This time around we're publishing a live-recorded panel discussion moderated by local cannabis accelerator program Leaf Forward as part of our new monthly Cannabinoid Futures speaker series.  This inaugural edition of our series brought Vanmala Subramaniam (National Post), Matt Lamers (Marijuana Business Daily) and Jay Rosenthal (Business of Cannabis) together on the mic.

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Qasim Virjee 0:00

Going from station to station shaking from Genesis to Revelations Welcome back to this the 21st episode of the start well podcast. As always, I'm your host Qasim Virjee. Start well CEO and founder. And for this session, we're going to take a listen to a panel discussion that kicked off our inaugural episode of cannabinoid futures, which is a speaker series that we host once a month in our event space on King Street. This time around, we had members of leaf forward in fact, the founding members of leaf forward which is a local accelerator program for cannabis, hosting and moderating a panel that included Vimala Subramanyam, from the National Post, Matt Lamers. From Marijuana Business Daily, Jay Rosenthal from business of cannabis. And of course, we fielded questions from the audience at the end. It's an engaging listen, and the topic was about the media landscape and how it relates to cannabis. I hope you enjoy it and would like to point you to our website at struggle.co/programmingtofindoutwhenthenexteventthatyoucanattendisandofcourserecommendyoucontinuelisteningtoourpodcastas We'll be republishing live recordings like this in the future.

[Moderator] 1:42

Great. Well, thanks so much Qasim for hosting us. This is a beautiful venue very happy to be here. It's our first time hosting an event here and I hope that we'll be hosting many more in the future. And thank you so much to our panelists. It's I think we're gonna have a great conversation tonight. So I guess just will Jay is getting set up there would love for kind of usually you just to give a background of who you are, how you got in the industry and what you do. We can start with even Belen.

Vanmala Subramaniam 2:09

I'm having a cold so if I'm yelling, it's because I can't hear anyway. So I started reporting on cannabis when I was at VICE. So I joined vice somewhere mid 2016. And I came in as to report on personal finance economics. But vise did a lot of reporting on cannabis. They didn't do the business side of it. So I started doing that. I did that for about two years plus, and then I was hired by the Financial Post to be the designated cannabis beat reporter and that was a little bit before legalization, and that's when everything really took off. So yeah, that's that's kind of my background. I've been in journalism for about 10 years. So was doing non cannabis stuff before that.

[Moderator] 2:53

Awesome, Matt.

Matt Lamers 2:54

Thanks for having me. I work for marijuana business daily. I report mostly on Canada, every market except the United States. Marijuana Business Daily focuses on news for businesses, which is a little bit different from like a mainstream, mainstream outlet. And I've been there since about mid 2017. I was actually a journalist in a different country. And I was looking for a reason to come back to Canada and then I was lucky enough to have this opportunity open up Canada was legalizing cannabis at the exact right time for me anyways, for my job prospects.

[Moderator] 3:26

Which country were you in?

Matt Lamers 3:27

I was on Grand Cayman. Very cool newspaper there,

[Moderator] 3:31

cool. J

Jay Rosenthal 3:32

making making the reverse move from the Grand Cayman to Ontario. So I'm Jay, introduce myself already. I've seen famous people do this. So we started business o