First Smoke of The Day

He ranks environment above everything else, and says around ninety five percent of the operations he walks into do not have enough dehumidification.

In this episode he lays out his rule for building a room. Spec it for week nine, not for day one. Sixty pints per day per light fixture. And understand that the colder you run, the less capacity that equipment actually delivers, to the point where a cold room may be getting a small fraction of what it was rated for.

He also covers keeping a room flatlined so pressure swings stay minimal, the numbers he targets through veg and into early flower, why he keeps veg rooms hot rather than cooling them down for the crew, light levels by variety, and the overnight failures that nobody catches until the next morning.

fsotd.com has the complete episode.

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He can tell how a room is doing before he looks at a single plant. He walks in, notices how his skin feels, and says that alone tells him whether it is going to be a long day.

In this episode he breaks down how he actually diagnoses a grow. Reading plant architecture after the stretch to work out where the room was overwatered or dried back too hard, and roughly when it happened. Why environment is the most common failure by a wide margin, and why so few operations own a light meter now that the industry has moved to LED. What he checks when the numbers all look right and the plants still look wrong.

He also gets into building a real pest program with multiple modes of action instead of spraying the same thing until it stops working, how to spot hop latent viroid by leaf angle and stems that snap without pressure, and the hardest call in cultivation: when a room is no longer worth saving.

Catch the full sit-down at fsotd.com.

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Harrison was on a call with a consulting client when his phone started blowing up. Joe Rogan had played one of his videos on air. He told the client he had to go, hung up, and decided to start taking the work seriously.

In this episode he explains how videos about California infrastructure turned into about a thousand new followers a day. It started with an unfinished airport train, then the high speed rail, roughly eighteen billion spent with projections reaching far higher and no train to show for it. He makes a point of keeping it out of party politics. His argument is simply that people are paying for something they are not getting.

He also talks about the politicians who have reached out since, why he has turned down every paid promotion offered to him so far, an honest answer on manufacturing overseas, and the trip to Mexico that is becoming his next video.

The whole thing is at fsotd.com.

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Harrison sold bongs. He never touched the plant. The police still showed up at his house and federal investigators still looked into him, because people assumed anyone shipping at that volume had to be moving product too.

In this episode he lays out what it actually costs to run a cannabis-adjacent business under federal prohibition. Banks that froze and closed his accounts as a matter of routine, to the point where the only institution that would take them was overseas. Thousands of units seized at customs over the years through random inspection, all of it destroyed. And the morning his social account with six hundred thousand followers vanished while he was on a plane to pitch investors, leaving him to pitch the next day with nothing.

He also talks about finding one of his own custom designs sitting unbranded on a shelf across town, and why he thinks the major platforms change their position the day banking opens up.

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Harrison built the largest online head shop in the country. Over 50 million dollars in revenue, a thousand bongs a day for a year, and more than a million sold. His salary when he sold it was ninety thousand dollars, the highest it ever reached.

In this episode he traces the whole build. Launching a one dollar subscription box on Reddit and waking up to a hundred subscribers, then quitting his customer service job the same week. Twenty months of putting nothing into his own bank account. Getting burned by supplier after supplier until a test order with a brand new seller came back perfect, and building that factory alongside them from two hundred pieces to two hundred thousand.

He also talks about the community volunteers who turned packing into a party, the meme page partnership that ended with him at Tommy Chong's house and moving his whole team to California, and the one thing he thinks most people get wrong about cold outreach.

Catch the full sit-down at fsotd.com.

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Full episode is up at fsotd.com

Harrison sold his company for $10 million. A third of it was cash and two thirds was stock. Then the stock fell from around $8 a share to $1.

In this episode he breaks down the full acquisition. The buyer had just purchased three of his biggest competitors, and when the offer came in around $9 million, he said ten or he walks. They agreed. What followed was two years nobody saw: a seven figure tax bill on money he didn't have yet, staff who couldn't be told about the deal in advance, and a real possibility of walking away with a fraction of the headline number.

He also talks about the $15 million valuation offers he passed on years earlier, the non-compete that kept him out of the industry he loved, and what the money actually changed once it finally landed.

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The whole thing is at fsotd.com

Hopelord's first paycheck in cannabis came from Puffco. The job was seeding and talent relations, which in practice meant handing Puffco products to artists he met while touring.

In this episode he traces the whole relationship. Finding Puffco through a producer friend in the ASAP camp, visiting their second office in Carroll Gardens when it was seven or eight people and Roger lived upstairs, leaving to focus on Talking Terps, and coming back years later as the brand behind Puffco's first co-branded collab. He also gets into PuffCon taking over entire city blocks and why he thinks 420 should move to Miami.

Then a real argument about New York: he believes it already has the best cannabis laws in the country, lounges or no lounges, and explains why.

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TP Crawford took close to a year. 3D render first, then find a factory that'll actually take the call, then prototypes, then shipping, air or sea. Hopelord walks through what it really costs to turn an idea into something physical.

He also went to the RAW factory with Josh and saw the scale up close. One mill supplying essentially the whole world, and damn near pre-sold out while they were standing there.

The detail he's proudest of isn't the look, it's the feel. The lighter sleeves are made in the USA and finished so they're almost velvety in the hand. Blazy said on a podcast that when he buys a lighter sleeve he buys Talking Terps, specifically for the texture. Hopelord's point: most people stop at the 3D print. Push the design all the way through and you get something people actually want to hold.

Plus the collab list, Puffco, Alien Labs, Kumba and Pake from Japan, a bicycle with Dos Noventa in Barcelona, and how each one came together on its own timeline. The Toad Venom drop with The Flowery, which went to their black tier first at about 100 half ounces. Pulling the brand back for a year and a half to respect what's in people's pockets. And red hot 1,100 degree nails in 2013 with Action Bronson, which he'll be the first to tell you was horrible.

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Hopelord's father taught art for 47 years. He passed six years ago, and Hopelord only learned his most repeated lesson by reading what former students wrote on his Facebook wall.

One of them, 36 years later, was still applying it: steal from everyone. Get up from your seat, walk the room, see what everybody else is doing, take what you like and make it your own.

That's the lens he uses now when people copy Talking Terps. He made a toy, and within a year other people were making toys. He posted a lighter case and started seeing ads for them from companies in France. His read is collective consciousness, not theft. Inspiration is free and what matters is execution.

The brand itself started by accident. A line in a song Juice and Erick the Architect were making after a Red Rocks show. It became a hashtag, then a logo, and the first person to wear a Talking Terps shirt was Snoop Dogg. He couldn't design shirts, so he made a two foot plush instead, and TP Crawford came out of that. The name came from a creative partner who's a boxing fan and was thinking of Terence "Bud" Crawford.

His dad got a signed first edition before he passed.

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It started with a tweet. Someone in the ASAP mob posted that he'd just gotten a G Pen and was looking for wax. Hope saw it, brought some over, and by the end of that week he was with the whole crew after the show.

That one post turned into years of access. Touring with Flatbush Zombies from Seattle to Santa Ana. Meeting Ted before Alien Labs was Alien Labs, back when it was Lemon Fuel OG and a six lighter in Reading. Running around High Times Cups collecting flavors like Pokemon cards and coming home with fifteen jars at a time.

Then the Mendo run. In 2016 he convinced Greener Fields to sell the original Skittles cut, took $20,000, called Ted, and drove up in the middle of the night. That cut plus an OZ Kush seed became Brainwash, the collab they finally did last year.

He also has a documented photo from backstage at a Smokers Club show at Best Buy Theater, him with Rocky, Playboi Carti, Ian Connor and others, showing them Skittles for the very first time while everyone was still on OG.

Plus the Toad Venom deal with The Flowery in Florida, and how the Talking Terps merch relationship turned into a strain drop.

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