High Functioning Podcast

Cameron Morton spent years as an assistant director on films like American Hustle and Joy. Then he walked away to start his own production company, PLAN R Pictures, and he funds it with a shift lead job at Native Sun...

Waste on the edibles line at one of the biggest cannabis companies in America was running around 50%. The freezers were stacked to the ceiling, and nobody on the floor was putting a number on it until one engineer did...

Nancy Domenichelli and Diana Langle met at a letter-writing campaign for a local candidate. They were the only two who showed up. Between letters they found out they lived six blocks apart in Springfield, and at 4:20...

Somebody showed up with a duffel bag full of cash to buy a win in a cannabis competition. Mark Kazinec says it would not have changed his life, but it would have changed his year. He turned it down, and then he had to...

Years ago, Molson Coors and Anheuser-Busch put millions into cannabis beverages in Canada. They built their own breweries. The market wasn't ready, and the bet didn't return. Boston Beer Company watched all of it...

Noel Barry has been extracting cannabis for about 15 years and has watched two lab incidents happen in front of him. One took a person's eyebrows off. Neither, he says, happened because butane is inherently unstable...

Signature collectors stood outside Massachusetts shopping centers telling people to sign a petition to end fentanyl. Cannabis workers signed it. What they had actually signed was the petition to repeal the adult use...

He opened a store selling hemp goods and glass on Newbury Street in the era when saying the word bong could get you thrown out. When the police told him to pull the pipes, he took every one out that night and walked...

In January 2028 a new Massachusetts rule takes effect. Fall 60 days behind on a payment and you can be cut off from every supplier in the state, unable to buy product, sell your business, or transfer your license. Todd...

There is a ballot question in Massachusetts this November that could close every adult-use cannabis store in the state within a year. It is funded largely by out-of-state money, and the panel argues most voters have no...

Alex Mazin could not raise the $20 million he needed to build a vertical cannabis operation, and he now says that failure protected him from years of headaches. He raised early, pivoted to a single store in Worcester...

Everyone in cannabis is trading the same doom narrative: markets are cooked, exits are dead, small operators are done. Seth Yakatan, who has sold 22 companies and raised over a billion dollars across 30 years, sits down...

A cannabis-native operator stopped at a North Georgia gas station, saw 1000mg THC gummies on the shelf, and knew the unregulated hemp market had a real problem. Thomas Winstanley spent six years scaling Theory Wellness...

Alex Mendez is an attorney from Quincy spending his own money to win a Massachusetts State Senate seat that pays less than his current job. In this episode he explains why, and the answer starts with a $20,000 hospital...

Oregon's wholesale flower market fell to $50 a pound, less than it costs to grow. Whole farms sold entire crops for $25 to $50. People who left six-figure jobs at Intel to grow cannabis lost their life savings. Samantha...