Apartment 113 Cannabis & Psychedelics Industry Podcast

Episode 245 is the 43rd episode of Season 4.

Today we're joined by Lance DiMaria, better known as Breeder Piff, the founder of Piff Coast Farms, a New York seed brand built around the East Coast haze lines. He started as a hobby grower on the forums, gave seeds to his friends and went full time in 2020. He says he holds more than 250 mothers and runs his cuts in facilities in New York and New Jersey for the legal market. He also puts on PiffCon, the haze competition and convention he started in New York.

In this one, Piff tells us what haze means in New York. Most of the world knows the terpinolene hazes, and the Piff is a different plant that smells like the incense they light in church. He ordered all the hazes he could find from the seed banks and kept getting terpinolene. He went to the neighborhoods it came from and tracked it back to the growers. A friend gave him his first Cuban Black Haze clone and he built his library from there. He crossed it to Blue Dream to make Harlem Dreams, the plant a lot of his later work runs through. Now he is hunting a Piff that finishes in 55 to 63 days for the commercial market. "It's all about the hunt, man."

He tells us how PiffCon grew from a breeder meetup of about 300 people into a convention that now draws thousands. We wrap up with his low-trellis tips for home growers and where to catch him this fall and at PiffMas in December.

Connect with Breeder Piff on Instagram at @piffcoastfarms and find the seeds at piffcoastfarms.com.

Enjoy the show!

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Episode 244 is the 42nd episode of Season 4.

We're joined on this one by Matt Jerome, from Meristem Cannabis Consulting and Founding Contributor of the Connoisseurship Roadshow, and we're running through September's cannabis and psychedelic headlines.

We start in the Netherlands, where ten cities now have coffeeshops selling only regulated cannabis from licensed growers. Customers say the quality is better, and the growers could not make enough hash. We stay in Europe for Ireland, where the neurologists who prescribe under the medical program say they want to use cannabis in their practice and that the path for patients is still hard to follow.

Missouri held its third microbusiness license lottery this month, and we walk through how the program got here and the new rules that came out of the first two rounds as well as my attempt win each lottery along the way. We get into the $61.5 million award two investors won against Cookies. We talk about the dispute over Sherbinskis and ask whether the person is the brand.

We turn to a museum guide on how the art world decides whether a painting is legitimate and we try its five steps on cannabis flower. We look at an entomology lab's five-year count of the insects living on outdoor cannabis and hemp. We wrap up with a nurse practitioner's guide for parents on what party substances do in the brain and when to call 911.

Connect with Matt Jerome on LinkedIn and learn more at meristemcannabis.com.

Read the party substance saftey guide at npfady.com.

Sit down, roll one up and enjoy the ride.

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Episode 243 is the 41st episode of Season 4.

Today we're joined by Victoria Cvitanovic, an attorney and data privacy officer at Rudick Law Group, where she started the firm's psychedelics practice. She practiced law in Louisiana for ten years, most of that time as a prosecutor, before moving into healthcare and tech law. A back injury brought her to psychedelic-assisted therapy, and her first ketamine session left her curious to explore and support the space. She lives in Santa Fe now and represents ketamine clinics, cannabis doctors and psychedelics operators.

In this one, Victoria tells us how she built a psychedelics law practice. She started in the courthouse believing in progressive prosecution and kept seeing people on the docket who she thought should have been patients. She left to learn how money, technology and healthcare work. Then a client called and told her to try psychedelic-assisted therapy, and her priest followed up with the question that changed her mind. “Are psychedelics about connection or escapism?”

She gives us her read on Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, and we wrap up with a few reading recommendations including translated literature and The Rose of Paracelsus.

Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn, follow her on Instagram at @victoria_verified and learn more at rudicklawgroup.com.

Enjoy the show!

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Episode 242 is the 40th episode of Season 4.

Today we're joined by Zina Brown, the writer and director of The Faerie Rings, a live-action feature film he describes as a fairytale about the war on drugs, somewhere between Alice in Wonderland and 1984. He is a New York director who came up making music videos and moved into short films, including Dreams of the Last Butterflies, which screened at festivals around the world and picked up a run of awards. He has worked with plant medicines for most of his adult life and sees the film as a way of giving back to them. The screenplay has won 17 awards across 55 festivals, including Best Screenplay in Mexico City, Vienna, Kyiv, Amsterdam and San Antonio, and the film recently secured its first investment.

In this one, Zina tells us the story of The Faerie Rings. Simon is a young artist living in a grimmer version of America run by three overlords called the Truthsetters, and the one thing they cannot control is a ring of mushrooms said to grow deep in the forest. He finds the last one, steps inside and meets the cannabis, mushroom and ayahuasca faeries, who Zina is quick to say are not the Disney kind. We talk about how the script grew from a short into a feature and how many of its turns came to him in the middle of a ceremony. He tells us about the Shipibo tradition he sits with and why he thinks a hopeful story about resisting tyranny matters right now. He also gets into the real cannabis faerie costume his partner Madeline Bell made out of silk leaves. We close on where the film stands now that producer Gavin J. Behrman is on board and the first investment is in.

Connect with Zina on Instagram at @zinarcotics and see the concept art at thefaerierings.com.

Enjoy the show!

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Episode 241 is the 39th episode of Season 4.

Today we're joined by Adam Temple, the CEO at Evolved Extraction Solutions. He grew up outside Vancouver and came back to cannabis after a back injury. He learned the equipment side during the open-source era, building extractors from brewery parts alongside a group of mostly pseudonymous tinkerers trading designs online, then went on to bring the first film evaporator to the country and co-founded Flyte, one of Canada's first national vape brands. He launched Evolved in 2016 once enough people started asking him to build them a machine, and the company now builds modular ethanol and hydrocarbon systems and runs the Genome Technology Centre, which he describes as the only federally licensed research facility of its kind for cannabis extracts.

In this one, Adam walks us through the arc of the extraction business, from the CO2 and ethanol epochs into the hydrocarbon and solventless phases running now. He explains why he chased processing instead of cultivation and how the modular system lets an operator scale by adding pieces rather than replacing a line. We get into the Genome Crystallizer and the bet-the-company move behind it: a cold in-line process that pulls THCA isolate out of one valve and keeps a terpene fraction intact instead of running it through heat and turning it into what the industry calls hot dog water. He also talks about watching both of his main competitors close in 2025, why he stocks their replacement parts anyway and how his team helps Customers.

Connect with Adam Temple on LinkedIn and learn more at evolvedextraction.com.

Enjoy the show!

Episode 240 is the 38th episode of Season 4.

Today we're joined by Michou Olivera, a trauma-informed psychedelic guide and relational mycologist working out of western Massachusetts. Her history with psychedelics goes back to about 1985, when she was fifteen and following the Dead around Northern California, followed by roughly thirty years away from them. Mushrooms found their way back into her life in early 2018, what stayed with her was not the journey itself but the three weeks of unusual clarity that followed it. She taught herself mycology beginning in 2019, and she is now in her fifth year of cultivation and her seventh year of practice, having grown twenty-four varieties for patients.

In this two-part conversation, Michou takes us through that arc, from working with a monthly macrodose during a stretch when very little was going right to what she describes as a clear instruction to grow the medicine herself for the people who would eventually find her. She explains how she treats mushroom varieties the way a cannabis connoisseur treats cultivars, matching a gentler one to someone fragile and a heavier one to someone with the resilience to go deep, and her stated aim throughout is to make herself unnecessary. We turn to integration, which she argues matters more than the medicine does and which she says looks less like a video group call and more like moving to music in the kitchen while you cook for family. We wrap up discussing moderation, where she reads heavy cannabis and vice use as a signal that someone is carrying too much rather than as the problem itself.

Connect with Michou on LinkedIn or visit michouolivera.com. She also hosts a monthly in-personintegration group in Westfield, Massachusetts.

Enjoy the show!

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Episode 239 is the 37th episode of Season 4.

We’re joined on this one by Dustin Hawksworth founder of Fat Nugs Magazine and Daniel Crawford COO, we’re running though the cannabis and psychedelic headlines once again.

In this one we start with the DEA's closing brief in the rescheduling hearing and the strange position of watching that agency argue cannabis has accepted medical use, then set it against the FBI crime report showing more than 200,000 possession arrests last year.

We go international for Germany, where imports have climbed sixfold in two years and a new government is already looking to tighten the medical route back down. From there we get into the New Mexico operators suing the state over a track and trace cutover that halts all legal product movement for six days, and a South African policy paper that put roughly 900,000 small cannabis farmers on the map while only about a thousand of them have made it into the legal program.

We close on the research pile with a Colorado State study on cannabis and exercise, a look at how people run their own set and setting outside the clinic, and a paper on mind wandering that pulls cannabis, psychedelics and the default mode network into the same conversation.

Connect with Dustin Hawksworth and Daniel Crawford on LinkedIn, Instagram or fatnugsmag.com

Enjoy the show!

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Episode 238 is the 36th episode of Season 4.

Today we're joined by Jonny, the founder of BzzBox, a line of wooden cannabis stash boxes. The idea arrived about six years ago on a cottage weekend, when he and his friends emptied their shoeboxes and Tupperware containers onto a countertop he decided to make an alternative. He made the move right as Canada legalized, selling the first three hundred boxes quickly. The brand funds beehives kept by a professional beekeeper with proceeds from every purchase, based on the idea that one hive in a thousand spots does more good than a thousand hives in one.

In this one, Jonny walks us through six years of iteration, from choosing bamboo because it absorbs odor to adding eight corner gussets. He gets into the magnets that lock the tray up into the lid and the click they make, the move away from combination locks and why he would rather the box sit out on a shelf than get hidden in a closet. We talk about the extra-large treasure chest available, the customers already asking for something twice that size and the jars with built-in hygrometers that let you watch your flower the way you would watch a humidor. He also gets honest about why ad spend became part of the job once the category filled in around him.

Connect with Jonny and see the boxes at thebzzbox.com.

Enjoy the show!

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Episode 237 is the 35th episode of Season 4.

Today we're joined by Lance Asher, the founder of Green Elevator Cannabis, a hemp-derived beverage brand out of Minnesota. He found the plant as a teenager and spent time in the legacy market. What followed was a long run in the corporate world, along with a car detailing business he ran. When Minnesota built a regulatory framework around hemp-derived beverages and edibles in August of 2022, he saw a way back in that did not carry the old risk, and he launched Green Elevator in October of 2023 under a tagline his daughter came up with, that an elevator takes you where you want to go.

In this one, Lance makes the case that cannabis and hemp have been letting themselves off the hook on flavor, and that an edible tasting bad because the effect is coming is a standard none of us would accept from a plate of food that arrived at the table. He takes us inside building the first can, from pairing lemon with wedding cake terpenes to talking a soda-focused co-packer down from forty-six grams of sugar to the low twenties, with a tasting panel that ran from his teenagers to his partner to the neighbors.

He gives a clear read on the federal hemp fight and why a beverage-only carve-out would leave gummies, chocolates and topicals behind, along with the people who prefer them.

Connect with Lance on LinkedIn and order a drink at GreenElevatorCannabis.com

Enjoy the show!

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Episode 236 is the 34th episode of Season 4.

We're joined today by Jeremy Ortiz, a cannabis insurance and risk management specialist and Ganjier Product Specialist based in Connecticut who works with license holders across 27 legal states. His focus is property and casualty, everything from the building itself to what's inside it, with a team behind him covering employee benefits and ancillary coverages.

Jeremy came up through sales. He graduated from UConn in 2005 with degrees in economics and sociology, rode the mortgage boom and moved into financial services in 2009, then joined a Connecticut agency where he spent eleven years under a mentor who pushed him to think for himself instead of taking orders. When a larger brokerage acquired them in 2019 and asked him to pick a specialty, he looked down the list of verticals, saw cannabis and never looked back.

The plant had been in his life long before the industry was. He grew his first crop at nineteen from seeds his friends brought back from Amsterdam in their socks, following an Ed Rosenthal book step by step and hauling five-gallon buckets out into the wetlands in waders. He is passionate to this day about glass and sun-grown flower.

We discuss what risk management actually looks like for a cannabis operator, why he thinks the industry's hard-won knowledge stays trapped inside individual states and how a lunch in Vegas surrounded by attorneys and bankers with almost no license holders in the room turned into a run of events built the other way around. We also get into why he doesn't carry business cards and what he means when he says your network is your net worth.

Find Jeremy on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/jeremyportiz

Enjoy the show!

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