Apartment 113 Cannabis & Psychedelics Industry Podcast

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! IG: apt_113 apt113.com

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! IG: apt_113 apt113.com

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! IG: apt_113 apt113.com

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! IG: apt_113 apt113.com

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! IG: apt_113 apt113.com