But somewhere along the line, some fuckery ran afoot, and they came up with some new political rules that keep marijuana delivery services from operating.
00:01:01.000Explain it, because essentially the way they've set it up is you would have to have had a license to operate in each one of the houses that you're delivering to.
00:01:39.000Which means that law enforcement can knock your door down, take your stuff, take your weed, take your cash, take whatever you got there, and you can show them all the papers in the world and they're like, that's great, that's cool, we're glad you're legal.
00:01:51.000Bring it to the judge and you'll be good to go.
00:01:53.000And you'll get your stuff back in a year and you guys will be fine.
00:02:33.000I have one hanging on AJ's wall in his office of them returning a few thousand dollars to us.
00:02:41.000Because, again, when there was any sort of trouble, it was, alright, you have to go see a judge.
00:02:48.000You go see the judge and the judge looks at the paperwork.
00:02:50.000And in our first case, the judge said...
00:02:54.000We've never seen a more compliant company in California dismissed without prejudice.
00:03:00.000And our lawyer asked, instead of dismissing without prejudice, we actually would like that entered in to the record that you're calling LA Speedway the most compliant marijuana company you've ever dealt with.
00:03:46.000We're not like ne'er-do-wells or someone who's clinging off the system and fucking up social systems that we've set up for people that are trying to get by in this world.
00:04:51.000Well, they say that during the old days of the Catholic Church, when they would walk down the aisle with that incense thing, they would be burning marijuana.
00:06:17.000That the propaganda that this guy created in the 1930s, even though we recognize it, everyone knows it, it's a fact, you can watch it, you can watch Reefer Madness, you can see what's written down, what they were attempting to do to make it illegal, the fact that it still sticks in 2016. And you couldn't smoke that stuff that they,
00:06:45.000Buy it from Canada and bring it down to the United States, because even though it's legal and it's not psychoactive, these farmers, they can't grow it.
00:06:52.000They're starting to try to change those laws, but as far as I know, I mean, I don't know of any large-scale hemp-growing operations here in the United States yet.
00:07:39.000You look at old Ironsides, the USS Constitution, the flag and the sails are made of hemp, and those are the original things from hundreds of years ago.
00:07:47.000It's one of the best things that nature's ever created, this fucking fiber.
00:07:52.000It has this incredibly powerful fiber.
00:08:40.000Our founding fathers had hemp fields in their farms because hemp cleans the fallow fields after wheat fucks up your fields and corn fucks up your fields.
00:08:48.000Hemp goes in there, cleans it all out.
00:08:50.000It's such an identifier of how goofy people are here in 2016 that that's an issue.
00:08:57.000That we're dealing with this weird hemp thing because it's related to marijuana?
00:11:20.000We were working in a stressful environment, working for Congress at the time, and he was actually...
00:11:28.000Drinking to medicate himself as we were, you know, working, doing technology coding and things like that.
00:11:34.000And he started playing with neurotropics to say, you know what, I'm not going to drink anymore.
00:11:40.000And I said, instead of neurotropics, why don't you try cannabis?
00:11:44.000I was that guy who had the shelves of modafinil and neuropeptin and L-theanine, all these different crazy things that you can get on or off the market.
00:15:17.000And we got these papers, and it felt so sketchy.
00:15:21.000But we went to a dispensary that afternoon, and it was like...
00:15:24.000Yeah, those early people that started open dispensaries like the Inglewood Wellness Center, those people were like the pioneers in the Wild Wild West.
00:15:34.000Well, it took almost a criminal element to be in business at that point, and that's why we're going back to these laws that say you had to be in business before 2007 in order to even be considered in these few that are allowed.
00:15:50.000Well, let's explain the whole zoning thing.
00:16:45.000But, like, we are the company that, instead of suing us, you should have just said, hey guys, what's a good way to do this?
00:16:51.000You know, that's important to talk about, that, you know, the Board of Equalization is kind of like the IRS for the state.
00:16:57.000If you're a commercial business, you pay your taxes to the Board of Equalization.
00:17:01.000Well, the Board of Equalization chose our company as the one retail company that they wanted to present to the legislature, to the people, we presented with the California State Troopers,
00:17:18.000the Highway Patrol, the Teamsters, the insurance company, and an app company, and us.
00:17:23.000Can I just say the Board of Equalization?
00:18:12.000This has got to be a way, though, they think that a universal basic income, that giving people $13,000, though, like giving everybody, like some, Michael Shermer actually just tweeted this, who's that really intelligent skeptic guy, and they think giving people $13,000 a year,
00:18:29.000like giving it to everybody, Would reduce crime.
00:18:49.000But the more I read about it and the more I see people who...
00:18:55.000People are quite a bit more educated than me on this subject.
00:18:57.000They think that it's possible that doing something like that would actually cost less money in the long run because it would start a cascade of positive events that giving people enough money to get by on.
00:19:10.000That that would start like A series of events in a lot of these people's lives where issues would be taken care of that are insurmountable otherwise.
00:19:19.000And it'll start some momentum in a positive way and that you're going to deal with less crime and you're going to deal with less violence.
00:19:26.000So you're going to deal with less need to deal with the problems and the financial repercussions of crime and violence.
00:19:33.000It'll overall cost less money to the community.
00:20:09.000I'm looking at the point, like, if you give people money, they're just going to be lazy, and they're never going to get anything done, and you're going to deal with a bunch of lazy people.
00:22:50.000They've had some interesting rulings about comedy up there, too.
00:22:53.000There was one guy that got heckled by some women in a nightclub in Vancouver, and apparently they were really drunk, and things happen at comedy clubs.
00:23:22.000The problem with that is, man, once people start hurling insults at each other, like the women hurled insults at the comedian, the comedian hurled insults at the woman.
00:23:46.000If they're talking to him, I guarantee you, unless he's a crowd worker, I don't know if he's a guy that works crowds, but I guarantee you, most likely, he was getting interrupted.
00:23:57.000So he was trying to do his act for all the people in the room, and he was getting interrupted, and then it got ugly.
00:25:12.000But it could have been that he insulted them first.
00:25:15.000That's the only time that I could see where they would get pissed off.
00:25:19.000But from what I understand, they had been heckling all night.
00:25:21.000That was according to his version of the story, which it's not like people wait to heckle.
00:25:26.000You know, someone who's a heckler, if there's four comedians in the night and the fourth guy goes up, that person's probably been heckling all night.
00:25:36.000Like, doing material on Canada in the future, if it gets heated with, like, you and Heckler, are you gonna be like, shit, this is Canada, I better step back a little before I call her this and that, or him this and that?
00:25:46.000Because, I mean, that kind of opens the door for this to be able to, like, oh, now we're allowed to sue if the comedian isn't mean to me.
00:25:54.000Yeah, well, it's a dangerous precedent to set, and it does not make me comfortable, and hopefully I'll never have to deal with it when I'm up there.
00:27:37.000The joke was, it was something, I'm going to paraphrase it, I'm going to do a shitty job, but a lot of people donated money because this kid was dying, but then he lived for several years, and then the joke was, hey, he's not even sick, or something like that.
00:28:49.000Because it's so shocking and ridiculous that it's funny.
00:28:52.000There's a real danger in pretending that those guys are just speaking their absolute mind and giving affidavits in court, relaying incidents with cold, hard disengagement from the facts.
00:29:30.000And he says it in this character and it's fucking hilarious.
00:29:34.000But it's a landmine for anybody looking to point to a guy's performance on stage and try to pretend that somehow or another what he's doing is what he really means.
00:29:57.000I maybe think that we're too close to it, honestly, because I think if someone didn't know, it might take them a few minutes.
00:30:04.000Like, say if you're not a savvy comedy store regular type person or someone who enjoys comedy on a regular basis, you could go and watch Holtzman and go, what the fuck is going on here?
00:30:14.000And that what the fuck is going on here might last 10 minutes before you catch on.
00:30:59.000That could be a comedy special, just that 50-minute version.
00:31:02.000Yeah, that is the best example of his bits, too, as far as the most fucked up thing you could imagine in joke form, but it's obviously not true.
00:31:13.000It's so preposterous when he gets into it.
00:31:18.000And it could offend people, you know, and if it does, to live in a punitive society that he can't be an artist and perform his art because he has to worry about being sued.
00:31:29.000He's already not making enough money to be sued for.
00:32:19.000I mean, it's not that people who are hecklers are bad people, but they're drunk and fucked up, and that makes them a pain in the ass, you know?
00:32:27.000But a lot of drunk, fucked up people are actually good people, right?
00:32:30.000When you reward that kind of behavior like this, like, you could say that you think that the comedian's not funny, you could say, don't ever go see him, you could cast judgment, you could do whatever the fuck you want, but to say he owes her $15,000, then it's like, okay,
00:33:00.000AJ, what's the punitive rule for the labeling that you have to put the cancer?
00:33:07.000That's Proposition 65. You have to label all marijuana products with this warning label that says this product is known to contain chemicals that may cause cancer.
00:33:23.000Is known to treat cancer, is known to, not proven to, but known to because we can't do the right research.
00:33:29.000Every piece of cannabis has to have this label on it or else you can be fined for not having this label.
00:35:59.000On top of the sales tax, on top of the city tax, on top of the excise tax, and some of the cities and counties in California having another 10 or 15% on top of it.
00:36:08.000They're also taxing the growers now, also, I've heard.
00:36:11.000So they're taxing anything that has anything to do with what you get as a final product.
00:38:38.000So if the companies are not following the rules as they stand, why are we throwing all these new rules at them and setting up these monopolies like here in LA with the monopoly, stifling good businesses?
00:38:49.000This doesn't help us and it doesn't help the consumer either.
00:39:04.000We've proven that, and again, that's why we're invited over and over to places like the Board of Equalization and to other places like Oakland.
00:39:13.000The city of Oakland wants to follow our delivery model.
00:39:16.000It's because the way we do things actually creates less...
00:39:22.000Less crime, you know, less opportunity for crime because it's just we're in your living room.
00:40:06.000You know, that's an important stat, but it is because we are very thoughtful about how we go about making sure the person is who they are.
00:40:20.000We do a Google search on every single patient.
00:40:22.000We turn down as many patients as we would take, maybe even more, just to make sure they are who they say and that a easy background check doesn't pull up anything that says we shouldn't work with someone like that.
00:40:40.000Yeah, pedophiles apparently love weed, too.
00:40:42.000But we don't love pedophiles, so we don't let them in our class.
00:41:51.000I don't think this should be available to everybody.
00:41:53.000I think when you're young especially, like this kind of fucking pop they have here in LA, you imagine if you were a six-year-old kid in Detroit and you got a hold of this shit?
00:42:10.000I think we would have to decide as a society how old someone should be before they start drinking.
00:42:16.000There's a lot of countries that let kids drink responsibly with their parents when they're much younger than 21. And they have less incidence per capita of alcoholism than some of the countries that are more restrictive about it.
00:42:28.000So I don't know who's right or who's wrong.
00:43:09.000I mean, when we start having the conversation when people say, let's compare weed to alcohol, I start licking my chops because when you compare it to alcohol, alcohol is poisonous.
00:45:03.000You guys are just some fucking people.
00:45:05.000So when you write something down on paper, this is how archaic our world is.
00:45:09.000You write something down on paper that decrees power to these regular people.
00:45:14.000So these regular people all of a sudden have the right to fucking shitstorm your house, kick open your door, shoot your dog, because you have a bag of pot hidden in your fucking bureau drawer.
00:51:50.000What most of them do not realize is that the program's co-founder, Bill Wilson, credited the psychedelic drug LSD for alleviating his alcoholism and believed the drug could be used to treat others as well.
00:52:25.000Wilson first began experimenting with LSD in Los Angeles at the Veterans Administration back in 1956. But after taking his first hit of acid, he realized that it was not the aspect of terror that could help remedy alcoholism, but rather the insight one could attain from stepping into a world of simulated insanity.
00:52:48.000Wilson believed that using the LSD could help the alcoholic discover a power greater than ourselves that in turn could restore us to sanity.
00:52:57.000However, he was adamant that using acid to combat the demons of alcoholism was not something that one could expect from a single dose.
00:53:32.000Interesting, there's documentation that indicates Wilson was involved with many supervised LSD trials, including some with psychologist Betty Eisner and Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, which led him to believe that the visions and insights given by LSD could create a large incentive,
00:53:51.000at least in a considerable number of people.
00:54:42.000Because of the stark contrast between being intoxicated on it and what it feels like to be normal.
00:54:48.000And this rethinking, like a reset button.
00:54:51.000That's what all the psychedelics provide that's like really beneficial besides being fun.
00:54:56.000They all provide that reset that takes you so far out of who you are right now that when you come back you go, man, am I doing this the right way?
00:56:11.000It says, unfortunately, LSD made its way into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous simply because others in the hierarchy did not support it as a viable treatment.
00:56:21.000In fact, a document published in 1984 by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services in New York explained that the reason the program does not endorse the use of LSD As word of Bill's activity, this is all in quotes, as word of Bill's activities reached the fellowship, there were inevitable repercussions.
00:56:38.000Most AAs were violently opposed to his experimenting with a mind-altering substance.
00:56:44.000LSD was then totally unfamiliar, poorly researched, and entirely experimental, dot dot dot, and Bill was taking it, end quote.
00:57:22.000Terence McKenna attributed this quote to Timothy Leary, but Timothy Leary said he never said it, so nobody knows exactly who said it, but that LSD causes violent reactions to people who have never tried it.
00:57:51.000Also, when you were taking it 200 times, a lot of that was recreational.
00:57:56.000But I'm sure there were small little things that I was probably going through that I... Were you concentrating on it to try to use it that way?
00:58:32.000All these psychedelics, like the good experiences and the bad experiences, represent what's the state of mind when you go into them.
00:58:38.000That's why the people that take it really seriously and they go through this all meditative ritual and they'll do yoga and they'll do breathing exercises and they'll set a tone to whatever they would like to go into this experience with.
00:58:52.000Say that they're going into the experience open and humble and say all these things out loud, and then they enter into the psychedelic trip.
00:58:58.000They do it that way because they want to set an intention.
00:59:02.000If you just broke up with a girl and you take acid, you really think acid is going to fix anything because it didn't help me when I broke up my girl.
00:59:10.000Like, that's really what you're saying.
00:59:11.000But you could also be like, hey, I want to quit smoking, take acid, and be like, what happened?
00:59:16.000And like, no, I focused on cigarettes, and then the whole place melted, and then my hand turned into a bunch of snakes, so no, I still want cigarettes.
00:59:22.000But again, it's not, you don't really want to quit.
00:59:26.000If you wanted to quit, you would just quit.
01:00:03.000On a lesser level, do you feel like cannabis has changed your personality?
01:00:08.000Because that is something you might not go into saying, alright, I broke up with something I'm going to smoke weed for, but throughout your lifetime, Has cannabis had an effect on you that you feel like it's changed your personality?
01:00:20.000I've been smoking since I was like 14, 15, so I don't even know what my personality was before.
01:00:24.000If anything, I think marijuana made me more paranoid and scared.
01:00:27.000You know, I was more like freaked out and stuff.
01:00:30.000But as a medicine for like headaches, and I don't take almost any pills now.
01:00:35.000I don't have Tylenol in my house anymore.
01:02:11.000A lot of our celebrity patients that are working in comedy or music or television or the movies, they want sativas specifically so they're not down at all because sativas are more known for their creativity.
01:02:31.000So we find people who are working in the creative field, they want to smoke sativas, you know, which is an important distinction between indicas and sativas.
01:02:44.000A lot of people don't know that different types of marijuana can affect you differently, you know.
01:02:52.000There are some people who are medicating for certain ailments.
01:02:56.000Well, they should smoke something that specifically works for those ailments.
01:02:59.000If you're smoking because you're looking for creativity, because you're looking for that You don't want to lay on the couch and go to sleep.
01:03:16.000If you are looking for that, it's nighttime, I want to relax, time to go to bed, you should smoke Indica's because that's going to bring you down and give you that body high with the CBD chemical that's inside.
01:03:45.000You know, one of the famous scientists, it wasn't Carl Sagan, it was some other famous scientist, it was one of those theoretical mathematician guys who writes all that crazy scribble shit.
01:03:55.000He would just talk about how he likes one hit.
01:04:13.000But it turned out Gino would say, you were such a dick to me when I smoked weed in your house that I'd have to go outside, smoke a whole joint in two minutes and come in and be a mess.
01:04:21.000So that was what I was exposed to, is I don't want any of that.
01:04:24.000I didn't realize you could just take one hit and just chill out and still work and still function.
01:05:11.000They might be on a million other drugs.
01:05:14.000So to say that recreational use is people just getting high, that's also not accepting that people are looking for mood regulation as a medical effect.
01:08:56.000Speedweed shut down by Proposition D, which was written by a lawyer who represents a bunch of dispensaries that are protected by Proposition D. Those are some dots.
01:09:42.000A business had to be in operation before 2007 in order to be considered now to be a viable business.
01:09:51.000Well, if you were in operation in 2007, you were in that Wild West category, so you were already skating that line.
01:10:12.000Yeah, we just laid off 40 people that are now in unemployment.
01:10:16.00040 good people that really can't get decent jobs anywhere, that were paid well above minimum wage, are now just laid off and going on the government dollar.
01:10:27.000Because of this law that nobody knows about and nobody read.
01:10:30.000And for us, it came at a time where we were...
01:10:36.000So excited about the future, working with the Board of Equalization.
01:10:40.000We were in our largest expansion at the time.
01:10:44.000We were going from the largest market, which was L.A., to expanding throughout all of California, which we're still doing, but we just now have to not include L.A., which was our main base.
01:10:56.000So what the law pertains to is you delivering things to people that live in homes because that home has not been cleared as a place to do business?
01:11:08.000Because of the zoning law, only these 135 pre-ICO's are allowed to operate at all within the city.
01:11:38.000But number two is our base, where our business is, is not in the city limits of L.A. So by...
01:12:06.000We're not even in L.A. And we have to deal with this.
01:12:11.000We're outside the city of L.A. Because the city of L.A. encompasses Hollywood and a lot of L.A. But there are places that people think are L.A. like Beverly Hills or West Hollywood.
01:12:22.000Those aren't L.A. Well, our lawsuit says we're operating a sophisticated delivery company running about seven hubs out of the L.A. area.
01:12:32.000It's like, well, where are the addresses on the lawsuit?
01:12:35.000There are none, because we don't have any locations inside the city.
01:13:38.000And he's like, hey, man, I'm just telling you the truth.
01:13:40.000But we're at a point now that if we don't do that, they're going to get pushed out anyway by bigger corporations that will come in and be able to pay millions of dollars for licensing and buildings and things like that.
01:13:52.000People are greedy and they're short-sighted.
01:13:54.000You can't be greedy and you can't be short-sighted.
01:14:47.000We went out and we're now participating with Desert Hot Springs for a legal cultivation.
01:14:54.000So it's going to be a place where the police could come in, the government could come in, inspect it.
01:14:58.000So we're moving forward with full legalization on cultivation as well.
01:15:04.000Paying everything you got to pay for, making sure that when you build your building, it's built to the right specs.
01:15:12.000Again, the government's involved in every part of it.
01:15:14.000So again, we're moving forward with the regulations, even though it's going to cost us a lot of money.
01:15:22.000The investment team that's behind it has already put $2 million in just to buy the property.
01:15:29.000So it's going to cost a lot of money and you're not going to make the money, millions of dollars that you're hoping for, but at least you're doing it in a way that can be regulated and you can open up your doors and not hide.
01:15:58.000Well, that's why we got sued, is because if you sue Speedweed, that gets your name in the paper.
01:16:03.000You sue one of the other 400 delivery services that you can find operating right now today that are illegal.
01:16:09.000That's not going to get your name in the paper in an election year.
01:16:13.000Maybe it's a conspiracy theory, but all of the facts in our case are dated 2014. We got served in 2016. I don't know, is this a special year to politicians?
01:18:45.000And that's because there's still stigma.
01:18:50.000And when you're living in a public life, you need privacy.
01:18:53.000And that's one of the reasons you need delivery.
01:18:55.000Because some of my patient bases, if they walked into a dispensary, they're going to lose endorsements and sponsor money because they're on family shows, things like that.
01:22:14.000So, you know, for L.A. to be behind the times of the rest of the state and for California, the most progressive state in the country, to be behind the times of states like Colorado and Alaska who are making tax money.
01:22:40.000And hopefully it's going to be eventually pushed out.
01:22:44.000But right now, you know, you have to deal with one of the most ridiculous examples of it, which is marijuana.
01:22:48.000It's one of the most ridiculous examples of all sorts of problems that I'm sure all sorts of businesses run into all across the country that we don't consider because it doesn't play a part in our lives.
01:22:58.000But this one does, and this one is really a nationwide freedom issue.
01:23:02.000I mean, that's really what a lot of it's about.
01:23:04.000It's a freedom of consciousness issue.
01:23:06.000And people don't look at it like that.
01:23:08.000They look at it like it's law enforcement, it's this, it's crime, it's this, it's children, it's this.
01:23:15.000It's a freedom of social consciousness.
01:23:19.000It's a freedom of being able to express yourself and a freedom of being able to intoxicate yourself with a natural plant and then what comes out of that.
01:23:30.000And that's what everybody was worried about more than anything in like the 1970s.
01:23:34.000What they were worried about in the 60s and the 70s is what was coming out of this.
01:23:38.000They weren't worried about the consequences of taking this drug.
01:23:41.000They were worried about what's coming out of this.
01:23:43.000You're getting all these people that just won't tolerate all the usual standard shit because they're constantly resetting themselves and then reconsidering their environment.
01:23:51.000And they're coming out with this whole new movement of people, like all the Haight-Ashbury shit in the 60s and all the music of the time.
01:24:00.000So much of that had to do with pot and so much of that had to do with LSD. They were just terrified of that shit.
01:24:07.000When we talk about the war on drugs and people, like, blame Nancy Reagan, that started with Nixon, you know, in the late 60s, early 70s.
01:24:14.000Well, now the new stuff has come out, I'm sure you've seen it, where they're saying that the Nixon administration purposely targeted marijuana because they were really going after the civil rights leaders and the people that were anti-war movement.
01:24:25.000So they would arrest them through pot, and that would be the back door to just break up these organizations, and that this was a strategy they had.
01:24:32.000To the point that they asked universities to pull cannabis information that was positive.
01:24:46.000The Donald Tashkin study is one that I love, where that study was to find the connection between lung cancer and smoking cannabis, and it turned out he could find no connection and actually showed that there could be a protective effect of cannabis.
01:25:19.000We were doing an interview with a magazine, and I had him there, and he showed, I take these 45 pills a day for what I have, or I could eat these three edibles.
01:25:33.000And he's like, 45 pills a day, it's crazy just trying to swallow them.
01:25:38.000But he said, these cost me thousands of dollars.
01:27:42.000If he's eating that much pot, you're talking about that many milligrams, and then it's getting processed, so you've got to think about it way stronger than just smoking it, right?
01:30:04.000And so we had to fight it, to fight those spider mites.
01:30:07.000We did everything we could, including buying 10,000 ladybugs, which eat these things, and releasing them in this tent a foot from where I'm sleeping on his couch.
01:30:26.000They have a bunch of different plants that I grow, so we buy ladybugs.
01:30:28.000Yeah, and they worked, but they didn't exactly work fast enough, and they were dying because we had CO2, and so we had to get predator mites, which were other little creepy-crawly things that we had to release right where I was sleeping.
01:31:57.000So you used the pesticide, unfortunately, late in the cycle, and it made the pot bad to smoke, but you could still extract the THC from it.
01:34:10.000We got into the industry with that extraction process, that recipe that day.
01:34:14.000Now, I've always wondered like this, when you use all those chemicals and you extract something from a plant, are those chemicals in any way, is there a residue on the extraction?
01:36:05.000And when the pot really kicked in, like when he would get really, really high, that would be right when the mushrooms would come in like a giant tidal wave.
01:36:57.000But he was really critical of the idea that marijuana was a cure for cancer because he was like, look, I am telling you, I have cancer and I smoke pot all day, constantly.
01:37:06.000He's like, I am your poster boy because if it was something that cured cancer, I would not have cancer because you cannot smoke more pot than me.
01:37:22.000Well, I think what's really supposed to be the most effective, and Gino, you helped my friend when his mom had an issue with this, and this is something about Gino, who'd never advertised himself, but he hooked my friend up with a lot of this cannabis oil,
01:37:37.000which is really expensive stuff, and you did it just to help his mom, or just to help his dad, rather.
01:37:45.000And, you know, we were talking about stage 4 cancer at that point, so there wasn't much ever hope that it was going to turn around and cure it.
01:37:58.000However, to ease the last few months of life was working and happening.
01:38:05.000There was a lot more quality of life, which...
01:38:10.000For the patient, that was great, number one.
01:38:15.000But also for our friend that we're talking about, it was great for him because he got the last few months of life together with his loved one in a better way, not in a comatose setting, which he was dealing with for a while before we got on the Rick Simpson oil regimen.
01:38:37.000Well, it definitely needs to be investigated because there's so many people that have had beneficial effects from it.
01:38:43.000It just seems insane to not have some large-scale scientific research being done right now.
01:38:48.000Like, just humanity as a whole, we kind of owe it to each other.
01:38:52.000You're not thinking about it right now because your loved ones don't have cancer, but if this turns out to be really legit, this could be another reason why we need to reconsider this whole ban on the legal sale federally of marijuana.
01:39:05.000If it can do this, If you're really taking this oil and you're reducing tumors, which has been reported in just a shitload of people, including friends of mine.
01:39:15.000I know people that have had cancer and had their cancer reduced by taking cannabis oil.
01:39:19.000And I know people whose parents had it and got their tumors reduced because of it.
01:39:24.000And autistic kids, like the seizures and stuff like that.
01:39:27.000Like our friend whose kid was going from like, I mean, he was having seizures all day.
01:39:31.000He takes the stuff he hasn't had a seizure in six months.
01:39:47.000And I've seen quite a few stories of that, of people that have children that had, you know, serious seizure issues.
01:39:52.000And as soon as they got them on the medical marijuana, it just stopped.
01:39:56.000And we have a lot of really bad prejudices about marijuana, you know, and we need to expose them as a society because they're holding a lot of people back.
01:41:03.000From what I understand, mostly from the podcast, from him being on the podcast last time, he is now in a better relationship with marijuana.
01:41:16.000Yeah, he was in an abusive relationship with himself, and marijuana was just playing a factor in that.
01:41:48.000And I remember thinking like, wow, that had to be cannabis inspired because it was so like emotionally connected to him.
01:41:55.000It was essentially like sort of validating his life work because he was really heavily criticized many, many times where people just completely ignored any of the potentially positive aspects of what he was saying.
01:42:21.000Well, the big one being that civilizations have experienced many different eras and that what we're looking at when we look back thousands and thousands of years is the most latest of eras.
01:42:33.000But there was potentially very advanced civilizations that had a different kind of advancement 10,000, 15,000 years, maybe even as many as 30,000 years ago.
01:42:43.000And that there's evidence of this stuff.
01:42:45.000There's evidence in the construction of the Old Kingdom in Egypt.
01:42:48.000There's evidence when they start looking at certain erosion patterns on the Sphinx, the Sphinx compound.
01:42:55.000Something that was built 14,000 years ago plus so all these different new discoveries that they're having when they're having these new they find these new things that are like for they found evidence of North Americans in Native Americans in North America at 14,000 years ago which pushes it way back before they thought it was it found like woolly mammoth bones with cuts on them and yeah super recently so this stuff keeps happening over and over again and they keep discovering These structures,
01:43:22.000and they find things underwater, they find sunken cities and shit.
01:44:23.000Like, he's a really good guy that's taking a chance, that's exploring this really important subject, this idea that we've been here many times.
01:44:32.000I can remember reading Magicians, maybe it was Magicians of the Gods, or Fingerprints, the first one thinking...
01:44:38.000I think it's Footprints of the Gods, right?
01:45:10.000Yeah, Von Daniken, who wrote Chariots of the Gods.
01:45:13.000And, uh, Chariots of the Gods was like a movie.
01:45:15.000They made a documentary movie about it that played in, like, the movie theaters.
01:45:18.000I remember when I was a kid, it was playing in the movie theaters, and I was freaking out, like, and people would leave there, they'd go, oh my god, there's aliens, they visited us.
01:45:26.000Like, that movie, if you watch that movie and you smoke pot and you're young, it will have you fucking convinced.
01:45:34.000I feel like I was convinced, and it's a lot of Graham Hancock who unconvinced me, because a lot of people think he's part of the ancient aliens theorists, but he's not really.
01:45:45.000He just feels that we have lost technology.
01:45:52.000He leaves the door open for visitation.
01:45:55.000He leaves the door open for that being a possibility, as do I, as I think everybody should.
01:46:00.000A unique moment where an alien spacecraft came down and ran into 14th century Europeans and fucked with them and kidnapped a few and did some scientific experiments on some and erased their memories.
01:46:55.000I mean, those could be artificially intelligent creatures that some super advanced civilization has created to gather up information on people.
01:47:04.000And that would make it so much easier for them to defy the laws of physics, defy the laws, not the laws of physics, but the laws of space travel, like with human beings being unable to withstand the kind of pressure that it would require to go light speed and shit like that.
01:47:23.000If these things are some fucking weird robot creation that lives off of a lithium-ion battery it's got in its dick, that thing might be able to go forever.
01:48:13.000What Graham Hancock is proposing is much more likely, because it's backed by actual science.
01:48:17.000And now that he's joined efforts with that Randall Carlson guy, and Randall Carlson, who's an expert on asteroidal impacts, The history of them in North America, in the world.
01:48:28.000I mean, he's a wizard when it comes to that stuff.
01:48:30.000And he can just quote it off the top of his head, all these different impact sites that they found.
01:48:34.000And you realize, like, oh, Jesus, we get hit all the time.
01:48:37.000And not only do we get hit all the time, there's evidence of a massive meteor shower impacting Asia and Europe.
01:48:44.000Somewhere around 10,000 plus years ago.
01:48:47.000Which coincides with the civilization that they're talking about.
01:49:31.000They probably had some kind of computer or electronics that just doesn't exist anymore.
01:49:35.000Well, not only that, the people who made that battery, they're pretty sure that was 2,500 BC. So that was way later than this impact they're talking about, this 11,000-whatever-it-was-year impact.
01:49:47.000They think that there's been a series of these all throughout history.
01:49:51.000And this is something that's supported by even mainstream science when they're talking about supervolcanoes.
01:49:56.000There's this one supervolcano—we've looked this up three fucking times, and I can never remember this goddamn Gino L.A. Speedweed bullshit— But there's a supervolcano that erupted 70,000 years ago and killed almost everyone on the planet except for a couple thousand people.
01:50:13.000And we all descend from those few thousand people that survived some massive supervolcano impact.
01:50:20.000This is a really openly accepted theory in mainstream archaeology and anthropology.
01:50:27.000They really believe that this is one of the possibly one of the big disaster extinction events that happened to human beings.
01:52:35.000Well, what Graham Hancock is exposing is that when you're talking about enormous periods of time, like 10,000 years, 12,000 years, 30,000 years, people cannot recall those natural disasters.
01:53:07.000When you're talking about 30,000 years and the possibility of all these different impacts and different things happening within those 30,000 years, Like, who knows?
01:53:16.000So what he's showing is, or what he was showing back then, was that this alternative theory is not preposterous at all.
01:53:23.000Like, there's real good evidence that this is not going to stay like this.
01:56:19.000So these spaces of civilization, like 10,000, 12,000 years, where they find these structures like Gobekli Tepe, and they're like, who the fuck...
01:56:30.000It's so likely that that's just a series of events.
01:56:34.000It's like people build up, they figure out society, get things going really well, they start improving upon things, and boom!
01:56:41.000Everybody's dead, rotting, bodies in the street, diseases, wolves, flee, head to the mountains, rebuild civilization, first fucking tribes don't make it, down to a few people, they slowly bond together,
01:56:58.000I bet that shit happens every 20,000 years or so.
01:57:00.000One of the theories I heard on Gobekli Tepe is that since that's what happened, that there was some devastation at that point, that A theory is that they blamed it on whatever gods, and that's why Go Black to Tempe was just covered at that point.
01:57:19.000If you were, like, a politician, you were trying to take over after the disaster, you'd be like, these motherfuckers and their statues ruined everything, and we're gonna fill it in with dirt!
01:58:10.000Meanwhile, that statue's kind of history.
01:58:12.000Like, we really shouldn't have been fucking with it.
01:58:14.000Because, like, if you could see what Julius Caesar did, like, if you could go back and see what Nero did, like, all the atrocities that he did, you wouldn't want to see a statue of him.
01:58:23.000But imagine if someone came along and smashed a statue of him.
01:58:26.000You wouldn't be able to look at it today.
01:58:28.000Like, there's something about when you go to a museum and you look at something from ancient Rome...
01:59:10.000You know, another thing, I believe it's from Graham Hancock, but the Iraqi Museum had a lot of material that just got wiped out during these wars that we'll never be able to get back that had to do with Ancient societies and Egypt and things like that.
01:59:30.000So during these wars, you know, the whole place was just looted.
02:01:40.000But that was during the Muslim invasions.
02:01:41.000Yeah, I know it was a different time period, but I was gonna ask, like that, is there something today that contains a bunch of, I don't know, history that could be destroyed and ruined?
02:02:06.000We lose 50% of the population in the impact and then, you know, when we were left with chaos and lawlessness and fucking people starving to death and no one knows what to do.
02:03:14.000And then a couple days later, everything worked again.
02:03:17.000And scientists think that it was a solar flare or an ejection that caused the EMP and just shut down all the power for a few days here.
02:03:25.000It would be walking dead if it happened now.
02:03:28.000It's so crazy that we rely on that thing to stay stable.
02:03:32.000This giant ball of nuclear power that's floating in the sky, it's a million times bigger than the Earth, and we count on it to stay stable.
02:04:23.000And the sun is just chilled right now and taking a breather.
02:04:26.000And even when they say solar cycle, they're measuring what they've been measuring over a period of, you know, whatever amount of decades they've been able to measure solar cycles.
02:04:37.000But just think about how long the fucking sun's been around.
02:04:54.000I watched this crazy documentary on hypernovas and that they initially thought that they were witnessing, when they saw these gamma bursts in the sky, they thought they were witnessing war between alien races.
02:05:08.000Like that was the initial reaction to measuring these gamma bursts in the sky.
02:05:12.000And then they realized somewhere along the line That you're looking at like a hypernova, like an enormous burst, an explosion that's so great that if it was in a nearby cluster, it would kill us.
02:05:27.000That gamma radiation, I think that is the highest that we can even measure.
02:05:34.000Yeah, and the thing was that it was happening all day, all throughout the sky.
02:05:39.000They would be measuring this for the first time, and they would see Like all these different spots in the universe, we're experiencing these gamma bursts.
02:05:51.000How would you not think it's Star Wars?
02:08:45.000Have changed so that marijuana companies can be for-profit now.
02:08:49.000They don't have to be not-for-profit, which is how it's been for the last 20 years here.
02:08:56.000And so that has to go into effect by 2018. So that's something to consider also.
02:09:03.000Once that happens, that changes things for a lot of cannabis businesses.
02:09:07.000But that all said, every cannabis business that's in LA that's not a dispensary in that Whether they're making edibles or they're making vaporizers or anything.
02:09:30.000We know the city attorney does believe that safe access is important, but he feels he has to uphold this law that was put into effect before he was the city attorney.
02:09:40.000So since he knows this is a bad law that he has to enforce, he could also affect change by helping go down the path of legalization for good businesses.
02:09:55.000He just knows his job is to enforce it.
02:09:58.000So hopefully he'll join the fight to find a path towards legalization.
02:10:03.000Okay, what can people do, the people that are listening, to wrap this all up, the people that are listening, what's a good way to follow this or a good way to help?
02:10:12.000A good way to help, if you're in California, a good way to help is to join our collective, even if you don't buy anything, and we'll keep you in touch with the politicians, and we'll put pressure on them.
02:10:22.000Politicians, you put pressure on them, joining, what would that entail?
02:10:26.000Joining our collective, like if you're a medical marijuana patient, join speedweed.com, and we are working actively with the city to try to solve this.
02:10:34.000So we're fighting in court, yes, on one hand, but on the other hand, we are conversing with the city.
02:11:46.000...that are professional doctors that you'll do a real Skype session and they'll talk to you about what your ailment is and you can get your card.
02:11:55.000Instead of going somewhere, you could just do it right in your living room.
02:12:17.000We need to buy a warehouse in California and a bunch of people use it as their mailing address and then get people from other states to become a part of your collective and they have like a fake mailing address and then we hook them up like, All right, we've got to talk more about that idea after this goes dark.
02:12:32.000Because city attorney's watching and I know he is.
02:13:29.000It's actually pretty scary getting pulled over with weed in California nowadays because the DUI rate has gone crazy.
02:13:35.000My friend's a lawyer, a DUI lawyer, and half of his cases now are just from marijuana.
02:13:39.000And they have a new test where they do the same kind of thing with your eye, but it goes left and right real fast if you're high or something like that.
02:13:47.000And if they feel like they can smell weed, and if you fail this test, you're getting a DUI just like an alcohol DUI. When you say it goes left to right real quick, what?
02:14:57.000Because if it doesn't affect your motor skills, like is it affecting your judgment?
02:15:01.000Can you prove that people who are intoxicated on marijuana perform less intelligently than people that are intoxicated on caffeine or cigarettes?
02:15:21.000And he could have those drugs and still have a couple of pops at the bar to really amp up all that aggression and still legally drive behind.
02:15:30.000I mean, isn't intoxication supposed to be a loss of motor skills?
02:15:33.000Well, right, but it's sort of arbitrary, because what is intoxicating?
02:15:38.000I mean, the swab test just did not pass in California, where they were trying to swab for THC molecules, and it's like, no, that's totally not going to work.
02:18:25.000You need to show some sort of significant issue.
02:18:28.000Because there's a significant issue with some people, but you're not even stopping those people from taking who knows what the fuck they're taking as far as antidepressants or psychoactive substances prescribed by their doctors.
02:18:41.000How many people are on fucking Adderall, man?
02:21:13.000Well, this is why we have to play this game of politics.
02:21:15.000You know, we just want to run a business and a good business.
02:21:19.000But we have to play this game of politics because if we don't, from the bottom, affect change to those people who are at the top and let them continue to create these laws, we could just go another 20 years with these bad laws when there's no reason for it.
02:21:38.000I'm just hoping that what's going to go on is that, as you know, from the time that I first got my license to today, how much more open it's been, much more relaxed people are, much more accepting people are of it, and much more accepting amongst grown adults.
02:21:52.000You just see the attitudes of people, they're changing, and people understanding how beneficial it is, especially for people who need it medically.
02:22:00.000Cancer patients, things along those lines, kids with epilepsy, ADD, things along those lines.
02:22:06.000There's just so many people that benefit from it.