HE IS AN IMP OF LIGHT – a life force of rolling, crazy energy. He strides into chosen parts, splicing his sense of sunny possibility with routine surprise and reflection. A conservatory-trained actor, he once (literally) inhabited the world and role of a professional clown. And he is now totally stoked on the family marijuana business. A man who palpably adores his wife, his three children, his ranch, his new truck, his hometown, his life.
Full throttle.
What was it like to be a clown?
My first job out of college was as a clown with the Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey Circus, traveling the country by train. My room was three feet by six feet with a sliding door. 18 other clowns lived on my train car. The entire circus traveled by train, including animals. The car in front of me was riggers. There were two of them living in a six by three with just curtains. So those dudes are in front of me. The dancing girls are behind me. The whole thing is international, everybody was from everywhere, all over the world. That train was lit up. We’d pull into your city, and we’d go into an arena, and I slotted myself in white paint, painted dark spermy looking eyebrows; I was elegant. I traveled on that crazy train for a year.
Was it fun?
I went to clown college for eight weeks.
There, you develop a costume and a character. They teach you a setup, build, blow-off – a three-part structure of a visual gag. You start writing gags, learn how to communicate in a 20,000-person arena and how to get a visual joke. And how to fall. Because you’re gonna end up basically falling on cement.
So, they called me into the office. They said, “We would like you to go to Vermont and be a spotter for a bungee cord act.” I said, “Okay, that sounds good. How long do I have?” They said they wanted me to go right then, to get in the car and go. Here’s what I had. I had a woman with a baby in her belly, who’s not my wife. And I had this relationship with Kristen, who’s clearly going to be the love of my life. And I got things I’m supposed to do. But they said get in the car and go with this guy. I went. I held bungee cords as a team of Russians and Mongolians worked their act. I was just there because they needed somebody to hold the rope. To stand there and hold a rope while girls learned to flip around the bungees.
But most of what I did were routines. There was a fireman routine and there was a pizza routine. The circus is ridiculous. I would go in the audience and do whatever I pleased. I would take people’s popcorn, I would investigate their purses, I would flirt with women in a very (probably) unacceptable way.
It’s the most eclectic group of people. I’m standing next to elephants every day to make an entry. The elephant I stood next to, her name was Jenny. She was short. She knew me. She knew who I was. She would sometimes be playful and sometimes not interested. Every day looked the same, every day smelled the same, every day sounded the same. We did three shows a day.
What was it like living in such close quarters?
There’s a lot of alcohol, a lot of drugs. A lot of people getting into each other’s business. It was pretty, pretty wacky. And people got hurt. You’d see people get hurt on the stage and disappear.
In every city in America, what neighborhood is the train yard in? The worst neighborhood. It was dangerous. Certain guys were paid in cash. And there were dudes that just wouldn’t work in say, Texas, because of a warrant. It was a carnival of people. It was bizarre.
What did you learn by being a clown?
Being an innocent is the best way to be. You’re discovering all the time. You don’t know necessarily what anything is. That’s where the comedy is. It’s in discovery. As if you’re a child all the time. Everything is unexplored. That’s what’s cool about being a clown.
From clown to marijuana entrepreneur…
I have a vertically integrated cannabis company that cultivates, manufactures, and distributes cannabis products through retail and wholesale. Soup to nuts, seed to sale.
It’s broad, sweeping, engaging. You learn such a large scope, from botany to food to chemistry to managing people to marketing. I find all of that fun. And I like having a steady job where there’s work to do every day. And I love pot. I love cannabis. I find pot sexy. I like being around it all day. I like that my customers like it. And I think that it is genuinely enhancing people’s lives.
What will the effect of legalized marijuana be for you?
Here’s what I think. I think that we are gonna have an excellent 2022, expanding to eight stores. We’re gonna be in multiple cities. We’re dialed in and we’re gonna dispense really good weed to all sorts of people. When rec cannabis comes in, we welcome everybody.
Eventually, we’ll probably oversupply in this state. It’s got a big landmass. It depends on how you grow. If you’re growing outdoors, you get one harvest per year. So the 2023 harvest, people have to be in shape, meaning that they have to have their infrastructure built, their licensing approved, and the wherewithal to achieve a proper grow. Ready to go in March. By April, they’re in the ground at the latest. So, if they’re ready, then they’re going to cut in October. That could be a large amount of biomass; a shit ton of weed can come down right in the state. But next year, people aren’t going to fully have themselves set that early. So it’s not going to be as massive of a farm season as the year after. 2023, it’s a big farm season, there’s a lot planted. And there’s also a lot that have already failed by that point. But in 2024, there’s a shit ton of weed here, probably more than we can consume. But when is federal legalization coming in? When can you export it?
What are the restrictions of being in the weed business?
In New Mexico, we have one bank that works with cannabis companies – Southwest Capital Bank. They vet everybody pretty hard. They dig through your books. They really profit on it. They charge us on deposits; nobody else gets charged on deposits.
Cannabis is a schedule 1 substance, classified as a narcotic along with heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth. Schedule 1 means it has no defined medicinal value, which we all know is bullshit. But schedule 1 money can’t go into a bank. It’s illegal, and it falls under federal seizure. It’s their money if they come and bust you for selling drugs. But that’s been regulated out a bit now that the federal government has accepted that cannabis is real business. And they tax us fully.
What does the growing season look like?
We grow outside and in a controlled warehouse. At the end of the day, outside is more cost effective. And it’s more environmentally friendly to do. It’s the sun, it’s a purely solar experience.
That is a six-month process. The plant is vegetative, simply growing but not bearing fruit. A fruit in this case is the flower, and the flower is the bud which is what we smoke. It’s the producer of cannabinoids, which are the resin, THC, CBD and all the sticky-icky that we love. The vegetative state goes basically until the summer equinox.
March and April is a good time to plant. Then in mid-June, we get more than 12 hours of darkness. That triggers it into producing fruit. Once that process starts, the flowers produce resin glands that hold THC and the other cannabinoids. In September, we start cutting. It’s a seasonal plant, it’s not coming back next year. They’re actually trees and can be 12 feet tall, eight feet wide. A single plant can produce 10 pounds a week. It’s fantastic.
With indoor, you’re controlling the environment. Now you’re taking a closed room and setting your light parameters and your temperatures to act like fall.
Next, you mash these wet plants together; as they dry, they produce mold. It has to be aerated and dried properly. Then it is trimmed down and put into bins which have to be opened every day for about a half hour to let that air so they don’t mold. This cure takes the smell of the flower and infuses it back into the plant. A proper cure is where you get your taste and your smell.
Once it’s cured, you can get concentrates and oils out of it. You can make oil and you can make edibles. You can make vapes. You just can’t sell it as flower. And flower is king in this state. We are a 75% flower-consumption state; we smoke pot.
New Mexico really likes to take it and twist it up and smoke it. We produce everything. But we are a cannabis smoking society. Maybe because New Mexico has been for a long time, maybe because it’s rural, maybe because it has both the hippie population and Latina population. I don’t know. But we like to smoke pot.
Do you smoke every day?
If I don’t have to do something overly taxing on my brain, I can smoke during the day. Do I smoke at work? No. But if I don’t have serious heavy lifting to do, I can smoke pot all day. It relaxes, it drops my shoulders, drops a little tension on my eyelids and my eyebrows. I tend to breathe a little deeper. Makes my senses more aware and therefore life is more enjoyable.
With cannabis, if I’m talking to you, I can also feel my toes inside of my socks, and I’m really here talking to you. If I can’t feel anything in my body, then I’m just flushed to my brain. And then I might not even really be talking to you.
The people that work there seem really cool. And talented.
It’s craftsmanship all the way through. We have a guy who has a kitchen background in candy-making and baking. And he doesn’t know that much about cannabis itself. But he starts looking at it and applying recipes. Now he understands that entire thing, head to toe. And if he needed to go in there and bake a cupcake, it would happen. If we needed to have vape cartridges, it would happen. If we needed to have specialty anything, he could do it.
This business is new. The knowledge base is only so deep. Everybody’s in the process of learning and being creative. That’s very interesting. I’ve got all these people selling weed and packing weed that are just talking to customers all day long and doing it with a sense that the person buying this product should be informed. Their job is to be compassionate.
You grew up here, you have a family here…
The 20 years when I didn’t live here, all I wanted to do is get back to it. Santa Fe feels right all the time. It’s got the open sky and the light, the sunrise and sunset, and the clouds and rain. It’s got the desert dirt and aspen trees going gold. Sitting on my porch with my daughter and with my wife, breathing in this air. It’s the only place I want to be.
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