Diana and JR discuss the effects of AI on the cannabis industry and interview Madison Margolin, a journalist and author known for her work in cannabis activism and psychedelic journalism.
Diana and JR discuss their current favorite cannabis and non-cannabis products, including The Healing Rose CBD lip balm and OG Story strain. They delve into the impact of AI on the cannabis industry, sparked by an AI-generated interview with the founder of Cookies. The episode features an in-depth discussion on the potential loss of human connection and consistency in cultivation due to AI influence.
For our Cannabis Media Moment, Diana interviewed Madison Margolin, a journalist and author whose work in cannabis activism and psychedelic journalism has been groundbreaking. Madison shares her experiences and insights into the world of cannabis and psychedelics, as well as her book Exile and Ecstasy.
0:16 - Welcome to Your Highness Podcast
0:45 - Fave Pot
4:27 - Fave Not Pot
8:49 - Main Segment
21:50 - Cannabis Media Moment with Madison Margolin
Important links:
00:16 - Diana (Host)
Welcome to your Highness podcast. I'm your host, diana Crash, and I'm your co-host, jr Crash, so we are going to start this episode, as we do every episode, and if this is your first time listening, this is the segment where we talk about our favorite cannabis related item at the moment and our favorite non-cannabis related item, and we call it our Fave Pot Fave, not Pot. So I will start with my Fave Pot, and if you've listened to this podcast before, you probably have heard me talk about the brand, the Healing Rose. It's, hands down, one of my all time favorite CBD companies, and also shout out to the co-founder, laura Beiner, who has been on both of our podcasts. She's an amazing person, anyway.
01:04
So I have been using their CBD lip balm a lot lately because the weather is colder and my nose is stuffed all the time, or it's not like a five year old, and that's also why my voice might be a little wonky today, but the Healing Rose has the best CBD lip balms and I am quite obsessed. Today I'm using the grape fruit, eucalyptus, but I really like the coconut one. I like them all, but those are my two favorites. So, and that's my Fave Pot right now. So what is your Fave Pot?
01:42 - JR (Host)
My Fave Pot is actually a strain, it is OG story. Now, something about me I deal with like a constant state of anxiety. I'm always jazzed up. It's just, you know, I say that America might run on Duncan, but I run on anxiety With that.
01:59
Sometimes I get like these kind of panic attacks and something that I use to help pull myself out of it is I have like these like little moments in my life that I bookmark. They're like little safety moments. They're generally very mundane moments that I can just reflect back to, where at that moment the world itself kind of quieted and calmed down and I was able to just fully connect to the moment. And it's very mundane stuff, like me as a little kid sitting on my stomach looking at the TV while wonderful world of Disney was about to play and the intro to that on a Sunday evening. You know there's multiple ones throughout my entire life that I can go back to and sometimes through a panic attack it can even be hard to get back to that moment.
02:44
So I found, with the very few strains, OG story being one of the easiest where after consumption, not only does it help quiet my mind but it helps deliver me back into that moment so that I can reflect on that moment, pull myself down, calm myself down and reflect on the idea that I'm safe and that everything is going to be okay. You know a lot of strains that can make you feel anxious or a lot of strains can make you feel tired, but OG story is one that kind of keeps you from doing both and it just kind of brings you into this very nostalgic, happy moment. So I've only really had it from the brand rhythm. So if you live in a state that doesn't have rhythm, you might be able to find it from another brand. But I definitely recommend especially if you deal with a lot of anxiety or panic attacks, the strain OG story. It's top terpenes, generally being Myrcine, Beta-Carry-Ophelion and Limonene, which is like my holy trinity of cannabis terpenes, if you will.
03:44 - Diana (Host)
Well, we're all learning a lot about you right now, jr. So me included me, being your wife for almost 20 years, did not know that you ran on anxiety. I didn't know that was your.
03:55 - JR (Host)
I'm generally always anxious. You're always like what's wrong with you. I'm anxious, like all the time.
04:02 - Diana (Host)
Obviously I knew that. I'm just saying I didn't know that you had a logo about it. I didn't know you had a logo about your anxiety.
04:09 - JR (Host)
Always, brandon.
04:11 - Diana (Host)
Well, whatever the motto, however you want to say it, I'm glad that you found a strain that helps you in those times of panic, because that can be very overwhelming. So I'm glad that that strain helps and I should probably use it more. So, moving on to our Fave Not Pot. So my Fave Not Pot, my Fave Not Pot. I don't know why I said it like that. It is a brand called Alice Mushroom Chocolates and you might have heard me reading the ad in a previous episode.
04:47
This episode is not sponsored by them, but they have sponsored in the past and are welcome to do so in the future. But anyway, I am so obsessed with their mushroom chocolates it has well, the daytime one. There. They call it for focus and energy, brainstorm. That's right, I knew they had a name for it. They call them the brainstorm chocolates and they have organic lines, mean quarter steps and piranha in it, and I'm telling you that the results are instant. I feel a difference immediately, and that is very rare. It's really helping my brain fire on all cylinders for the most part, as much as my brain can. So I definitely recommend them. I haven't tried their nighttime chocolates yet because I have enough. I have enough stuff to help me go to sleep right now, but I highly recommend the brainstorm chocolates and actually, if people want to try it, the code still works for 20% off their next purchase your highness, so they can use the code your highness for 20% off. So what's your fave? Not pot right now.
06:07 - JR (Host)
My fave not pot is a movie. It's a movie that I watched last night. It's Christmas time so I really wanted to get into the Christmas spirit, so I watched. It's a wonderful knife and let me just tell you, it's magical.
06:21
If you have a love of horror movies, christmas movies, lifetime movies and hallmark holiday originals, then not only do you have the, the entertainment taste fit for the gods, but you have a delightful movie ahead of you, all the way down from it being shot in Vancouver. The fact that all the houses are both non-descript yet fancy, you have just writing, that just goes completely bonkers. It's a play on a. It's a wonderful life. So you know, you have a future where someone decides that they don't want to exist anymore. So you see what the that reality would look like, and it's just like this absolute dystopian nightmare of a reality, except it all takes place in this world. That's very familiar because it looks like it came out of a hallmark holiday movie. It's just absolutely magical and I absolutely recommend everyone, everyone, watch it. Is it a good movie? No, you know, I'm not going to say it's a good movie, but is it entertaining?
07:21 - Diana (Host)
It's personal taste.
07:22 - JR (Host)
It's personal taste, but it's entertaining and it's just. It's just all around fantastic. And Justin Long is in it and delivers probably one of my favorite performances I've ever seen him in. So watch, it's a wonderful knife.
07:36 - Diana (Host)
I will not, you know I won't be watching that, but I will definitely just hear your experience and be happy about it for you, because that's pushing it for me.
07:48 - JR (Host)
It is rated R after all. Oh wow, I don't want to.
07:55 - Diana (Host)
You know, ever feel like life stress gets to be too much? Welcome to Meet your Gaia, your natural wellness partner. We are the number one rated provider of credo, a 100% natural plant based solution used in Asia for centuries to help increase focus, energy and relaxation. Want to know more? Use the code YHpod to get 10% off your first order today. That's meetyourgaiacom and code YHpod for 10% off.
08:48
Moving on switching gears, if you will. We are talking about AI and cannabis today. I mean, who isn't talking about AI right now? Really, if you're in the industry, you may have already heard about the story, and if you aren't, then I'm only going to give a very brief description.
09:10
So I encourage you to research some more on your own, but a few weeks ago, a story came out in Benzinga or on the Benzinga cannabis website, and it seemed to be an interview that they conducted, interviewing burner from the brand cookies. So, pretty quickly after this interview was released, burner himself said that the answers were not hits and then, once Benzinga was finally contact, when they did respond, they confirmed or at least burner confirmed I shouldn't say the Benzinga confirmed. Burner confirmed that the entire interview was fake and the most recent update that I can find was that not only were the interview answers generated by AI, but so were the questions. So it appears to be that this journalist who conducted this interview is AI, or at least AI created this article, and when it first came out, when the news first came out, there was a little bit of backlash. I mean a little bit is what I'm saying because, largely speaking, it seems to me that the cannabis industry is embracing AI.
10:34 - JR (Host)
It's really weird. We've kind of seen the buildup to this. First, with the mild loss of integrity. A couple of years ago we started seeing a lot of companies purchasing cameos from cannabis celebrities and using those cameos as almost a form of marketing and advertising for their brands or their dispensaries or companies, even though it wasn't truthful at all. It was literally just a celebrity being paid to read a script. And now we're just seeing the buildup of this where not only have we kind of lost some of that integrity, but now we're fully removing any human aspect out of it whatsoever. We're basically just having two robots speak to each other and calling it a day.
11:19 - Diana (Host)
Well, exactly, and there are a lot of issues with this. We won't dig into the media aspect of it so much right now because we are going to do a bigger dive into the cannabis media and the state of things in January. This is largely about the AI of it all. I'm going to read this post from a woman on LinkedIn and I didn't get her permission to use this post, so I'm only going to paraphrase it for now. But she basically is saying that one of the issues that we have is that proper terminology like we are not seeing that in the algorithms, because social media platforms are making it impossible for brands and companies and people who are trying to educate to use the proper terminology. So, basically, if AI is picking up from antiquated language and data, then it's only going to further embolden the prohibition propaganda. Basically.
12:24 - JR (Host)
Yeah, and I think a big aspect of it too is a lot of that stuff is people talking about glitches, of can it work and not even questioning should it work? We've seen this mechanized state slowly rip into the cannabis industry, going all the way to the dispensary level where you would have just a year ago, people walking into dispensaries having conversations with bud tenders, on ailments, on what's good for what, really discussing the plant, having that human connection. And we're slowly moving away from that, eliminating that human connection, to where they're just coming in, ordering off of a kiosk, walking up to the counter, getting their product and leaving. There's no real discussions happening.
13:13 - Diana (Host)
And people complain about that.
13:15 - JR (Host)
People complain about it, but then also people complain about long waits too, which happens when people are having those conversations. You can't have your cake and eat it too, but yet again, it's which direction do you want to go into? We have this plant that was gifted to us to help build that community, to build those connections with the earth, with Mother Earth, with the plant, with each other, and we're doing everything we can to eliminate that human connection. Pulling away from the dispensary. Let's just talk about something like cultivation, because this is something that I've struggled with myself, because using AI during cultivation just going off of something, I found people using automation to increase efficiency, reduce risk of human error, basically using AI to being told when to adjust water, adjust lighting, you know, taking a lot that human aspect of it, of it out of it. On a medicinal level, you know, I see something like this and I'm thinking well, it's gonna make things a lot more consistent for the medical patients, something that I've talked about a lot, you know. So here I am about to start contradicting myself, because I wanted that consistency with medicine. But what are we losing because of it? You know, we're losing that human connection.
14:36
Growing cannabis, it was an art. It had that human connection where I would see flower come in from like row and it would be great, and then I would see it come in and it wouldn't be good and then it would be great again. And it really was dependent on who the head grower was and the connection they have. It wasn't just their knowledge, because they can pass that knowledge down, but it's the connection that they had with the planets, almost like that energy was transferred to it. You know, by having that connection, you know me. A lot of people would say that that is the case, right, it is the case when I was working in Cava, running in Cava Bar. You know, it was that connection.
15:13
When you're preparing Cava, you have to run the Cava root through a strainer to extract the liquid that it was soaking in. So it's just the liquid. You're not consuming root. And while doing that, while straining it, you had to massage it. You were transferring the energy from you into that Cava.
15:29
People would be able to drink Cava and knew who strained it, whether it was someone that was generally anxious, someone that was generally angry, someone that was putting a lot of their heart and care and love into it. That energy transfers into the final product and that energy from the head grower, from the human aspect, it transfers to the plant, and we're eliminating that. You know, we see, what we have now is all this art being produced by AI, and the one common denominator that you're hearing is it may look very nice, but it's losing its soul, it's losing its human connection, it's losing its lived experiences, its pain, its love, everything that is felt, that goes into art. It's losing and now we're losing that in our connection with each other, with Mother Earth, with these plants that were then putting into our body to heal us on a human level, and we're taking the humanity out of it. So it was like we're creating a cyborg industry where we're slowly introducing more and more mechanizations into it, removing the humanity.
16:35 - Diana (Host)
Well, and to touch on that a little more, I mean, one thing that I have seen over the past seven plus years is a lot of people who are in it for healing purposes, who are healers themselves, like nurses and doctors and you know, naturopaths and you name it are exiting now because they aren't being given that opportunity to formulate the products just so for a certain condition, or consult with a patient before they go into the dispensary. And the thing is, is that, you know, for an industry that claims to want to be different from other industries, we're like quickly moving past these things right.
17:17
Like I remember, when I first got into the industry, there was consultants and coaches out the wazoo like you could throw a dime and hit like 20 people who claim to be a cannabis consultant or cannabis coach, and then a lot of people you know badmouth that profession or not badmouth. But basically there was a lot of like discussion about are these real jobs? Are these people really helping you? And at the same time, the discussion is changing about the dispensary experience, the retail experience. Oh, I'm being rushed in, I'm being rushed out, I'm being. You know, I don't even talk to people about what I'm picking and all of this, and it's like very much the whole you can't have your cake and eat it too scenario.
18:04
but it's so conflicting Because it's like you said, there are, there's all these people who don't like to wait in lines, don't want to have to deal with anybody, prefer to use AI, prefer the fact that you know. Bing might say well, what's a terpene? I'll show you.
18:22 - JR (Host)
Yeah, and a big thing to think about as well is is where these decisions are coming from and why. You know, these decisions weren't just thought up of thin air. They were delivered down because a lot of people were complaining about things like long waits and stuff like this. So you know, corporations being as corporations, do they want to A make people happy, even though that's kind of a, b, a they want to make money in the quickest and most efficient way possible. And then B they want to make people happy so that they continue making that money. So if people are saying I don't like to wait in line for a long period of time, these bud tenders are too slow these executives are thinking okay, we'll speed up the process by taking the humans out of it and we'll make more money because we'll get more transaction per hour. Then that's how we ended up in the situation.
19:14
You know, this is the model that was built by Apple, by all these large companies. They didn't just come out of thin air. So, really, what people need to do is they need to reflect on what they really want out of this industry, what experience they really want. Do they want to have that connection? Do they want to build that community? Do they want to feel that oneness with the planet itself, or do they just want to get a synthesized down piece of medicine and that's whatever you want? That's fine if that's the direction you want to go into, but you can't have your cake, like we said, and eat it too.
19:51 - Diana (Host)
And this is why it's not legalized on a federal level, because no one can really agree on anything.
19:57 - JR (Host)
Exactly.
19:57 - Diana (Host)
I say, oh, it's just so simple, just make it legal. It is not so simple. This is a very good example of that. You know, it's like there's a huge faction that is against the you know, appleization of the industry, the Targetization. I guess Target's not the greatest example, it's much more like Apple. And it makes me think about when I worked for JC Penney and it was taken over by the old Apple executive and it all just went to shit very quickly Because they removed the people first mentality.
20:31 - JR (Host)
And that's what AI is generally going to do. You know AI doesn't take the jobs that people hate. We've seen this. You know it's taking the jobs that people are actually loving and passionate about. It's taking away the arts. It's taking away the connection to a plant.
20:47 - Diana (Host)
And last I checked we didn't have a basic monthly income so it is very problematic for people like us. I'd say for everyone, but that isn't really true. There are people who are still going to profit, no matter what.
21:00 - JR (Host)
In this scenario, we're not those people, not those people.
21:04 - Diana (Host)
But you know it is terrifying because it's happening in all aspects of media and, like I said, we will be digging into cannabis media more specifically in January. But in this episode, at the end of the segment, you will hear from Madison Margolin, who is an author and journalist in this space Well, she's in all the plant medicine spaces, but and that is for our cannabis media moment. So stay tuned for our cannabis media moment with Madison and until next time, stay high and beautiful.
21:45 - JR (Host)
Bye everybody.
21:50 - Diana (Host)
Today I am joined by Madison Margolin, who is a multimedia member of the plant medicine space. So, madison, first of all, how are you doing today?
22:01 - Madison (Guest)
Good, how are you?
22:03 - Diana (Host)
Good, I am glad that we are finally meeting after all this time. So, madison, why don't you start at the beginning and tell us what got you into cannabis media?
22:14 - Madison (Guest)
Yeah, so I grew up in the cannabis space. My dad's a criminal defense lawyer, so he specializes in cannabis cases and I just he was also ran for office a few times to legalize weed and so I grew up in that and kind of an activist household. But I didn't think I ever wanted to like go into media at all. Actually, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer and you know I ended up kind of I got into journalism school by accident. I said, hey, that sounds really cool, I want to go so. So that's how that happened with with media.
22:49
And then when I was in journalism school, I was in New York reporting a story for one of my magazine classes on New York's medical marijuana program, and it was the year was 2015. New York was like going to legalize medical cannabis within a year, so I think. And I ended up getting a job based on a story that I wrote in journalism school at the Village Voice reporting on on weed for the voice. And so that's how I got into cannabis media. And then I kind of just took it from there, really just looking at the policy, culture, spirituality, medicine, agriculture, all sorts of things related to cannabis.
23:30 - Diana (Host)
Awesome. So what was the impetus behind creating Double Blind Magazine?
23:36 - Madison (Guest)
Yeah. So my co-founder kind of came to the idea while she was meditating just to do a psychedelic like an RSC psychedelic magazine, and the first thing she did when she got off her meditation pillow was to call me and say, do you want to start this together? Because I already had been reporting a lot on cannabis and psychedelics and she kind of like knew my background and knew that it would be a good fit, especially for kind of bringing more you know, like you know bringing like a good team to the magazine because of my background. And so that was the impetus. It seemed like a really good opportunity to kind of move psychedelic journalism forward in a sophisticated way and to really open up the conversation about where psychedelics are taking us in all other sectors of society.
24:24 - Diana (Host)
What are some of the biggest challenges that you see or that you face, being in plant medicine or plant medicine focused media?
24:34 - Madison (Guest)
I think that people often focus too much on the plant medicine and not on, like, where it takes you. So psychedelics are never really just about psychedelics. They're about everything else. They're about spirituality, mental health, medicine policy, conflict resolution, environmentalism. So I really hope that people are able to kind of look more into psychedelic consciousness. Unless that psychedelic substance, as a path forward into kind of resolving all the issues that we hope psychedelics can help us think differently about.
25:07 - Diana (Host)
So what is your favorite part of your work?
25:10 - Madison (Guest)
Just that I get to be a student for life. You know, I use my job as an excuse to kind of explore things that I might be too shy to explore otherwise. Or I just get to, like follow my intuition and see whatever I'm interested in and kind of go from there and, yeah, I get to learn a lot and talk to really cool people.
25:29 - Diana (Host)
Awesome. So do you want to tell us about your book Exile and Ecstasy?
25:34 - Madison (Guest)
Yeah, so it's a first person Donzo Journalistic Memoir of sorts. It's kind of like my life story and a lot of my life story is also influenced by my journalism. So it talks about me growing up in the community surrounding Baba Ramdas, who's the author of Be here Now. He and my dad had the same guru named Karli Baba, or otherwise known as Maharajis, from India, and so I grew up in this world of what I'm called Hindu's of kind of a lot of you know West Holocaust Jews who had been influenced by psychedelics and ended up in India looking for spiritual sustenance and meaning and frameworks to integrate their psychedelic experiences. So that was where I'm coming from.
26:22
And then when I was in journalism school I every student in the class was assigned to report on a particular ethnic community and because I was the only Jew in the class, I was given the Hasidic community in Brooklyn and when I was there I met a bunch of people who were doing psychedelics at festivals and you know, like upstate and the cat skills or doing high wasca ceremonies, and again, the people I met were really more on the fringe of that society. It's not the mainstream, but I saw a lot of overlap between the way that I was raised and actually the Hasidic world, and so I got really interested in it and was so curious how people from such a strong psychedelic background could sorry such a strong Jewish background, how that might factor into their psychedelic experiences. And so the whole book sort of chronicles my experience of reporting on this world, doing psychedelics with Jewish communities, kind of seeing how that relates to Rondas and be here now and yeah it. You know the book takes everywhere from like ayahuasca circles and basements to India. You know hilltops in Israel.
27:35 - Diana (Host)
So yeah, how long did it take you to write that?
27:40 - Madison (Guest)
I mean it's like a lifetime in the making, especially, and then another 10 years of journalistic experience. But I did. I started where I was working on it for at least a year or so, but then I scratched the whole thing and rewrote it in a month before it was due.
27:58 - Diana (Host)
In a whole month.
28:01 - Madison (Guest)
Well, the first draft, the first draft, I had to like go back and you know, I gave myself another month to do the second draft.
28:10 - Diana (Host)
And so all of the media that you do really does intersect in the way of spirituality and the experience. That happens, not just the plant.
28:23 - Madison (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I'm more interested in, like, the consciousness of psychedelic substances themselves.
28:30 - Diana (Host)
Like the spirit, the plant spirit more, so that is really interesting. I'm excited to read more about, or read the book more. I've only been able to peek at it a little bit here and there so far, but I'm very excited to dive into it. So how can people support you and where can they find you?
28:50 - Madison (Guest)
Yeah, so you can go to my website, madisonmargolancom. You can also follow me on Instagram at Madison Margolan. It's M-A-D-I-S-O-N-M-A-R-G-O-L-I-N. And yeah, I have other social media too, but those are like the two main ones. You know, twitter is Margolan, madison and then Facebook. You can also follow me. It's just my name and yeah, I'm doing a lot of work in this sector, on, you know, judaism and psychedelics, how that applies to Israel, palestine conflict. You know, just in general, I teach courses here and there, so excited to share more of this.
29:29 - Diana (Host)
Well, thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it, thank you. Thank you for listening. Until next time, stay high and beautiful. This episode was produced by your Highness Media. Audio editing by JR Crash. Intro music by your Mom Likes my Music. Subscribe to our sub-stack your Highness Newsletter for the latest announcements and event updates.