Apartment 113 Cannabis & Psychedelics Industry Podcast

Rob Sanchez
  • 5.0 (5)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

Hang out at Apartment 113 with Rob and a different guest to talk shop about the industry and learn about all of the people that make it possible. Cultivation, manufacturing, extraction, accounting, consulting, media, events, education and more. Listen in for a conversational look at the origins of different businesses and projects in the space along with unique perspectives and occasional tangents.

  1. 2d ago

    Episode 236 - Jeremy Ortiz, Cannabis Insurance

    Episode 236 is the 34th episode of Season 4. We're joined today by Jeremy Ortiz, a cannabis insurance and risk management specialist and Ganjier Product Specialist based in Connecticut who works with license holders across 27 legal states. His focus is property and casualty, everything from the building itself to what's inside it, with a team behind him covering employee benefits and ancillary coverages. Jeremy came up through sales. He graduated from UConn in 2005 with degrees in economics and sociology, rode the mortgage boom and moved into financial services in 2009, then joined a Connecticut agency where he spent eleven years under a mentor who pushed him to think for himself instead of taking orders. When a larger brokerage acquired them in 2019 and asked him to pick a specialty, he looked down the list of verticals, saw cannabis and never looked back. The plant had been in his life long before the industry was. He grew his first crop at nineteen from seeds his friends brought back from Amsterdam in their socks, following an Ed Rosenthal book step by step and hauling five-gallon buckets out into the wetlands in waders. He is passionate to this day about glass and sun-grown flower. We discuss what risk management actually looks like for a cannabis operator, why he thinks the industry's hard-won knowledge stays trapped inside individual states and how a lunch in Vegas surrounded by attorneys and bankers with almost no license holders in the room turned into a run of events built the other way around. We also get into why he doesn't carry business cards and what he means when he says your network is your net worth. Find Jeremy on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/jeremyportiz Enjoy the show! IG: apt_113 apt113.com

  2. Aug 10

    Episode 235 - Melanie King

    Episode 235 is the 33rd episode of Season 4. Today we're joined by Melanie King, a cannabis events producer and marketer whose career has run through some of the industry's most memorable events. She grew up in Massachusetts and followed an unlikely path into cannabis, working in mental health administration at UCSF and Berkeley's Wright Institute, spending time as one of the Internet Archive's earliest employees in late-90s San Francisco and later running her own successful events and wedding planning business in Sonoma. She entered the cannabis industry in 2016 with CannaCraft, helping grow its events program from the pre-regulation days into headline activations like the first on-site cannabis sales at Outside Lands, Emerald Cup and countless product launches. Today, she leads field marketing and events for a cannabis retail technology company. We discuss that journey from event planning to cannabis, what it took to build successful brand activations during the industry's early years and how cannabis events have evolved alongside legalization. Melanie also shares the story behind organizing a first-of-its-kind cannabis event at Fenway Park before opening up about a years-long health battle, the challenges of navigating a delayed diagnosis and the role cannabis and RSO played throughout her treatment and recovery. It's a conversation about resilience, creativity and building community through every stage of life. Read the article covering Melanie’s story in Fat Nugs Volume 29. Connect with Melanie on LinkedIn. Enjoy the show. IG: apt_113 apt113.com

  3. Aug 3

    Episode 234 - Jacob Tell, District 216

    Episode 234 is the 32nd episode of Season 4. Today we're joined by Jacob Tell, founder and self-described Chief Dreamer of District216, a psychedelic social club based in Santa Barbara, California. District216 was created to bring people together through education, community and integration, offering regular gatherings, special events and an online membership for those interested in exploring psychedelics in a thoughtful and supportive environment. Before launching the club, Jacob built a career in marketing, live events and branding through his agency Oniracom while producing festivals, cannabis symposiums and other community-focused experiences. We discuss how District216 grew from a single educational meetup into a thriving psychedelic community, the importance of integration and creating safe spaces for conversation, and Jacob's own experiences with ketamine-assisted therapy and ayahuasca. We also explore the changing public perception of psychedelics, the challenges of preparing enough qualified practitioners for a rapidly growing field and what's next for District216, including its return to the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference. Learn more about District216, join the community and sign up for the newsletter at district216.com. You can also learn more about Jacob and his work at jacobtell.com or connect with him on LinkedIn. Enjoy the show. IG: apt_113 apt113.com

  4. Jul 31

    Episode 233 - July 2026 Special

    Episode 233 is the 31st episode of Season 4. Today for the July special we travel to Panama to sit down with Fidel Muñoz, better known as El Tío, a legacy grower from Panama's Pearl Islands who witnessed firsthand the rise of what the world came to know as Panama Red. Born in 1948, El Tío shares a rare firsthand account of one of cannabis history's most iconic regions, reflecting on a lifetime shaped by the plant, the people who cultivated it and the dramatic changes brought by prohibition. The conversation is conducted through an interpreter, preserving an important piece of cannabis history in his own words. We explore how cannabis transformed the Pearl Islands from an agricultural community into one of the world's most recognized producing regions, the rise and fall of Panama Red, the foreign buyers who arrived by sailboat, the realities of growing during the boom years and the impact of the War on Drugs. Along the way, El Tío reflects on the pride, hardship and resilience of the families behind one of cannabis' most legendary names while considering what the future might hold as legalization continues to spread. El Tío does not maintain any public profiles, but if you enjoyed his story, be sure to read the feature article based on this interview in the Landrace Edition of Fat Nugs Magazine! You can catch the audio as always on iTunes, Spotify, Audible, YouTube or at apt113.com. Sit down, roll one up and enjoy the ride.

  5. Jul 27

    Episode 232 - Scott Wright, Wise Rabbit Films

    Episode 232 is the 30th episode of Season 4. Today we're joined by Scott Wright, president of Wise Rabbit Films and a documentary filmmaker who describes filmmaking as his fourth incarnation. Before film he spent 25 years as a radio DJ under the name Shadow Steele, worked as an executive in the record industry, and later became a winemaker and wine importer, before turning to documentaries and screenwriting later in life. His earlier films include the wine documentary Three Days of Glory and the John Waite music documentary The Hard Way, and he has written five feature screenplays. His newest project, and the heart of this conversation, is The Next Chapter, a documentary about older people turning to psychedelic-assisted therapy. In this one Scott opens up about taking his first real psilocybin journey at 68, guided by a facilitator in San Miguel de Allende, and how that experience reoriented his life and pulled him out of decades of introversion toward community and connection. He shares how that journey led directly to The Next Chapter, which follows a group of people in their 50s and 60s from the US, Canada and the UK through a guided retreat and then revisits them a year later. He gets into the craft of documentary making and learning to let a film become what it wants to be, along with using microdosing to unlock creativity and his screenwriting. Throughout he keeps returning to why he made it, to let a generation that feels underserved by conventional mental health care know this path is available to them. Find The Next Chapter and its screening schedule at thenextchapterfilm.com. Learn more about Scott's work at wise-rabbit.com, follow Wise Rabbit Films on Instagram @wiserabbitfilms, or reach him directly at scott@wise-rabbit.com. Enjoy the show. IG: apt_113 apt113.com

  6. Jul 20

    Episode 231 - Tyson Cramer, Peak Profit Yields

    Episode 231 is the 29th episode of Season 4. We're joined today by Tyson Cramer, founder and CEO of Peak Profit Yields, a global cannabis cultivation and operations consultancy. His road to the plant started with humble Mexican brick in rural Pennsylvania and ran through Humboldt State University and years of off-grid homesteading and outdoor growing in the Northern California hills. He later moved to Ontario to help build Greybeard, an ultra-premium craft brand that notched a string of Canadian firsts from live resin to the first export of cannabis to Israel, before the company was acquired by the publicly traded giant Aurora, where he became chief cultivator of global operations overseeing roughly 90 metric tons of production a year. He left in late 2024 to launch Peak Profit Yields, where he now helps operators around the world run leaner and more predictable businesses, and he sits on the board of the Federation of Cannabis Farmers (FCF). He gets into leaving the legacy market to build Greybeard in Ontario and the grind of educating Canadian consumers who were only just learning about live resin and dabs, then the cash-flow squeeze that led to the Aurora acquisition and a crash course running global operations at scale. From there the conversation turns into a real operations masterclass: why commercial and cultivation teams have to be tightly integrated, why every cultivar needs its own bill of materials and a set-it-and-forget-it approach to production separates the survivors from the rest. He also shares a blunt warning that most operators underestimate what full federal regulation and GMP will demand, and that the reckoning heading for the market will be brutal for anyone who isn't already preparing in the states. Connect with Tyson on LinkedIn and learn more about Peak Profit Yields at peakprofityields.com. Enjoy the show! IG: apt_113 apt113.com

  7. Jul 13

    Episode 230 - Talvin White, canAFarm

    Episode 230 is the 28th episode of Season 4. We're joined today by Talvin White, founder and CEO of canAFarm an Illinois social equity license holder working to open his first dispensary. Talvin comes from a long line of growers and grew up around family gardens He entered medical cannabis as a patient looking for an alternative to opioids, then won an Illinois license through the state's social equity lottery on a single application he wrote himself. Since then he has added licenses in Minnesota and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Today he owns a building in Kane County and holds permits for sites in Elburn and North Chicago. In this one, Talvin rewinds his road to a license. He walks through what actually happens once you hold a license, the chicken-or-egg fight for funding, the hunt for a good location and how to build a team you can trust. From there, we get into the brand he built with his son, his read on a tough 2026 Illinois market and the investors circling distressed operators, along with a look at the unhurried dispensary experience he wants to create. We close on the plant itself, landrace and old-school strains, the loose way the industry names its genetics and why tissue culture and terpene testing might finally keep it honest. Connect with Talvin on LinkedIn and learn more about canAFarm at thecanafarm.com. Enjoy the show. IG: apt_113 apt113.com

  8. Jul 6

    Episode 229 - Alex Eckman, Higher Thoughts Podcast

    Episode 229 is the 27th episode of Season 4. We're joined today by Alex Eckman, a cannabis chemistry graduate, extraction technician and host of the Higher Thoughts Podcast. Alex has spent about a decade in Michigan cannabis, a path that began when he left the fire service and turned to the plant as a last-resort medicine for chronic health issues. He worked through the state's wild-west caregiver era, then doubled down on the science and earned a cannabis chemistry degree, serving as vice president of his student government and sitting on the curriculum committee along the way. Today he is focused on education, advocacy and content creation under the banner of "merging studies with strategy," while looking to dig back in on the processing and R&D side of the industry. We get into what his program was actually like, from an on-campus vape and hydrocarbon lab to the votes of no confidence he and his fellow students passed that flipped the school's stance on cannabis, and his case that the connections he made there mattered as much as the coursework. We dig into the surprising finding from his capstone research, evidence that some vape carts may leach a microplastic out of the hardware and into the oil, which he stumbled onto by accident after a sample caught fire inside the lab's electron microscope. Then we pull up a chair on the consumer side: the Michigan concentrate market with live resin at three or four dollars a gram, his hack for buying cheap extract and dialing the terpenes back in himself, how far is too far before a dab turns harsh, the wholesale tax squeezing operators and where a chemist thinks the market and his own career head next. Connect with Alex on LinkedIn and follow Higher Thoughts on Instagram. Enjoy the show! IG: apt_113 apt113.com

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About

Hang out at Apartment 113 with Rob and a different guest to talk shop about the industry and learn about all of the people that make it possible. Cultivation, manufacturing, extraction, accounting, consulting, media, events, education and more. Listen in for a conversational look at the origins of different businesses and projects in the space along with unique perspectives and occasional tangents.

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