Yo, what's going on?
Everybody? Welcome to a new episode of My Canic Cast. I'm Candiday. In today's episode, we have special guests founder and CEO of High nine, Franz Tuitor, and they also are official drink sponsor of the podcast. So welcome to that. Welcome him to the fam through ralpheh plause.
Cheers, guys, Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
Cheers France. We appreciate you coming on. We're excited to dive into your drink. But before we get into your company and what you're doing there, let's get a little background information on who is Franz? Uh what got you in the industry? First off?
Yeah, well again, thank you guys for not only having me on the cast here but also having us be part of your show. You know, we we really believe in, you know, supporting others who are trying to build a business like ourselves. So you know, we respect to hustle, the grind and the sacrifice. As we were just talking off air about, you know, team support and such. Thank you. Really, I kind of hate telling stories about myself because it starts dating me and reminding me how old I am.
I can see here in the video I got the gray Hairs going. So you know, I'm based here in San Antonio. I've lived all over the country throughout my life. I've lived in Vegas, I've lived I grew up in Florida, born in Carolina, went to NYU seventeen years on two different tours of duty. As I like refer to it, in New York City, you know, we got an event. I know, get a lot of media coverage and so forth, but it hits a little harder for some of us.
You know, I was in the tower. I was not in the towers, but I was in the city on nine to eleven. So remember that day vividly. In fact, was supposed to be at an event that next morning. That morning was supposed to be at an event on the top of the tower. So you know, there's you never you never know what's in plant. You know what the plan is for you, what your path is going to be, and where fate might take you. So as we're you know, we're here in September. Now you know
that just starts to it hits a little bit. But again, been all over the country. My My background is finance, biotech, pharmaceuticals, UH, working in the hedge fund world, focusing on healthcare, consulting companies on product development, mergers and acquisitions, those sorts of things. You know. Several years ago, I had some life changing things that you know, made me evaluate the path I was on where I wanted to be, and a lot of happenstance just really started to fall fall in place
around me. Uh. We had started a partner of my my partner in this business as well. We started an ingredient importing business, bringing ingredients from India to the US for food, beverage, nutraceutical manufacturers. So for example, uh ccilium, which is in meta you know, it's the key component of metamucil, is exclusively growing in India. So we were importing you know, that sort of stuff, and as part of that job, we had to constantly keep up Huh.
I didn't think about stuff like that, you know, but it's something that happened so regularly, and it's something that's like obviously needs to happen, you know. It's just one of those like things they're like oh oh oh yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's you know, there's a lot you know we we so as part of that job or that business. We had to stay on top of, you know, dietary trends, so raspberry key tones were a big you know, this is back in the days when doctor Oz was was getting popular. In fact, a funny thing, Doctor Oz used to be a consultant of mine when he was
just a heart surgeon. Uh I was. I was using him as an advisor when we were evaluating some uh some cardiothoracic surgical device companies that uh that we were looking at investing in. And so doctor Oz was actually just a heart surgeon in New York at the time, so we were we were working with him, but we had to keep up on trends, and one of the trends I continued to see was consum rumors utilizing coconut
water to cure their hangovers. And being from the science side, even though my background is financed, I've probably read more clinical studies than some physicians out there trying to understand because I got to catch up to all their years of med school. And I thought, well, when you drink alcohol,
it will make you go to the restroom. Yes, you have to drink water to rehydrate, but the problem therein lies as you drink water if you are also not putting or replenishing nutrition into your body, you're depleting all your vitamins and minerals, and so a lot of if you look at a lot of the symptoms let's call it of a hangover, muscle eggs, headaches, etc. A lot of them are associated with vitamin and mineral depletion, specifically
elect lights. So I thought, why not prevent the hangover in the first place, and so I created I created Cocoa Cocktail, our alcoholic beverage. So this is actually, yeah, we were the first spiit Seltzer. We launched this with no prior experience in the beverage industry or even consumer package goods ourselves. But we created the first and only alcohol to ever meet the FDA's requirements to call its
to be considered an excellent source of vitamins. We added vitamins to this, We added we actually have a special vitamin component, We added the coconut water, and we made it gluten free, non GMO, and so forth. We had an issue with her. Yeah, it was. It was every dietary trend. In fact, we're the only alcoholic beverage where we're ever going to see a nutrition label type and it's all from food, all food everything.
Now you say that, I just realized it's most like, hey, here's how much booze is in it, don't drive you know, you're taking the health side of factor, you know, in that and especially with a girlfriend that's gluten free, man, like, that is huge and it's just it's rare to come by. Not everything's gluten free.
Well, what's what's crazy is that in the alcohol world it's actually illegal to put a nutrition profile like this on a product. It's because and we you know, this is about cannabis, so we're not going to get too much an alcohol. But we found we kind of found some loopholes in the regulations that put us into the FDA as opposed to the Tobacco Tax Bureaus jurisdiction. And the FDA actually has a regulation that for wine coolers, that's how old it is, and we met that so
we can actually claim the vitamins on our product. We were booming. We started out in two stores in Texas. I moved to Texas specifically to launch the product. I was in Austin. Within eighteen months, we went from two stores to eight states. Major distributors we were about to have an investment from Constellation Brands and then the wheels
fell off. You know, this is again this all predates truly in white Claw and all those other products, and so we had a manufacturing issue because we don't own our own plant, and the company that we were using basically defrauded us. And we've got five plus year lawsuit on going with them that's going to finally go to trial in January. I believe we have an a deck left to right.
Yeah, I know, good for you fighting for what you believe in, you know, but like Dan, you pay in the butt.
Well that's you know, but that's business in America. I mean, the little guys get abused by big suppliers and so forth because the bigger, the bigger suppliers or the bigger quote partners that they're supposed to be, they have the resources to basically tell you to go pound sand and you know, sue us.
Because they know you have the lawyers and the money and the funds to outlast a lot of these companies that will put them under. I mean, we we've there was that thing that video trending where the CEOs of some big company I can't call their name, it was yeah, and Kelly was even telling them like, oh, screw them, don't pay them, don't pay them. They like doing it on purpose, and that's like a sick mentality because like that just it really makes me sad, because the American
dream is to have a fucking business. Like you know, like we were talking before, we align morals because we're out here knit grinding. You know, you're the CEO, co founder, but you were also telling us like you're packaging stuff too when you have to, like you're out here getting
things done. And it just when those bullies are doing that bully shit because of some money, it's like, I don't know, it's just very frustrating because and I think you said business in America is that big business bully and in a pain like that, sou's crazy.
And well we'll probably bring some of that those aspects and elements into this conversation and a little bit. But so skipping ahead, the reason we got into the alcohol was we saw these trends. We saw the paleo diet, the gluten free diet. You know, we saw America, or at least a segment of America, trying to be healthier, trying to get their diet in shape, trying to get themselves in shape, and that has that has continued. I mean, obviously we still have a massive obesity problem in this country.
Now everyone's hoping an injection is going to save the day. And and you know, it's like, let's let's put the work in people. But and it's quite it's quite strange that you can only you only need to make a few different decisions in a day and it can change the rest of your life. Is if you can get those into habits and patterns every day and they're really not.
Diet is a big thing. You know, everyone's out here consuming like what hundreds of hundreds of grams of sugar Like that isn't this hundreds of grams of sugar? You know, I mean you've got to have some sort of restraint and kind of control over your health. And like you know exactly why we love wealth, you know, these holistic ways, because there's other ways to take care of yourself. You know,
like you're talking about coconut to coconut water. I mean, we don't even I bet you have people out there don't even drink enough water like yet alone coconut water.
Well, you know. I'm a big i I you know, and I'm a big believer of you know, you always hear people talking, you know, because social media it's it's the flash and the dash that gets people's attention, you know, if I were a hip hop artist. So I'm gonna be in here holding some stack of you know, fake money that I have and showing my watches and you know, whatever I've rented and so forth. And you hear people talking about generational wealth. Yeah, yeah, I'm about generational health.
And let me tell you to the extreme or the level that I've taken that and and how this again applies to our products. So consumers, when you you just took a sip of my can of product.
Yeah yeah, I like the half and half I think, which is tea? Right, it's tea in the.
Head, it's watermelon lemonade. It's watermelon lemonade and iced tea. So we can't use Arnold Palmer.
Yeah it's good.
It's one of my favorites.
Yeah, I appreciate mine too. But when you took a sip of that, you trusted me. You put trust in me and my company that all of the ingredients in that product are good for you that will they will not harm you. You are trusting me. I take that very seriously. Not only I do all the formulation of our product. I'm our own guinea pig, but the ingredients in this product the coconut water, and we have another ingredient called Grand Fusion, which is a proprietary blend of papaya, orange, banana,
and shataki mushrooms. We actually turn it into a powder and that's where a lot of the vitamins come from. So to tell you to what an extent or an extreme that I go to and how much this.
Trust I have it, that's really cool that you're putting natural ingredients in du it. I'm really glad that you it reiterated that because like that's really awesome. I mean, you can read this on the ingredients points, you know, but until I read the shataki mushroom, like, I wouldn't even thought that you put mushrooms in there for vitamins. So that that you are you clearly do take this health them to a next level, because I feel like a lot of products out there are just trying to
make it taste good so you'll buy it. And like when you buy a Red Bull what is that forty grams of sugar in like less ounces than this. It's insane.
Well, I don't even think some of them are trying to make them taste good anymore. I think we're just throwing a bunch of shit in the can and trying to market it, market the crap out of it to you, and get some influencers. But but let me let me also, let me just throw this out, please. When my son was born and he transitioned into formulas and such in his diet, and I looked at what some of those formulas had in him. They're loaded with synthetic vitamins and minerals.
So we all know that vitamins like your daily vitamins, we call them expensive p because your body doesn't process about ninety percent or eighty five percent of the actual vitamin content. It just ends up being flushed down the toilet. So I was concerned that my son, again being focused on generational health, was not going to get the proper nutrition, especially at what is the most critical and crucial stages
of his future development when he's a baby. I put our coconut water, specifically our coconut water, and I put the Grand fusion into to his formulas. So he was getting true and natural potassium, magnesium, salt, dextros, which are all the you know when people say it has electrolytes, if you go back to idiocracy, but electrics, what are there? What are electrolytes? It's it's potassium, magnesium, it's sodium, it's dextros, you know, sugar, salt and so forth.
Yeah, I mean as a plant grower, I mean that made it was like kind of the stuff he's talking about, and that that's so cool that you're getting it from a natural way. Like I mean, I don't mean to move to your ingredients, but your ingredients are all natural? Is that what we're saying too? Like, that's pretty cool, that's that's awesome. Man.
Now we do use superlose and we are going to be shifting that to stevia.
Oh we use so sugar free. Yeah, it's only like five four or five grams of sugar, and that's crazy for it.
Sugar comes from our honey. But let me just say, my son, I'll be that part.
Thank you for saying that.
No problem. My son's five and a half. He's already been teaching himself Arabic. He knows fifteen different alphabets. He can read and write the Greek alphabet upper lowercase, taught himself. He knows how to use a protractor. He's not obese. He's in the ninety ninth percentile for height, and I truly attribute it not to jeans, but to the fact that we gave him the best possible nutrition, and we continue to do so ever since he was born. We have focused so heavily on He has not had sodas.
He does not like juices. He does not get ice cream, you know, and we're not doing it in a way where you know, one day he'll be rebellious and say, I'm going to eat a gallon of ice cream. Every day we introduce him to stuff, but we really monitor his treats, let's call it. But we're making sure he gets proper nutrition. And that's how we all need to live. You know. We learned during COVID. You mentioned the chittaki mushrooms.
We learned during COVID that over fifty percent of Americans are vitamin D deficient, and vitamin D plays an essential role in your immune system. So look at how much vitamin D is in one can. Fifty sixty percent. I haven't even looked at the percentages lately. I should know it off the top of my head. But that's specifically coming from the shoutaki mushrooms.
So that's crazy.
We've got jumping ahead to our ingred, you know. So going back real quick to the original question why we got into this health trend. Health it is absolutely alcohol. We didn't make alcohol good for you. We made alcohol slightly better or slightly lessful because at the end of the day, we can't do anything about the actual or alcohol in the can. And by the way, red wine, tequila, whatever, alcohol, it's all an ethanol base. It's all broken down by
the liver, of the kidneys and so forth. In your body. It all does the same damage. One alcohol form is not any different, less bad, or however you want to word it. For your body. Alcohol is degenerative to you physically, mentally, emotionally, destroys families, destroys lives, literally kills people. Okay, so that I mean that is alcohol THC. I am a believer. Again, I have not been a smoker. For I smoked twenty years ago. I enjoyed it back then, life gets going
step away from it. I am such a believer because I do the formulation. As I mentioned earlier, I started testing on myself. I'm fifty one. I'm not on any prescription meds. My wife thinks I probably should be, but you know, I've never done any other dug outside of weed in my life. And I could not walk upstairs without excruciating amounts of pain. Too much basketball knees. I got a fusion. I've got all the injuries. My shoulders are.
Shop in your body. You have some bones used.
Yeah, my spine. I got a lumbar fusion. Yeah, I mean it's common and I feel great, and thank God for modern medicine on that side, because there's nothing that could have cured what I would have had or what I had at the time. But yeah, I can now go to the gym. I know it doesn't look like yet I'm getting there. It's a time function right now, I'm making the time. But I can go to the trampoline park and jump up and down with my little guy. I can chase him around. I can go up and
down the steps. I mean, it reached a point where I was like, if I forgot something upstairs, I'd be like, ah, I don't need it. I'm gonna get it later because I couldn't get up and drinking high nine was the only lifestyle change that I made, and I got my mobility back, and mobility is health.
No, the more you move.
The healthier you're going to be.
And my mom when that's what in motion right and stays in motion. My mom was a nutritionist, so like I was crazed with like, you gotta eat to balance me on a lot of this is so important. And granted, you know, I still grew up probably drinking too much soda, but now as adult, it's been harder to cut. So it's awesome to hear your kid has already got some of these habits. Like she dialed in because I wish
I would have had the sugar. You know, soda was wait, you guys are in Michigan, right, and Nicole pop pop. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I mean, you know, I'll drink. I loved it whatever it was much, But now now I'm an adult, I look at it and I'm like, oh, forty grams of sugar in this one little cult can. I'm like, oh my god, like and the average.
Health mal shouldn't have more than twenty two grams of sugar a day. So put that into contact where you destroy your entire sugar content in one in one camp, yeah, one mountain dew and basically you shouldn't have sugar for the next two days, just to average it out.
Yeah, and people are out here drinking like you know xxls and stuff. I mean, I was too even like because you don't. Again, that's why health is like, it's.
Those you think it's one pot too so important.
But for some reason it's not talked about enough or and you know in this in the ways it is, it's not reciprocal. You know, people aren't taking it in. They're just like, ah, you know, so it's a shame, you know.
Well, and that's and that's why we you know, that's what we saw in the marketplace. We saw that, you know, there was it's it's a confluence of factors that are really making this opportunity possible. Obviously, one is the farm built from twenty eighteen, which brought these products into a
legal zone. Let's call it, whether you want to say it's a gray zone, a white zone, whatever, there's a zone that we can bring these products to market, and then you now have this whole this whole movement away from alcohol. Crazy statistic because again up on the alcohol business as well. In those statistics, a Nielsen survey of gen Z consumers, only fifty nine percent of gen Z
consumers interviewed or surveyed. It was like a thousand or two thousand had had a sip of an alcoholic beverage in the last year, and of those only nineteen percent had consumed a beer. Those are damaging statistics to the alcohol in this man.
That's crazy damages. Yeah, yeah, oh man, hear.
And we're seeing it. We're seeing it in the sales. I mean it's we're seeing in sales. So there's this movement away. But people leaving alcohol doesn't mean they're not they don't want to have fun or relax or whatever whatever brought them to an alcoholic beverage. That desire or sensation, that chasing, that sensation that hasn't gone away. They're trying to find a healthier and a better way to accomplish that.
And with the legalization in many states of weed or marijuana, whatever y'all want to call it, and then now the onslaught of the hemp based THC and CBD products, it now provided a legal operation, you know, a legal way to find healthier alternatives to get that sensation or feeling that they were chasing with alcohol. Now you don't have Yeah, you don't have the degenerative issues. And you know that's
that's something real trend. It's sticking. And so we decided that we could make a better product that would sort of take that trend to the next level. And that's where we're you know, that's kind of where we're at moving forward right now. Is we're in this case, unlike alcohol, where we were the first, we're not the first THHC drink. We admit that we're just the best.
And you mentioned the Farm Bill, So if you don't know, the Farm Bill in twenty eighteen allowed it for hemp to be processing shipped around the states all over nationwide, and that's how you're able to have Delta nine TTC. Right, this is like the Delta ninetc. So I mean just curious how you do that? Do you buy like do you grow your own hemp plants or how do you how does that whole process work on you getting the Because they saw the honey on there too, Oh so
that honey is already is infused. Sorry, he's just putting at Okay, Okay.
I never leave home without this stuff. This is this is the magic juice. This is our honey. Okay, this is the magic juice. Because I will tell you I have tried a lot of competitive products, the smell of weed, the taste of weed. Personally, I don't like drinking bong water that is been flavored and had artificial sweetener and then over carbonated. That's not a good cocktail for me. So for us being in the alcohol side, we know
the importance of taste. It has to taste good. We've won, by the way, we just won the SIP Awards, which is the largest consumer alcohol tasting competition in the country. We just won the Innovation Award in double golds for all of our products. So we know about taste, we know the importance. So in order for these products in general as a drink, you know, let's let's kind of put let's table, gummies and anything else to the side and only talk about drinks. Drink, they've got.
To taste good.
The general public does not want to taste weed. They don't want to smell weed in their drink. It's different from when you smoke it. Don't want to drink.
We've talked about the edibles too a lot, because, especially back in the day, you get edibles that would taste
pretty much like you were chewing dried like bloods. And it's like it's come so far now you can even not even tell sometimes, you know, And that's it's nice especially, and this is why I love products like this, like you know, ten milligrams, like drinks, especially because you're you're you're touching the whole market that hasn't been touched, you know, smoking weed, smoking, you gotta fall in love with the smoking action. Right, I'm a smoker. Before I was smoking weed, right,
I was smoking cigarettes. Hookah. You not for being a smoker, my sister not being a smoker. They drinks are a very easy like normalizing cannabis and THC to people, because it's very already understood. You know, it's already I know how to drink. Everyone drinks, you know, So it's I think it's a very good way to make some people become believers. So I really like products like this drinks. It's a new age.
You're you're hitting. It's it's I'm just warning now. I love my product. I also model myself a bit after Phil Knight from Nike, and that's also going to come into play in a minute Phil Night Hay edition. In fact, he was once asked, you know if you'd ever had dinner or lunch with the founder of under Armour, and he said, why on earth would I do that? I hate him. I hope he goes out of business. I feel the same way about my competition. I want to see them all just fall to the wayside. So just
take that with a grain of sow verry. I'll admit my BIA scenario, But if you're not biased about your own company, then you know, as my dad used to say, if you don't think you're the best, why should anyone else. So I believe that we're the best. So what we had to do was before we embarked on this venture, we had to find a way to overcome that taste and smell aspect. And what we found was by infusing
the honey with the hemp derived delta nine one. It's in compliance with the farm bill, the point three percent all that sort of stuff. If you tasted this and I'll have to send you, I'll send you, guys a jar. There is no weed or yeah, there's no weeds or taste to this whatsoever. And you're getting the natural benefits and properties of honey.
Well you exactly, that's a great thing you just brought up, because I will say, I love when I can get natural honey from North when I'm like visiting family can't always get it. But like, just the fact that you mentioned that earlier about the sugar coming from honey is such a better Like you get so many other benefits from the honey, but also just that is a natural sweeten. Hear, more natural sugar than if you're getting like like fruit croc ers something like fake right, So I just well, we.
Get so so our sugar is coming from the coconut water, a tiny tiny bit from the fruit juices. Because the fruit juices are concentrated, they are denatured, so the sugar and a lot of moisture are removed from it, and then and then the honey. So you know, every I think it's one teaspoon of honey has five milligrams of sugar. We don't have quite. I won't put up We got all our ingredients, but I'm not going to put our formula out there in the public, of course. But we've got.
You know, that's where all of our our carbs are, our sugar carbs are coming from. Nothing is added whatsoever. And as I mentioned, we will be moving from sucralose uh to stevia. And part of that is because I foresee the retailer, the chain retailers starting to open up here over the next let's say twelve months. So Whole Foods uh sprouts you know different companies that have label or ingredient restrictions. Is a a band ingredient at Whole Foods.
So if Whole Foods were to decide to sell these products, I've got to have a product that will be in compliance with their ingredient restrictions. So we are already moving toward that.
Yeah, that's smart, because that's a good you got to take ahead and absolutely because I think these drinks should. I don't see why you can't eventually get these drinks in those stores like that. That's the big thing about this like loophole area whatever want to call it. Right we discussed earlier, is it's like why could you not like besides restrictions to this, well, let me tell you so long regularly like.
Alcohol, Well again, it's it's crazy to me that you have states that are trying to argue that these products need to be sold behind a counter. Yet I can go, you know, I can go get a forty of malt liquor that's just sitting out in the cool or even in a big ice bucket in my convenience store. You know, they don't protect that. Yet somebody can go out and have a dui, or a kid could shop lift it, or you know who knows what. You know, We've seen I don't have to reiterate it. We've seen the damage
alcohol can do. If someone could tell me one good thing that alcohol does in a non sarcastic approach, please tell me, right, if I can tell you, tell me just one thing that THHC does.
What do you mean that?
How about it's an anti inflammatory? Yeahh is an anti inflammatory.
You can help with anxiety, anti anxiety, It can help with I mean that there are those general ones. So they say sedative, but I mean I think that's more of like mental but like you know, chronic pain.
You were just one of the.
Huge one.
Well and that and that goes back to chronic inflammation. And when you start looking at things like autoimmune diseases. You look at cardiovascular A lot of these diseases. The root I'm not going to say cause, but one of the roots side effects or factors is inflammation. I mean inflammatory, you know, And and THC is a documented anti inflammatory, point blank. That's one of the key benefits. So we don't even have to go down the laundry list.
And so that makes sense because we talked about terpenes and t C and there's all that all that other stuff that all has anti inflammatory properties, and like when you talk about that, like I forget how many issues rely with that, But it makes complete sense because if your veins are inflamed or your your arthritis gets all that anything gets inflamed, it's gonna affect other things. So that's a good point.
Just please don't bring common sense to this industry because you'll give all our regulators a heart attack because they they love to come up with just arbitrary shit that makes no sense from a regulatory For example, in Iowa, the regulators had the genius idea that they're going to limit the amount of THC in a twelve ounce beverage to four milligrams. You go into that same market, there is not a single There is not a single regulatory limit on the amount of alcohol any product in the
alcoholic category can contain. There is, There are no limits, of course none, But yet we decide it somehow. Four milligrams is the magic number. Connecticut came up with three. New York is it one? Uh, Florida is it? Yeah? New York is one? Florida.
You're going to get off of one milligram?
They they do, they they've come.
Up with such because they don't understand the product.
They've never consumed.
Well.
And so we are non carbonated. And we did that for two reasons. One and all of our product, all of our flavors, are non carbonated, and for the foreseeable future, will remain that way. And it's really for two reasons, if I asked you, well, one is obviously to avoid bloating the seltzer market. We've learned on the alcohol side, Americans are over carbonated. I can't even tell you how many people have just sent me notes or told me, you know, thank you for not carbonating this. I'm so
sick of my only option being a carbonated beverage. I've had people tell me they shake things and I'm like, well, but if you don't open and let the gas out, it really doesn't go flat. It's you're hoping over time it will. So that's one of the reasons was to eliminate that bloating. The other big reason, and you bring up this whole, the milligram idea. Until we started to have edibles in the market, not a weat smoker on this planet twenty years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago.
You asked them how many milligrams did you just token? That hit?
Right?
No, no one's going to know. Ever, no one's even sent them milligrams to edibles, I mean especially Holy Yeah, nobody knew.
So if I asked you how many beer how many five percent alcohol beer content beers take you to get a buzz or drunk, you probably have a number. You probably have a baseline because you've experienced it. Most consumers today, a lot of them are coming in or coming back to the THHC market and they don't have a foundation because there really isn't a baseline across products to say five milligrams of this or fifty milligrams of that will have this effect on me.
So having product, yeah, that's a good point, and it's very circumstantial, you know, in to how much have you been exposed to TC, how's your tolerance? How old are you, how how's your health? Like, there's all sorts of things to play in a factor with edibles, and that's a very good point because like some times when you're smoking weed, you know, a couple hits, they'll get you high, but edible is very dependent on.
You well, and we all we all know somebody who's had a bad edible experience because of the onset of action and you know.
I can't feel it. You think I'm gonna get you another one.
Yeah, and then you know an hour or later they're they're upside down on the couch and you know whatever. But so so, by by being non carbonated and also having real juice and all of our real ingredients, we allow the consumer, as we say, to find their zone they can open it. And by these these products in
general have not been cheap in the market. Well, we'll talk about our pricing strategy at some point, because we want these to be affordable and part of your so you can make it part of your daily routine and not a treat, you know, something of that nature. But you can if you're new and you've never tried this before. You can drink a half a can, put it back in the fridge, see how you feel. Oh, let me drink a little more, or let me drink the other
half later tonight. Whatever you're you find your zone, you find your routine with our product, and you don't have to worry about it going flat or losing taste, and you therefore you haven't wasted money.
That's a good point. And that's another crazy with carbonation. You really do have a window, you know, And I I will, I will admit I do like carbonated things. But it's not like I'm anti carbonated things, like I kind of just don't. I don't really have a preference, right, But it's very it's very cool to hear that because these are health benefits that I you know, the bloating thing.
You know, this is some shit Kyle might know, like our a personal trainer friend who's super into health, Like he's gonna really appreciate this type of stuff, you know. So I really like that you're targeting not just how high you can get, but also how how I can get a buzz, but being healthy, And I think that is.
Such a we're gonna we're gonna talk about that high in a second. But I'll tell you this. If you are a bubble fan, you got a soda stream. Dump any of these drinks into a soda stream and put bubbles again, because we have the robust, full bodied flavors. I like to say, and I've already tested it. The only one I won't carbonate is a tea. I don't like carbonated tea.
The tea is perfect. I like the tea, I'm just like.
But the BlackBerry, the pineapple, the limeaid, by the way, is gonna taste like a sprite or a fresca even if you carbonate it. So if you want the bubbles, throw it in a throw it in a soda stream. And the other cool thing, by the way, about our flavors, and this again goes back to using real flate, real juices and extracts, not natural flavors, which is a whole you know again, having been in the ingredient world, is a scam.
Natural chocolate flavor. It's like, what, there's no chocolate in this well.
I mean, look, all chemicals are pretty much come from nature, or you know, there's synthesized from other natural chemicals to make an end chemicals. So the FDA considers that process natural. You might have a raspberry flavor natural flavor that has absolutely zero raspberry in it whatsoever. It's just they were able to put together chemicals to mimic the flavor to some key.
Yeah, it's like sunny d there's not an orange in there. But it's basically like if we were like, hey, let's make orange without using an orange.
It's just like very You can mix, for example, the BlackBerry with the watermelon half and half. It's delicious. You can mix the BlackBerry and the pineapple. And by the way, if you do like cocktails, I mean look to each their own, you can use these as mixers with your alcohol, you know, putting the limead into uh you know, the tea also works. And we got more flavors in the pipe. But what we tried to do is create a flavor profile as well that was robust that you can mix
things together. And by the way, so we have the pineapple and the BlackBerry, we have a caffeinated version. So all of our flavors are ten milligrams of delta nine THHC from the honey. The there you go. So the black cans.
Adam right here. So the black one is the caffeine caffeinated.
So that's that's two hundred milligrams of caffeine versus the non caffeinated. And I will tell you you that I sent that out to some scientists. Well, let's say you want a hundred milligrams of caffeine, but you still want ten milligrams of delta nine THHC. What's your answer? Half a can of each mixed together in a glass. You can do that. You just cut your caffeine down, but you didn't dilute your THHC count. So it's kind of like.
You're not even changing flavor. Oh interesting, I like, I like hated that.
Like, you know, I have to bring a child analogy but if you guys, yea might not be old enough to remember gor animals where you could match the match the animals and you know, little kids could put.
Their outfits together. But that's you know, we kind of that you can. Uh again, I'm dating myself all the time. You know you can. You can mix and match these things to whatever your preference is going to be. And like I said, you can even throw it in the soda stream. It's it was all about the versatility you know, that we could bring to the product into the category.
No, I'm really glad we did this interview because because you know, I can read this and learn about the natural ingredients, but to really dig into all your products and how much you really believe it and show how much health is behind then now it really Now I'm able to read this canon like oh that makes sense, Oh that makes sense right, and then compare it to other things. You know, I really like the noncaffeinated option versus the caffeine aided option because you know, sometimes people
will get a little jittery on caffeine. But also, you know, I watch people drink three expresso shots like it's nothing, absolutely insane. Well, I think the tolerance is different. It's the same thing to TT right, It's really relative to your consumption level, you know.
Well, there's a lot of other factors that go into that as well, and we've had we've done a lot of testing with random folks who we have no association with. We've already heard from folks that drink energy drinks fairly, you know, religiously that they've replaced their energy drinks with High nine because they don't feel the jitters. They don't feel the crash. And part of that is because are so if you look at the cast, I call it
a cascade. So and obviously it depends on how fast and how much you drink at a given time, because there's only so much, you know, in a given can. So if you take one sip every thirty minutes, you might not feel the THC because your body's got time to you know, process it and so on. But when you drink let's let's use the caffeinated version as an example. When you're drinking that, you'll start to feel the caffeine first,
just because of how your body metabolizes different components. And by the way, the coconut water really does play a key role in metabolizing uh nutrition in you know, the the vitamins and minerals in every end. So you're gonna feel the caffeine first, then you're gonna start to feel the THHC kick in. Then as those start to as you drink more and you're adding and you're starting to go up the you know, up the mountain till you find the peak. About that time is when those food
based vitamins will start being metabolized. In your body, and as the caffeine starts to wear off and come down, the natural energy and all of the B vitamins and the see all the vitamins that we have in there, they almost serve as like a parachute preventing the caffeine crash. And we've heard this from so many consumers. You know, Hilly Dove, for example, who's up in her I think she's the feral Mill for twenty she's up in the
Michigan market. Big red Bull consumer you know, tells us I don't feel drained, like after the energy boost from a red Bull wears off, I actually feel exhaust.
I get a crash so hard off red Bull. And I do not like to drink Red Bull unless I'm like an emergency situation like and I need to stay awake for like an hour, like a Red Bull does not do it. I crashed so hard off red Bull. I actually started drinking stuff without like a lot of
sugar that has natural sugar. So it's I'd love that you're bringing this up so because it's it's it's so true, like you so like that's really your caffeine is more natural because a lot of times, like a natural caffeine like this will keep you moving energized rather than just boost it.
You know, well, have your drink one of these before a workout. It is going the caffe heated one. It is going. The focus you get from that caffeine combined with the THC high, the body high, it will be the best workout ever. Morning I'm going to give is that if you go on like a treadmill or a StairMaster doing any cardio, You're going to feel awesome. You're gonna be like, oh man, I'm chugging along, chugging along. Oh man, I must have been on here like an hour.
I feel great. You're gonna look down it and be like, finance, Wow, God, that's the THC factor. But yeah, you will have You will feel the mobility, you will feel. The big thing is the focus, you know, and the big thing is if you're especially if you're lifting weights, it's not always about how much you lift, it's how you lift. But I've had so many people test this and they've told me it's you know, it's the best workout ever.
I'll definitely give it a test. I'll be at the gym tomorrow.
Sometimes halfway through the workout, you need that extra boost, so that would be perfect. And you know, I think sometimes the little bit of THC would be nice. Exactly what you're saying. You get in your head and just get focused. You really don't, you know?
I like that and after work, a little caffeine boost for me, I could definitely use that, right, it works.
I mean it's like I said, you know, we we pride ourselves on making sure we deliver to the consumer what we promised and that's and that's what this drink does. And in fact, we we had a big branding meeting today. As I mentioned off air, you know, we're at a critical stage in our company right now. You know, to me, there's there's three steps for any company in any category. Service, product doesn't matter. The first question you got to answer is the what What is my product? What are we making?
How are we differentiating it? What is it? We did that we went through our first phase. We changed packaging, we made tweaks to flavors, we added flavors, lowered caffeine. We learned from our market experience to get the what's correct. The next question you need to ask and answer is the why, which is the market? What is the market opportunity,
What is the need? How does put into that? Why are we here in the first place, the last and we again launching at a small scale, working with a lot of folks on Twitter, working with folks like yourselves, working with retailers to understand where our product is, what type of consumers and why and so forth. The last question that we hadn't had answered yet We've been asking ourselves for months trying to figure this out, is the who who are we? Which is what is our brand?
Our brand is the who that's the product. The who is not the product, it's the brand, because the what is just attributes of a product. So when we went through this and we started thinking about, first of all, how where are these drinks going to be consumed? Because I see my competition, they're all positioning these as their products as alternatives to alcohol. I think that's I think
that's the quick buck approach. Those guys are just looking for the quick buck, trying to pull those consumers who are they want to leave alcohol drinking. But there's a lot of market that if you're a consumer that doesn't drink alcohol, believe or not, I don't drink alcohol, I'm going to say, well, I must not need that product because it's an alternative to alcohol. I don't get hangovers,
so I don't need your product. And when you look at ansumption, if you really want to compare to that market, you see college kids shotgunning, funneling, and you know, drinking large quantities of alcohol rapidly as they can. These drinks. In general, no one's gonna sit down and shotgun three straight THHC drinks. It's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen. So we do a lot of these types of factors.
And the biggest problem we had was there are so many elements to our product that no one else has. The coconut water, the vitamin source, the honey THCHC, the amazing taste, the non carbonation. How do we sum that up? And I take it back to something I said earlier. I model myself a little bit after Phil Night. So our slogan that we are unveiling today tonight, or we're gonna start unveiling it over the next earl days is just drink it.
Just drink it.
Just drink it, and let me tell you a great story. And I know, I don't know how much time we have and you' all cut me off at any moment. Several years ago, when I started in the alcohol business, again your experience, I was lucky enough. In fact, I connected with the gentleman by the name of John McDonald on LinkedIn Texas. He was in Boston. He had just left the former chief operating officer for Patrum.
And.
He said, I'll make time for you. And this was before zoom and you know video conferencing. I said, I'm on a flight tomorrow just to come sit down with you, because he's an expert. Flew to Boston. I literally got one hour of his time and I sat down and I asked a couple questions, but I mostly listened. One of the best stories he told me was when he joined Patron, John Paul de Giorgio that you know, Paul Mitchell gave him a blank check. Patron was only doing
about fifteen million dollars of revenue at the time. It was. It was struggling, and John Paul came to him and said, here is a blank check. Do whatever you got to do to make this happen. And so he took samples and went out to his friends and he said, here, try this, and they said, well, what is it? Tequila? Oh no, I don't know. I don't want tequila. I had a bad experience in college, I had bad experience last week. Whatever was the bad?
No, I get you know, I made one hundred percent. People have that with a lot of products. That's a very valid point.
Oh what So what he did was he went back whatever period of time after and said try this, and they said what is it? He said, Patron, well what is it? Just drink it, just try it.
Drink it.
They drank it, they loved it, and from that marketing strategy, Patron, if you really think about it, they created the craft high end tequila business that has made lots of other people tons of money and put to took tequila from being associated with a bad night in Tijuana to being served in the highest, you know, profile clubs at insane prices and people forking over tons and tons of money just to drink. Patron, even though it was they overcame, You're.
Just shifting someone's perspective, right, because honestly here right, so people have bad associations with even like TC or something. Right, So I think that's kind of where you're leading to how you're with your drink. But it's very cool because you're sometimes people don't have that necessarily that comfortable experience, but they're gonna be love the product.
Well, it's not that it's not necessarily that people have a bad experience with THCs. If you a lot of you know, you ask consumers in general, especially ones who have not been in the market, you mentioned THC, I guarantee you probably seventy five to ninety percent of those people asked. If you ask, what image comes into your mind when someone mentions THC, they're thinking hippie stoners. That it's the stoner image. It's it's that is the STIGMATI.
And so what we are looking at with all of our different benefits, and you mentioned earlier about getting time. This to me and how we're moving forward is getting high. Because if you want to get high, you've got most of the people in the market are going to consume it via some form of smoke or flower. Right, They're not None of those consume are going to things on their smoke and only go edibles or drinks or something. Going forward, it's.
Not going more to happen.
It's rare, right, not.
Going to happen. So we are trying to become part of that. But I want this drink to become part of people's everyday routine because we have a common as humanity. There's a common thread, I believe, in my opinion in all of us. We want really one thing at the end of the day, to be happy, to feel good. You've never you've never heard someone say this is so awesome, I feel so great. This sucks. I can't stand it anymore. You have someone say, oh, I got bad allergies today.
This sucks. Right, people want to feel good. That's why they're consuming out. They're consuming it to have a good time because it makes it good. You know, people want to feel good. What our drink does. It's not about getting you high. Because we now have the decgmatization of THCHC in the general place, there are people consuming THC for its health benefits and not to get high.
Yeah, that's very true.
They're drinking if they wanted to get high. Why are they using it as a sleep aid because they're wasting.
All of the high.
So we have this going on in the market play correct, So think about this. We've all done this as well. You're at a restaurant, your wife, your girl, your significant other. You're at a new place, trying a new food, neither of you have ever had. You take a bite and oh my god, it's so awesome. You feel so good. Oh you got to try this. Oh what is it? Just eat it? Trust me, because don't you trust that
I would not give you somethings like shit. I'm actually trying to share a very positive, uplifting experience with you. So just try it. I'll tell you what's in it later. So for us, it's just drink it, because trust me, I am going to give you something that is going to change your life. This is going to give you health, energy, focus, You're just gonna feel better. Yeah, and that's what we're giving you. So when someone says, well what is it,
then I can tell you about all the benefits. But in the meantime, just drink it.
And just try it. It's a drink. Tell me if you like it, and we'll go from there. That I like that, well, it's not just that.
Trust that I am sharing something with you that's positive. Let's get back to a world where we are sharing positive experiences, positive things in life. So we can all go back and we can all achieve that one underlying goal in life, which is too simple, and it's so simple. We just want to be happy. That's it.
Yeah, I just want.
To have a good day. Just I want to have a day where I wake up my knees don't hurt. I want to wake up where I'm just in a good mood. How many people can say or remember the last time they did that, Well, you start drinking this, it'll become a more frequent occurrence.
And also use my can of fifteen and you get to save fifteen percent off your order too.
There you go. I love that. I really appreciate the power of your belief and just just be the care and the trust you're trying to rebuild in the consumer, because I think sometimes people have got shaded by what's in their stuff because of like supersize me and stuff moving forward from there. And I think that it's like really amazing that, especially when you say be delightful. It's like, I really just like that take on it, because I think that's you don't see a lot of health going
into edibles. I mean, for the longest time, it was just sugar, this sugar, that sugar, that this brownie.
Because there was no glue free stuff too, to have.
Something with THC, revitalizing minerals, vitamins like all this stuff that's just good for you too, as well as giving you kind of a relaxing buzz too.
It's like it's really awesome. No, I think you hit on a lot of your joining uante.
I love this product. It's cool.
Yeah, I know. Yeah, thank you, thank you guys h for doing this. Trust Yeah, no, And.
I'm sorry if I talk a lot. Like I told you before, I love my product and there are so many stories and things I could share, and.
It's great to hear it from you, hear the passion that you have, and like that's going to be speaking to our listeners and want them to try this product and go out there and try it because like you do talk about it. And I didn't mean to cut you off, but like you're talking about hydration, you're talking about like I'm just reitering with Groovy said here, you're talking about actually getting vitamin D, you're getting vitamin A, vitamin so you're getting all these vitamins in here. Drink
it's healthy for you. Like you don't see a lot of healthy products on the market nowadays. A lot of lot of brands they're just trying to, like, like we said it earlier, just just get it out there, have other people sell for you, and just make a quick buck off of it. And I'm excited to see this brand, your brand continue to grow and go into stores here just based off of the flavor and the taste. Like you said that the Water Mountain half half extremely extremely good.
I really like the pineapple because I love pineapples in general, and pineapple juice is just I can drink that ship all day.
And just curious real quick before we move on too much, because we we have gone a little longer, but it's totally fine. I still want to touch on a couple of subjects. So we're just gonna go a little longer than normal. Yeah, okay, if that's cool. Yeah, how how big is your team?
You know?
A high night because you say, you know, you're the co founder, you're packaging, and we talk about like you know, he sounds like it's really just like a family knit, who you trust type of business. And I just want people to know that because because these are the companies you got to support, right, So I just I always wanted to reiterate that or talk about that.
Well, first of all, I don't know if I have his card. Oh I do, as I mentioned my my five year old.
Yeah, he's on the team. It says dad's phone. He doesn't have a phone number. That's great because I was saying, you just give me those vibes. That's family. It matters to who's on your team. So like I just wanted to if you wanted to shout him out or show any love, I just and obviously you know, shout out and Nikolai, is that what? By the way, it was really quick. I couldn't read the real quick.
I want you to catch his name. That is his legal name, by the way, Nicolay.
Right, Maximus Batman.
Batman, Oh my god, I didn't even awesome. It's like his confidence. That is his name whenever. That's awesome. I just got his first name. I didn't even catch Batman. That's clutch. Is that you a big fan?
It goes back to my my dad and I My dad passed away twenty two years ago, but uh, you know, it goes back to old thing with my dad and I used to sit and you know, we're talking again about the seventies when the old fam and wham and things on the screen popped up, and I would sit there and watch Batman with my dad. But it's it's funny because again I do all the formulation here at my house. He knows the formula. He's been he was just in Wisconsin with me at production. You know, he's
he's only five and a half. We did to do a project. He started kindergarten. He's already been to twenty one states, like, actually done stuff in the States. And I will also tell you my wife. My wife, you know, she has migraines, you know, every now and then, probably because she lives with me. But she dranks. She's not a smoker, She's not on any drugs or anything like that. Never been, never has been a THHD consumer. She now drinks these every once in a while because it's only
your headache. But from a team standpopoint, so we've done a couple of things. I've got a I got a great team of guys that are heading I got four guys that are heading up our distribution relationships. So ironically, we're dealing with a lot of aloholters in this category. They're really scrambling because again the negative impact TA see has had on their alcohol sales. So they're looking to diversify and they want to control this, you know, segment
of the market. So I've got four great guys across the country working on that. Pat I've got a business partner, Todd Shull got uh, And we just brought on again where these things are going to be sold. We just brought on the former head of adult beverage buying or alcohol buying for he's now working with us, Mike Persick. And we brought on the former manager for adult beverages
at Walgreens, Uh, Tim Turner. And you know those we're talking about, they were with those respective companies for many years. And actually, you know, get credit for running the teams that turned their you know, their alcohol sales into multi billion dollar a year ventures. Uh for Target. You know, Target wasn't a player in alcohol. Walgreens became a billion a multi billion dollar wine flow or because of Tim. So I feel like we have some great people on
our team. But and I've got I've got from my music days. Uh are my old DJ friend, DJ Johnny to Johnny. Uh, he does all of our graphic design. I give him my ideas he translates it. Into the canvas year. We actually have some packaging design changes coming. We're gonna put some hexagons and some more texture and stuff. Uh So I got Johnny involved. I do a lot of graphic stuff myself. I'm dangerous enough to to get some things done. You know, We've got a great team, and.
For me, it's still like less than ten people. So you're not talking a huge, like corporate team, you know. So it sounds like but you have. It sounds like people, you really really good people for a business, Like a lot of those that accreditation you were dropping like that's awesome.
Yeah.
Well, and my distribution team, it's gonna call him the four Old Time electively. They've got one hundred years of experience in alcoholic and non alcoholic beverage distribution. So there's not anybody they don't know. And it's translating into you know, we're launching in New Jersey, Wisconsin. You know, the only thing that's holding this market up at times are the state regulations of course that are that are just well
they're all changing every day. Like somebody wants to put a registration process or change the laws in Georgia right now, you can't. You can't even sell a Hemp Delta nine or Delta eight product. Not until October first. They've got a moratorium while they figure out the regulations.
Yeah, oh okay, I say moratorium. So I was curious. I was like, how do you deny that when it went, you know, when it's now legal. So okay, that's so they're just laying it as a la.
They have banned every retailer in the state of Georgia until October first from selling any of these products because they got to figure out the rules. Now, the next question is what rules do they actually come up with. You know that they throw the darts at and figured that's a good answer for something, because that's all they're doing at the end of the day. But you know when they say founders of companies don't sleep, and they
make a lot of sacrifices. And I don't want anybody to cry a river for me or pat me on the back or any of that shit. That's not what I'm here for. We don't sleep, you know, we my family makes sacrifices. I'm going to be away for you know, two and a half weeks here coming up. My you know, my wife's going to be solo taking care of a little guy. A little guy is not gonna have me around. I mean, those are real sacrifices because you know, the most valuable thing any of us have in life is time.
So we only have limited time with one another. So when I'm spending time doing something else, it's time I'm not spending with them. So I just shortened the amount of time I will be able to spend with them. So a lot of sacrifices made. And but but I'm proud of my team. We've accomplished so much in a very short pereriod of time since we transitioned this and I can tell you in the next the next coming weeks, we've got some big announcements coming that are going to
just have our competitors scratching their heads. And that includes one of them I can disclose. In Iowa, our distributor is going to be Johnson Brothers, which is the third largest spirit distributor in the country. They were prior to Iowa changing their laws, they had I don't know ten twelve brands that they were carrying. When Iowa changed everything, they got rid of most of them because they just
weren't doing well. They kept two local brands. They did basically a bake off with about one hundred brands, including us. We came out as the only third brand. They're going to carry fun Bev in Ohio. We're going to be the We're going to be one of only two brands they carry. So we're starting to also, by the way, start we're starting to see a calling of the heard. So see all these alcohol distributors, and I'll try to
make it quick. They had they had Fomo. They had Fomo because they so many missed the spiked seltzer movement. So when this started happening, they went out and they just grabbed every thc brand they could. And so now they're stuck with a lot of crappy products and realizing that those brands are not marketing. They're in fact, the best quote I heard was, we've got a lot of products, but we don't have any brands. We are building a brand.
I like that. I may steal that for sometimes when I talk about just cannabis companies like in I don't know, sometimes that is the issue. You would just have people trying to like make a bu buck and cheap gets
you done. Some cheap marketing tactics and then sell the company and like who cares right cheap, get some investors, but then like the people who really care the brand, putting their heart and soul into a product that they believe in far farther and few in between, you know, absolutely well.
And we're talking to some of the big public cannabis companies because if you look at what kure Ethan is doing, by the way, is one example, they've launched a THHC hemp beverage. They are actually launching a hemp division of cure Leaf, which is on the cannabis side, because they just they see that the market opportunity is going to be greater and there's no reason why you can't be on both sides of the business. And and we're talking
to some folks there. There's just you know, get your popcorn ready because the fireworks haven't even started yet in this industry where we are in the very nascent stages and it's about to get funky.
Like to date myself, No, no, no, don't you My name is groovy, like punky is acceptable? There you got any era. It's been great since it's the sixties. So we're good. We like that, we like we like funk. Especially because I like smoking.
I gotta find a way to get on the get our product on the groove cruise. I'm gonna I want to work on that.
That would be dope.
Oh my buddy talks about that all the time.
Buddy Drew has been going like on a off for years and it's like one of his favorite facts.
You wanted me to go. I think it was this winter last year we were talking about booking. It was like some big twenty I don't know ten maybe, I don't know how many years it is, but some big event and he's like, come on, come on, come on, And he's like, no, man, I can't pull the trigger right now. And he's like, it's so low.
I don't thru ships. They're big Petri dishes.
Yeah, no shit, I've.
Been a couple. Yeah there. I just like going off with the destinations. I'll be straight up on this. That's like my favorite thing.
Ever done it.
But I do got one more question for you unless you got something.
Else anything, Yeah, anyone you want to shout out besides the team, anyone who want to shout out that helped you get here, Anyone you want to like just give credit to why we're here, any like last little things you want to say, because Dave's last question is pretty fun. It's kind of a funny, like a fun.
Mom and dad, man, Mom and dad, Hey man, mom, My mom is uh. My mom grew up on a farm in Austria. That's my name, franz.
Uh Austria as a child at the.
Tail end of World War two, and she came to the United States when she was eighteen. Did not speak English, did not know anyone. You know, she went through very hard times on the farm. The Russian troops came through. They took all their crops. They literally had nothing. They took her baby dolls. I mean she literally went through it. Came to the United States when she was eighteen years old to New York to make a better life for herself, and in fact she was I'm forgetting his name. Nancy
Dickerson was the first Newslady. She covered JFK back in the day. And her son who's now on CNN and all this, my mom was his nanny. And I'll just throw a funny story. He wrote a book about seventeen fifteen years ago and he cites he doesn't name my mom, but he came home from school one day and he had a pet rabbit that was in the backyard and he came home. He just got it. He was excited to see this rabbit and went to the cage and it wasn't there. In the kitchen said what's for dinner?
And my mom said, rabbit. She had no she being on a farm, she thought she thought it was dinner. She thought something brought us. She just had to.
I don't know.
My mom was always the you know, the very stern and you got to save and you got to do this, and that where my dad was the My dad was the gambler, the risk taker. And you know, I'm I'm just lucky because as a young child he took me around, uh, you know, every business we were involved in, and how to treat people, and you know that that kind of upbringing is something I wish, you know, I hate to.
I just see too many kids these days that are you know, they're just they're running wild people, you know, And I know parents have struggles and challenges.
Disrespect sometimes, yeah, and it's and it's by the way, go back to the generational health real quick.
Here's a scenario. You're in a grocery store. You see a mom smacking a child on the butt. I'm not talking about beating them up or abusing them. They're disciplining them. Okay, you'll have people video that on their phones, call child protective Services and try to shout them out for child abuse.
Okay, what everyone's going to be a nasayer to get attention. It's like, dude, just mind your own business.
Like I mean, well, but take this into consideration. That mom or that dad is trying to do something to better their child. They're trying to help them, they're trying to show them how to act, they're trying to prepare
them for life. Then you see another mother walk by or a father that weighs three hundred and fifty pounds and is pushing a cart full of shitty food that is literally poison has little piglets of kids walking behind them that are probably already going to have diebetes by the time they're ten, And not only will no one called child protective Services on that parent, they'll give them a coupon to buy more of the ship to poison their family. Those are the issues I have in this country right now.
No health is a big thing that we ignore, but we want to point out other issues that are like.
Absolutely, but which one is child abuse, poisoning your child with their diet or disciplining?
I think, you know, if you're beating them really too hard, I understand, But discipline is discipline. Well, and that's what I'm saying. I don't know, I'm just reiterating that, Like, you know, I definitely agree with discipline. I was disciplined in public, and I think that's honestly something you have to learn that, like, hey, don't be a little shit in public. You know, it doesn't matter where you are.
I will tell you what's going on. And I think sometimes when you reoffer that, you give that power to the kids. So I think that's kind of a great thing to point out because it's kind of like eyes, it's in the it's in the eye of the beholder in this in this case, you know, well I.
Use I use the you know, smacking them on the butt is sort of an extreme example. I've never never hit my child, never done that. I've got other ways that I get through to him without having to bring viole equation, I guess to say, But I'm just using that as an extreme example of you know, which one is you know which one is action real harm, and I'm going to argue the part full of poison is
the problem. So but yeah, my parents are my parents are you know, my dad passed away, but you know, I know he's still there and he's he's still with us and guiding us. And my mom is a rock. And then you know my wife and my son and my family, because without them, what am I doing anything? You know, what are we doing anything for? So that that's what matters to me, and that's that's why I get up every morning because otherwise, you know, if you have no purpose, you've got nothing.
Yeah, man, I feel you on that. That's great. Purpose is everything, man, passion.
Purpose.
Man, it's been it's been a great interview. Friends. I appreciate everything. But we have a funny question here. We ask every guest that comes on that fun question. It's not really funny, but it's a fun question. It makes you think for a second. So imagine you crack open one of your high nines. You're at your desk about to get the work, and a genie pops out and it's like, yo, I can grant you one wish to change anything within the cannabis and hemp industry, since it's
always cannabis. But if you want to change anything in the hemp side either as well too, So what would you wish for?
What's one thing you would change in this industry?
But it has it's only specific to the hemp weed industry, right, just so I understand the question.
That's usually what we stick to. But I mean, like, I guess we could bring health into the equation too, because we I feel like the more we focused more on health in this.
Episode, Yeah, if you want to go that way, I.
Mean, just because I always try to focus on the product, you know, So why don't you cannabis? I mean, Genie's giving you two?
I mean waited my response. My response weighs into both.
That perfect.
My wish would be to replace our entire processed food and beverage society to natural folks, because I think I think that would that would change lives.
And oh yeah, I mean because it would affect a lot of the hip hop.
I would have funk Master flex dropping a bump.
We give you, we give you a.
But no, that's a good that's a good one because I think processed foods affect every single part of everything, whether it's alcohol industry, whether it's the cannabis industry, like it affects a lot of man and it's something that's probably taken serious enough.
I'd like to add one tier to that that not only do we replace it, but we make natural food accessible to all. Yeah, all too many. Too many children go to school every day hungry and they cannot They're not adhd, they're fucking hungry. They need nutrition.
That's that's a horrible you know, you will see it's cheaper to be unhealthy, so then people become more unhealthy, and it's like this cyclical thing of negativity, you know, in your health.
So you're gonna see, as we grow and we have the available financial resources, we are going to do things to give back to try to enact change. We're not going to just about it. We want to do it. We are doing this because we want to bring health, we want to bring wellness, we want to bring happiness. This is not again, it's not about getting high. That's a stigma we're all going to need if we really
want to overcome the government, the regulatory the critics. We want to overcome all of these, all of these walls that are trying to come back up against all of us in this industry. We need to get away from the stigma that we're getting high. Everyone says it's a medicine, but then they talk about I'm hoya as fuck. No, that's not a medicine. That's you got buzz. You might as well had again a forty of cult forty five or something. You know, we need to get this stigma
out of the way. We need to get back focusing on the true benefits and why people want this legalized, because it should be viewed as an elixir, a remedy, something that's good for you, not bad for you. Right now it is continuing, it's still being viewed as being bad for you.
That's a good point.
I don't see alcohol being banned in any state.
Yeah, but they want to banc and it's literal poison.
So let's all work together and let's get this as a collective refocused on the benefits, the true benefits this product, this plant, whether it's a hemp, we whatever the proper terms are, it doesn't matter. Vitamin C from an orange is the same vitamin C, so it doesn't matter if it's coming you know, your THC is coming from hemp or whatever. Delta nine's Delta nine, doesn't matter where which plant it comes from. This should all be legal. We need to focus on the health. Thank you guys.
No, I love that folks on the hoof, So that's so great. And like we always talk about cannabis health, TEMP helps, TC helps the help. You know when we talk about alcohol, it does. It might help you for a moment, but it's more it's an illusion, right But anyway, so I love that focusing on health. Really glad to have you on the team. My can of fifteen. If you want any discounts, check it out. High nine It's is.
Let's let's let's put the website up there. Like I even think about putting it's a high nine, right he nin with the number nine, I was gonna say, that's what I want to specify. So remember it's high instead of that that first and it's a it's a number nine.
Nine dot com and use my candifit.
That's the hip hop influence.
I love it.
I like that again. Thank you Franz for joining us today. Thank you for becoming a partner of our show, and we continue to work together moving forward. If you have any questions, d m us or their ig is Drink High nine. You can d M Franz and his team right there. Other than that.
Website looks like this. Check it out High nine.
And you just dry. He's dropping swag. He's coming out with new products or possibly new flavors in the future. Again, thank you Franz for coming on. Guess did I say something?
No, no, no, you're good.
Not just new flavors. We're gonna blow your mind.
Yeah yeah, okay, and we'll be sharing that on our story as well, so you'll be hearing about it on our Instagram story. And again, if you haven't followed High nine on Instagram, ma, sure you followed Drink High nine Again, Franz, thank you again for coming on. Love Love the parroduct you have excited to you be promoted, promoting and helping you out with it and as always groovy, we're here to advocate, educate, that inspire the next time y'all.
Thank you. Just drinking, Just