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146: Get Customized Cannabis Through Your DNA Profile – with Len May

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Cannabis products are not “one size fits all.” 

If you are interested in using cannabis or hemp related products or started using them but are not satisfied with the results, you came to the right podcast episode. 

By now, you probably know that the hemp industry exploded across North America. Today, there is a good chance you live near a marijuana dispensary. You might already be using CBD products or THC products, or both. 

But the question is – are you getting the right cannabis in the proper form that works well with your DNA? 

As medical science learns more about cannabis and continues to make discoveries on the endocannabinoid system in the human body – the industry is adjusting, growing, and getting better at addressing specific needs. Consumers are starting to find cannabis product options that are more personalized and micro-focused on particular needs for individuals. 

How this works is all tied to your DNA. The Awesome Health Podcast has the perfect guest to break this topic down: Len May – gifted at explaining the complexities of cannabis in concise, understandable ways. 

Len is a pioneer of the medical cannabis industry, bringing more than 25 years of experience in the hemp industry. He is also an expert in genomics. 

As the CEO and Co-Founder of EndoCanna Health, Len is a mover and shaker in the industry. He has held past positions as President of the Cannabis Action Network and Board Member and Lifetime Member of the California Cannabis Association. May is the current chair of the CBDIA science board and is a stakeholder in some of the industry’s most iconic brands. 

In this episode, he shares his expertise on the Endocannabinoid System and how genetic expression plays a role in human experiences. As a Certified Medical Cannabis Specialist in Medicinal Genomics, May has an in-depth knowledge of genomics, cannabinoids and terpenes, and their interaction with the endocannabinoid system. As well, he holds a Masters of Medical Cannabis and a certificate in Endocannabinoid Formulation from the Institute for the Advancement of Integrative Medicine.

Len is also a published author (Making Cannabis Personal) and the host of the popular podcast “Everything is Personal.” 

 

In this podcast, we cover: 

  • Len’s impressively compressed story of his rise to the top of the cannabis industry
  • Len May’s past run-ins with law enforcement as the industry changed
  • A simple explanation of the endocannabinoid system in your body
  • How to determine which cannabinoids are the right fit for your system
  • The differences between CBD and THC
  • How cannabinoids help the top bodybuilders in recovery
  • How you can use your DNA profile (like 23&Me) to fit you with the perfect cannabis formula
  • How other medications can affect your cannabis experience
  • What are terpenes? 
  • Why THC makes Wade ravenous 
  • How the hemp industry “clones” plants for better quality
  • What the future of the cannabis industry could look like

 

How Len discovered cannabis helps his ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder)

When Len looks back on his childhood, he describes himself as a kid who would quickly drift off into daydreams while in class, occurring often enough that Len took many different types of prescription medications. 

Len wasn’t happy with any of them – they either didn’t work or if they did help, the side effects made him feel like crap. 

Until one day – Len was hanging out with some older kids, and one said, “Do you want to smoke a cigarette?” Len was excited as he felt like one of the cool kids. He took a drag from the cigarette, coughed, and he instantly knew that this was not the taste of a regular cigarette. He found out it was a rolled joint full of marijuana. 

What changed Len’s life was when he went back to class after smoking the marijuana, he noticed how he was able to focus much better on the schoolwork in front of him. 

That is how cannabis became Len May’s passion and go-to medicine. He got off all other meds and went to using cannabis only. Eventually, through struggles with his parents and later, his entrepreneurial efforts led Len to becoming a cannabis activist and business owner. 

Hemp is a beautifully complex plant that still has a lot of uses to be discovered.

Len says the hemp plant is “very complex” and has “somewhere around 500 different components identified. But we don’t know what a lot of them are. We have identified somewhere around 114 different components with actual names, and we understand the effects.”

In the hemp plant are the cannabinoids themselves: CBD, THC, THCV, CBDV, CBG, CBN, and other components like terpenes. 

The plant itself has its genetics, which are cannabinoids expressed in the flowers’ trichomes. The flower grows to a particular maturity and then begins expressing these cannabinoids. In the plant, they work synergistically together to create an effect. All of these start at the primary cannabinoid, the grandfather cannabinoid or mother cannabinoid, a CBG. Every single cannabinoid has an acid molecule. 

Len and Wade get into the science behind cannabis and how it works in the human body. Science geeks will love this episode. 

Tune in and hear how a simple DNA test could be the breakthrough you need to find the right match between your body and cannabis products. Len May’s company – EndoCanna Health – can do the DNA test. Or, you can take your 23&Me DNA profile (or whatever company profile you used) and submit it for instant feedback. Pretty incredible service. 

Check out this episode and discover what cannabis can do for your physical and mental health! 

 

Episode Resources: 
APH Listeners get $20 off total order with code: awesome20 on Endo-dna test
Book: Making Cannabis Personal: Take the Guesswork Out of Your Cannabis & CBD Experience By Tailoring It to Your DNA
Endo.DNA on Instagram
Len May DNA on Instagram
Endocanna Health on Facebook
Endo-DNA on Medium
Len May on Twitter

Read The Episode Transcript:

 Wade Lightheart: Hey, so I'm really fascinated. We were chatting just before we get started here and you run a company called the deals with, let's just get into the, you deal with DNA cannabinoids your endocannabinoid system, all this sort of stuff. There's a lot of talk in the industry. There's a lot of projections in the industry but you've really taken this to the next level by bringing real genetic related information, personalized to the person and how to leverage the endocannabinoid system. Let's just get your backstory. How did this all start?

 Len May: Okay. So as a kid, I grew up in Philly and I was the kind of kid that you sort of sit in class and I began to daydream and drift off. So I was diagnosed with ADD, and they put me all kinds of prescription medication and all that sucked. Some of the work that made me feel like shit. So I was hanging out with some older kids one day and they're like, Hey, do you want to smoke a cigarette? I'm like, I'm going to be the cool kid. I'm going to smoke a cigarette with these older kids. And so they passed me a cigarette and I take a dragon and inhale it start coughing. Like that's not a cigarette that doesn't taste like a cigarette. So they stopped the weed. And I went back to class and my EDD has like, all these windows are open my head, sort of narrowed those windows down and I could focus and sort of became my go-to medicine and doing that. You know, I still, I got off all other meds and I just want the cannabis. So I didn't know it was medicine for him, but it made me feel a certain way. And my parents really didn't like that. So the catch me and get me out of be in trouble. And eventually they ended up kicking me out, actually calling the cops on me and having me trying to get me arrested and kicking me out. The irony of that is they both take formulations diet manufacturer made for them now for their aches and pains. So it came full circle. But yeah. So in doing that, when I was on my own, I became an activist. So I was the president of the cannabis action network. And I fought for legalization. I held a rally at independence hall in Philadelphia where like constitution and the declaration of pendants are all on hem paper by the way.

 Wade Lightheart: Yes. So the sales of the main flour, the ropes main flour and the constitution was based on hemp paper.

 Len May: So in that I was an activist and then I moved to Los Angeles about 12 years ago and I got into the dispensary space. So I was an owner and operator of five dispensary's. And then one of the things I kept seeing over and over is two people with the same symptomatic conditions will come in and get the same exact cultivar. Well, we were referred to a strain and have a completely different experience. And so EDD kicked in and I could hyper-focused I became obsessed and I'm like, I need to figure this out. So I thought it was the plant itself because we have all these different names of different strains and plans. So, you know, blue dream and green crack and ridiculous names like that. So, and then…

 Wade Lightheart: Tuxedo a time was one of my favorites. I forgot a friend that lives on tuxedo Island…

 Len May: My favors is Alaskan thunder fuck. Have you ever heard of that?

 Wade Lightheart: No I don't.

 Len May: I'm like, all right. Sounds great. So I got into and I found a video by a guy named Kevin McKernan, who was the one, the first people genetically sequence cannabis. And I started contacting him and long story short, it started working with them. My job was to travel around the U S and Canada and get plant material, bring into my lab, extract the DNA, purified and send it to Boston, to a sequencer. So we started the first library called canoppediaa of different cultivars or strains. And you could see the example would be likeblue dream since I mentioned. So I would get five different blue dreams to what's called blue dream bringing in. I could see genetically two of them aligned. So they're pretty much blue dream. Two other ones are closed. They're cousins, there's a relationship, but they're not blue dream. And the fifth one is not even close. It's called blue dream, completely something different. And so we started looking to see alright, it must be named, but then there was a conference of doctors that were treating kids with epilepsy at a Harvard medical school using CBD. And a lot of them would come back saying, well, we're going from a hundred seizures to zero. It's working fantastically, but some of them were saying the seizures come back or it's not working. There's some outliers. So they had a pharmacogenomics company. We sequenced these kids DNA and we saw they had genetic markers and common. There was for a form of epilepsy called Dre syndrome and published an article on that. And it was peer reviewed. And we think GW pharmaceutical probably focused on that to get their Epidiolex product past the FDA. So that was my light bulb moment. I said, well, if there is one biomarker, there's probably more and they shut down the human side. So I got a chance to take some science people with me and formed endocrine health in 2017. So our first six months, all we did was research. We looked at every single snip, which is a single nucleotide polymorphism gene. Let's say that has a direct or indirect association with your endocannabinoid system. Once we did that, we had peer reviewed studies for each one of them. And then we went to Illumina, who is a company that makes sequencing equipment. And we asked to make a chip for us. So we made a custom chip and then we created a kid and that's how we kind of launched. So it's pretty much a really short.

 Wade Lightheart: That must be the most compressed, long story that I've ever heard. Pretty impressive.

 Len May: Even five years, like…

 Wade Lightheart: I mean like, well, it's like I can learn from that. It takes me 25 years to say two minutes of my life. So I'd like to reverse that. You talked about activism and you talked about your early years because, you know, I was in Vancouver Canada when the big extraction of Mark Emery. So Mark Emery was kind of like one of the icons of legalizing cannabis in Canada and had the highly publicized case where he was extradited from Canada to the United States but there was some sort of plea deal that happened. And because of all the publicity, he ended up becoming, he did his time then also became kind of that's the point where everything changed. What do you thinkfor you, it took, you know, coming in that environment where you're getting so much pressure from your family members, let's saycause you know what, we needed to be reefer madness and this was bad and people fail and all that sort of stuff. And unfortunately what happens is you have a broad range of experiences and people will take the negative and then just project that on the whole point, right? Or they'll take the positive and project that all the point. And what you're doing here is completely different. You're into customizing and sequencing, particularly with that person's individuality. What point for you to did it come? Did it go from, you know, being kicked out of your house to like, this is where I'm going to be an advocacy from that and what transpired to make that happen?

 Len May: I think it's passion. Like my understanding that it was wrong. Like, although your brain is on drugs and you know, this your brain on drugs and all that other bullshit that was offensive to us. I think I had an experienced, I've saw a lot of other people haven't experienced. I'll tell you my aha moment where everything kind of flipped. So my parents kicked me out. I'm defined. I was always kind of a defined kid.

 Wade Lightheart: And what do you mean by that defined?

 Len May: I didn't do like I did already in school, but if I, I don't like authority. If a teacher tells me what to do, I get kicked out of school. I got in a fight with my teacher, like that kind of stuff. So I'm defined in that way.

 Wade Lightheart: I can relate to that. And so I tell you start your own business, right?

 Len May: Exactly. I didn't do well with authority. So I'm like, I know I don't do well with authority do my own thing at some point. So when I held my rally at independence hall, as I was saying, my keynote speaker was this woman named LV Maseca. And she was one of the first people to get thoroughly prescribed cannabis under a program, denied, supported that they grew with this cannabis and in Mississippi and they provide them this 10 with pre-roll joints with a big USD label. And I was like, wait a second, schedule one. It's illegal. My friends who are getting arrested for this are you're growing it. And you're given it to people made no logical sense.

 Wade Lightheart: When was this? What year?

 Len May: This is 1992

 Wade Lightheart: Wow! It's a long time.

 Len May: It's long time ago.

 Wade Lightheart: It was 20 years ago.

 Len May: Yeah. So she opened up her tenant. This is federal property with federal Rangers everywhere. And she lit up a joint and there joining anything I'm like, wow, this is pretty cool. So everybody crashed in my house afterwards all the people that were doing the conference. So all of a sudden I was dating this girl. She was an artist. She made the sculpture in my house. All of a sudden we got woken up to big crash, something broke. So Aly woke up and she walked into this sculpture and broken to pieces. And I was like, Aw man. But she has glaucoma, degenerate glaucoma. So she's legally blind. And the moment that I saw this, she got to join and she lit up and she started see, she still wore the thick glass if she could see again. So I'm like, wait a second. This is real. I see it in real time. It's not just for me. It happened right in front of my eyes. So I knew this was a therapeutic substance and that's kind of what triggered everything for me to kind of pursue my passion.

 Wade Lightheart: Wow! That's such an interesting point. And what were some of the, maybe the hiccups or the parts that became challenging along the way? Cause you're dealing, you know, with different state laws, you're dealing with federal laws, dealing with international laws, there's being advocacy and then you're targeted by watch groups or, you know, three letter organizations. Do you have any run-ins with the law or anything like that?

 Len May: Yeah many runs with the law. I mean, I have friends of mine who went to prison for cannabis and we got shut down like a way, I mentioned, I have five dispensary's. So I get a call from my manager, one of my shops. She's like, the feds are here. What do I do? I'm like, whatever they tell you.

 Wade Lightheart: Okay. Yeah. They have guns.

 Len May: Yes. Anything just they like to do that just do that.

 Wade Lightheart: The government has a license on violence. A lot of people forget that.

 Len May: So then they closes down one by one, the last shop was in Santa Ana and the guy from the department, that's the only one I went to. The guy from DOJ comes up. It's like, let's go for a walk. Walking is like, I've no problem with dope. My mom takes it for a cancer, goes 14 days, cease and desist, stop operating. We're not going to prosecute. So they sort of forced us to shut. So I called my buddies, said the marijuana policy project, it's a lobbying group in DC. And I'm like, what's going on? What's up? It's like quid pro quo. Like, what do you mean goes well, Obama and this is the funniest ironic thing because Obama, out of all the presidents that you think about it, he's the one that actually nailed. And he think about him and he decided he needed to get, by the way, this is just a second information. I don't know. I don't have any facts to support this. Sothe information is that he had to had an education bill that he wanted passed and big pharma was really pushing synthetic cannabinoids, THC, like Marinol. And they basically said, you know, shut down some prominent shops and we'll support your bill. And it started in San Diego and they started shutting down shops and we were one of the few that got shut down and that was it. So they made a statement.

 Wade Lightheart: It's very interesting. Cause it had a similar type thing happened in Canada, in Vancouver where I'm from, there was, I think at one point 165 dispensary's in the city of Vancouver operating. And then as things became more federally regulated and the bills came in and then the synthetics and the government and big pharma came in. All of a sudden, all of these dispensary started getting busted in by the cops one after one after one. So really what you're seeing is a situation where it appears that big pharma is leveraging government policy and using the police as their muscle on the street, in order to basically a corner of the market. Would you say that appears to be accurate?

 Len May: I would say that appears to be accurate. And I would say that everything shifted, if you really think about it, when Epidiolex got approved by the FDA, now big pharma start seeing, okay, we don't have to go this route. There is Elaine for us that opened up. Now we can take individual cannabinoids and we can file IP the same way we do pharmaceuticals and we can create a pharmaceutical grade product that we can do on our own. And now you see in the whole country starting to open up a little bit. So could it be an ironic timing of this or is there some nefarious reasons behind this?

 Wade Lightheart: I want to get into the endo cannabinoid system because this is, I think something that is a very exciting field of research, which is expanding. There's a lot of money going into it. There's a lot of people who are finding relief, but can you explain in your experience what the endocannabinoid system is for our listeners and why it's so important to understand your unique system, I guess or differentiation which is associated with your genetics?

 Len May: Yeah, so the endocannabinoid system was discovered in 1992 and the way, so people who went to medical school prior to that didn't even know that this existed. And the real interesting thing is it's a primary regulatory system. So think of about the endocannabinoid system is sort of the puppet master, where does it gets signals from all the other systems, the endocrine system, all these other systems and modulates by sending out chemicals and messages into those systems, which come up us to release because the overall goal of the system is to get our body into homeostasis, which is really bounced. And it does that through to endogenous endocannabinoids that have produce itself. The first one is called an antimite, which you would say is the word Anon in Sanskrit means bliss. So this is your bliss hormone. And the other is 2AG. And so THC, the phytocannabinoid from the plant, it mimics the way an antimite works in our bodies. And it has a receptor called the CB one receptor, which is mostly located in your brain, your central nervous system. And then you have a CB two receptor, which is most senior immune and digestive system. And that one stimulated these enzymes, that CBD actually stimulates. And that mimics to AG. So you have phytocannabinoids from the plan, the mimic the way our indogenous andtocannabinoids. So we actually have kind of cannabis inside of us. And so they, you get those fidocannabinoids to work in bind to those receptors that we only have in our bodies. And the overall goal is to have that balance and homeostasis.

 Wade Lightheart: So that's again, very succinct. So how does a person determine which cannabinoids are right for them going back to the strain component where now they're sequencing this and how does those two things kind of fit together the overall turn system, but then we've got the individuality.

 Len May: Yeah. So the system itself is there and it can regulate itself normally with its own indogenous and the cannabinoids. However, we do have some imbalances in our own and the cannabinoids systems and we have inefficiencies and some of those deficiencies are because of prohibition. If you think about it, years and years ago cannabis was part of our overall diets. Even though we may have not consumed it, animals would eat hemp or cannabis, and it would be in our food supply system…

 Wade Lightheart: Spiral into the soil to reconstitute the microbes in the soil. You always grew up in an area of hemp and the farm, and then you plowed it. You turned it back in and it's great for the soil.

 Len May: It's great for the soil just to plan. I mean, you probably know Trenoble planted a whole bunch of hemp to be able to absorb all the nuclear waste in the ground. So it's an amazing plan was so many different things.

 Wade Lightheart: Like nuclear joint.

 Len May: There a nuclear joint man, you can smoke at first if you like it.

 Wade Lightheart: They were radioactive high.

 Len May: Exactly. So the thing that I started seeing is these adverse effects. So cannabis is a drug, just sugar is a drug. Caffeine is a drug, it's a drug. So you have to be really careful and everybody has their own experience with it. And one things I started finding, I'm not the person that has adverse effects from cannabis, but I did one time go to this event. And I tried something that was called clear, which is like a 99% THC extract. And when I tried that, I just, Oh my God, like my heart started pounding more than normal and all this stuff. And I started feeling panicked. Anxiety came up and I'm like, Oh, well, that's what people go through with certain cannabis.

 Wade Lightheart: It's not something that you experienced before, but now you had an insight into what that feels to people it's not easy.

 Len May: Exactly. Different people experienced different adverse effects from different types of cannabis. So our goal when we started was to try to give something like a blueprint for somebody. So we can use, you know, our product as an R-test, as a GPS. So this will show you this road over here, has a traffic jam on, it is construction. So avoid this, this road over here is a much better road to take doesn't guarantee, there's not gonna be a pothole along the way. But one of the challenges that I started seeing from people is, you know, it takes four to eight different products until people find more works for that. During that process, they can have some adverse experiences and say, I'm not going back to cannabis anymore. And I'll give plenty of examples of that if you would like, and then until they find what works for them. And then when they find that works for them, if it's flower itself, you have something called genetic drift. You never have consistency in flower. You can get your, you know, your green crack from one place and your green crack from another place, they'll be two different things. So our goal was always to try to focus on avoid an adverse event, so you can have an optimal experience for your cannabis use.

 Wade Lightheart: Can you illustrate maybe the difference between some of the endocannabinoid style? So there's THC and then there's CBD. And I noticed for myself, I do really well on the CBD for whatever reason. I like that THD kind of, I get a little goofed out of it. And you know, I have a harder time focusing and I can't stop eating that. So can you explain the differences of those particular components, our listeners can understand?

 Len May: Yeah. The plant's very complex. It has somewhere around 500 different components in it that we have identified. We don't know what a lot of them are. So we identify somewhere around 114 different components that we are, actually have names for. And we understand the effects. So you have the cannabinoids themselves, and which you mentioned THC and CBD and THCV and CBDV and CBG and CBN and all these other things. So I'm going to try to explain it, and then you have turpines too, which I'll explain…

 Wade Lightheart: Please go through the whole list so that people can get a proper understanding of what each one of those things.

 Len May: And also in the condency which are no longer consisted so I give you the whole run down.

 Wade Lightheart: Yeah. That is the awesome.

 Len May: So the plan itself has its own genetics, which are cannabinoids. And these cannabinoids are expressed in a what's called the tricombs of the actual flowers. And the flower grows it's gets a certain amount of maturity, and it starts expressing these cannabinoids. In the plant, they work synergistically together to create an effect. They all start at the main cannabinoid, the grandfather cannabinoid, or mother cannabinoid, a CBG. Every single cannabinoid has an acid molecule. If I'm getting too science here.

 Wade Lightheart: No I love this thing, let's go right for it.

 Len May: So, acid molecule was in raw plant. So the raw plant has, you know, all these different cannabinoids that you mentioned, THCA, CBDAall these other components in the plant. And I'll explain what THC and CBD does. So when you heat the plant, so when you cut it and dry it, and under stress, it also expresses as tarpines which I'll explain what that is as well. And you dried it, you cured it. Now you have the plant when you heat the plant, it converts, drops the acid molecule and converts it to its THC Delta nine tetrahydrocannabinol, which is THC and CBD, which is cannabidiol and all the other cannabinoids. Now, when we consume this, so most of the cannabinoids are psychoactive, but they're not intoxicating only THC. And now we have Delta A, which is if you want to talk about that too, but THC is an intoxicating cannabinoid and what it does, as I mentioned in bikes and the CB one receptor and a mimics the way and ended my works with our bodies.

 Wade Lightheart: So that's that kind of blissful, heart-based relaxed, open, feeling. Right. And that could be pretty connecting.

 Len May: Yeah. And then, you know, sometimes what happens with THC and it depends how much of it that you take. It actually, THC is a vast dilator. So what it does is dilates your blood vessels, your heart starts pumping faster, and some people are predisposed to anxiety and stress. So if you know, normally that your heart is going to beat faster, and it just part of the, you know, way of consuming THC, you're fine with that. Some people, it triggers the genetic expression to have an anxiety and stress, so some people don't like high amounts of THC. What CBD does, it works very similar to 2AG, which is the other indogenous and the cannabinoid. And it works. It's an amazing anti-inflammatory. So it stimulates these enzymes that are part of your immune and digestive system, and it helps to be able to regulate those systems. So a lot of people, and also it's a adverse agonist of THC. So people are consuming too much THC. We think there are studies that showed that consuming CBD will help to release the binding of the receptor. And it will make you as you for as high,

 Wade Lightheart: Right. That makes sense to me because I've noticed CBD and the right combination seemed to be better for people in the, now you go into the places in this four to one and eight to one and eight to eleven, they get, now we're seeing these ratios and people are dialing in the ratios, which is like, maybe stage one before we get to kind of where you're talking. A couple of things, I I'm a big fan of the Pat McAfee show. And he talks about he left the NFL because for him ADD guy, cannabinoids was something that allowed him to perform. He was one of the best kickers in the entire league, but then he got into the substance issues with league, and then he checked out of it. And then, you know, he was saying, I believe it was him was talking about how, there is a big number of athletes who are using cannabinoids and THC to recover from, to kind of wind themselves down from these things or to manage game time anxiety. And unfortunately, a lot of them get put into this kind of like substance abuse thing. When in actuality, you know, they could, they could use a speed based drug given to them for brain focused or whatever prescribed, but the guy smokes to do, and he gets busted from the Lake. So how are just any comments about what you've noticed on that?

 Len May: I mean, you know, I work with a lot of athletes. I've had a lot of them as a customer's server and Endocana health and some of the role my podcasts and good friends of mine, you know, yo guys like Ricky Williams.

 Wade Lightheart: Who made a big stand about it.

 Len May: Love to leave because of it. And he said, and then my good friend, Evan Britten who's

 Wade Lightheart: Just add on the…

 Len May: He was all mine, he's a really good friend. We just hiked the other day together. And he used to tell me stories, like when they get off the bus, the trainer gives him pills. They give them a handful of pills and he used to be like, and put them in their pocket and consume cannabis, as long as you're not a rookie. And if you're an experienced player, you know, when testing happens. So they, a lot of them in locker rooms consume and smoke and they then navigate through the policy. Ricky said that the only time he got caught is when he switched teams, because the schedule for testing was changed. And I think if you really talk to himif you ever have him on, he'll tell you, he probably did this on purpose to make a statement, make a stance, because he's like, I'm not taking opioids. I'm not taking benzos. I'm not taking anything. I liked the natural plant. So absolutely it works for some people. And I'll tell you, so my good friend, Danny Hester, who's,he was a Mr. Olympia.

 Wade Lightheart: Yeah. His pictures up over at Gold's gym. Fantastic body building champion.

 Len May: Amazing in his, I don't want to give away his age. He can say in his…

 Wade Lightheart: He's incredible shape for his age.

 Len May: In his forties he won Mr. Olympian natural physique. So Danny, when he was training, he came to me and he's like, Len, would you legs? I'm training twice a day. I do legs. And it's like, is there anything that cannabis can help with to recover? So I can do legs because that's the worst. And I'm like let me thinker. So I came up with a formulation called the recovery and I gave it to them and he was like, and he won Mr. Olympia that year. I'm not taking credit but…

 Wade Lightheart: Any of those bodybuilders that went to the gym, of course, in the bodybuilding industry you know, managing the pain of extreme training and same thing for NFL and stuff like that. And so many people get addicted to products like new Bain and opioids and these other things which have horrific withdrawal issues, side effects and stuff like that. And so managing pain is something that every athlete needs to do, especially if you're training legs routine. I mean, I had a year where I couldn't walk. If I stepped off a curb, I would just collapse because my, I was in such excruciating pain. Yeah. So I can relate to that. So that's very cool that you can start with the recovery.

 Len May: Yeah. And some of those athletes they take cannabis to help pre-workout too. So it all depends what it is. And when you understand your endocannabinoid system, you understand your genetic predispositions. Now you can create formulations. There'll be like your daytime and then your nighttime. So you can consume different things throughout the day, depending on what it is that you need based on outcome that you want to achieve.

 Wade Lightheart: I've noticed a lot of these cannabinoids seem to carry. They seem to be great delivery agents for other nutrients. Like, so I noticed a lot of people, well, for example, with our nootropics, they find that if they do a CBD or THC CBD combination, they get an amplified effect or a sustainable effect, or it just seems optimized. Is that part of, because of the mechanisms of how that works? Cause I kinda jumped around, we haven't gone through all the lists.

 Len May: I remember I booked Mike that even didn't talked about…

 Wade Lightheart: I want to come back to, was such an interesting topic so…

 Len May: Well, I'll tie my answer into talking about indicas and sativas and how the plant works. So we had this things that Endeca Sativa. So Endeca is supposed to be down a sedative and sativa is supposed to be up right. Uplifting. We don't have that anymore. So indicas Sativa we're bred out. So if anybody says, this is sativa, they're probably full of shit because we've crossbred this plant for hundreds of hundreds of years to breed in THC, because that was the cash crop and breed out all these other things. Now we're starting to mess around and say, well, THCV is an appetite suppressant. Can we breed plants with THCV or CBD? We never even had CBD was part of the Oh, hemp. Well, hemp doesn't express naturally that much CBDs. So what do we do? We grow fields of it. And we dry it it as an industrial combine and we extract it and all the bull shit that's of this, instead of just a flower part of it, you're getting leaves, stems, everything in it. And you creating cannabinoid because that's the next thing. Now it's Delta eight. So we're the businesses making this work. But let me just explain indicas and sativas. So originally the original Endeca dominant or the Endeca crops, they grew in Southeast Asia, a few thousand years ago, sort of Nepal kind of area, Kashmir area. That's where the early indicas were found. So harsh climate you know, four seasons snow. This plant grows wide. The leaves are wider. It doesn't grow to the sun. That's doesn't stretch tall. And because the plants, when it's stressed, it expresses what's called terpenes, which are the essential oils. And the plant produces, every single plant nature produces essential oils in cannabis. Their turpines work together with cannabinoids to create an effect. So what it did, we think that the natural predators in that area it's sort of mutated and it started expressing these turpines to detract the national predators in that area. And if you look at the original indicas and even the indicus hybrids, if you smell them, they smell dizling and skunky down the skunky kind of smell. So that is isolated. Well, that has to do with myrcene, which is the dominant terpene, essential oil does dominate Endeca plants. And that is a sedative that makes you combined with THC that gives you into down, set it up kind of feeling and that's the Endica. So the sativas, they originated in more Caribbean type of climates, warmer climates, like South Africa with the Durban's and like Hawaii with the Malvi's and all these other things. And in Mexico, a couple co gold and all that stuff. So would they, the plants stretches to the sun, it looks different. The leaves are thinner and under stress, whatever national predators were of that area, the plants must food oriented. It's given off a food year, citrus type of smell to it. And that one is dominant in a terpene called lemonade, which is thenwas shown in studies to boost dopamine. And that gives you the lift up. So those are the sativas and those are the indicas then together with the turpines and the flavonoids and the other components, the other cannabinoids, you can start working on having a specific effect. Now that challenges that we haven't done enough studies on individual components and how they work together. Our focus has been THC and now CBD, right? And now we're starting to look at other components, but because there's so many different components of plant, it makes it very difficult to take all those components, the DNA of the plant to match with your own genetics and come up with a formulation. So we're creating that guideline now, but we urge people to do more. We do studies too, but we urge people do studies. So we can start looking at this what's called the entourage effect, but I like to call it a concert. Cause I'm a music guy. It's a concert of all these things playing together and how they interact within your body.

 Wade Lightheart: So fascinating because you know, historically speaking, you know, the growers who were, you know, before everything was legalized, they were very sophisticated in their understanding of growing a plant and how to use the plant and also the different types and its impact and effects. So they were doing it more through observation and experience and exposure to the product and how it was produced. Now we've moved into kind of a more commercialized, specialized industry. What do you think are some of thepositives of that? And then some of the negatives, cause I know there's been, there was a massive investment push and, you know, med mens just around the street. And there was a whole bunch of controversy around that. And then there's the end of integrators and to spend it like, what is this whole industry what's happening in the industry? And what do you see happening in the future?

 Len May: I think it's going to splinter into three different factions, so John Bayner, who was speaker of the house, who was one of the biggest opponents of cannabis who would stand up there and say, this is the devil's lettuce and how dare you consume that? You know, and he joined acreage, which is one of the top multi-state operators in North America. And then he had an awakening. He had a green awakening, which green is it a? There's the money or who knows, you had one of those that happened. So I think, look, big ag is going to get really into cannabis and they all already, so you're going to have genetically aligned breeding methods, everything that Monsanto does, you're going to have in the cannabis crops as well. CBD, all the different crops are going to be big ag. Then you're going to have big pharma, big pharma is going to isolate individual components, try to get patents on them and do clinical trials on the individual components. I'll give you an example. So I was contacted by a research study in New York that was looking at autism and trying to isolate CBDV, which was another cannabinoid. And they asked me if I can help them get CBDV. So it's very difficult to isolate. I talked to, you know, my growers who are friendly with, who grows CGMP, who follow CGMP standards and all that for extraction, can you extract CBDV yes. I went back to them. I said we can't use it. I'm like why it's department of defense is sponsoring this study and they have an exclusive contract with GW pharmaceuticals to get their CBDV from them. Now it's jazz because they bought a GW pharmaceuticals. So we'll have big pharma involved in that. It's no, no there's nothing we can do about that part. And then we'll have, I think the nutraceutical industry. So we'll have specific formulations that are indication specific. So this is you know, to help you unwind or to help you with focus and they'll have multiple components and we'll have consistency. So the same way you will go to your vitamin shop or GNC you pick up your formulation, you turn around, I don't have to worry about going in and seeing the test results. Now you're, it's wild West. You don't know what you're getting. You get a product says, you know, 28% THC, what else is in there? I have no idea. What does it have? Heavy metals. Great. What about the terpene profile? Does a matter, of course it matters. So that's kind of what I feel is going to be the future. And what I'm hoping is going to be the future is more personalized formulations. So I can go in and say, wade, or Len, I can go anywhere in the world. And I can say, I'd like to get my formulation number one, or whatever it's going to be called and I can get it anywhere.

 Wade Lightheart: So standardized formulations that have been established that dispensed in an appropriate facility so that you know, that what you're buying is exactly what it is. Okay.

 Len May: Absolutely. It could be like a compounding I'm starting to interupt, but it can be like a compounding pharmacy kind of way to start creating them too so.

 Wade Lightheart: Right. Or have it shipped right to your house even…

 Len May: Shipped right to your house. Yeah.

 Wade Lightheart: Which leads to, I think your company right here, let's talk about what you're doing and really leading the way and with the EndoCanna health.

 Len May: Yeah. So we created this endo DNA test. So the goal is to be able to give better control of your health and wellness. One of the things that really illuminated besides all the things I talked about, I'll give you an example of how this can work, but especially during COVID, one of the things we started seeing is that the healthcare system has failed us in a certain way. So what we want to do is empower individuals to take better control of their own health and wellness preventative. So now, you know, it's not like this hurts over here. I can take a shot for it. I can get a pill for this. It's more or less, why is this hurt? And what's causing that. So what can I do to find out my genetic blueprint? Then I can take something that's more aligned to me that's personalized. And then a feedback loop mechanism that I can see what the epigenetics of that. So that's really the goal.

 Wade Lightheart: Exactly what we do in biological optimization around nutrients and vitamins and hormones and all these sorts of different optimizations. But you're using specifically testing and working within the endocannabinoid system to isolate and find out which is going to be your magic symphony.

 Len May: Yeah, so there's a few different things we do. So it's very easy to use. It's a buckle swab, you swab the inside your cheek. You put it back in the, in the box, you register because we're hip a compliant and we have to make sure I've stressed this over and over that if you do not register, we will not know that DNA belongs to you, right? It's very, very important. We are a data company, but we don't care about your personal data. We care about that. There's a thousand people with your genotype that took this formulation fed back, that it's working or I can make better suggestions for people. So it's really, really important. So there's over 160 different reports on different conditions like anxiety, mood pain then we have predispositions to like opioids or stimulants that, you know, pain management specialists can use this to guide people taking cannabis instead of an opioid. We have nutrient deficiencies vitamin something that you mentioned as well, THC side effects. So some people have some challenges with side effects and I'll explain thosemetabolic function. So those things based on metabolic function, but taking a metal-based you are, and then we have drug to drug interaction. So if you're taking prescription medication, which most people don't talk about, certain cannabinoids can inhibit you know, the efficacy of your prescription medication as well. So this is what the report does. So when you swab, you log in, you get your results and it'll say all those things. But in addition, we give you your personalized wellness plan to shows you all your predispositions and your suggested formulations. So this is better for you. And then we geo-fence and look at products based on a certificate of analysis or test results and show you, which is the product closest to you that matches your suggested ratio and where you can get that product. So from the beginning, all the way to a personalized product.

 Wade Lightheart: Well, that's super cool. So the company that you've run, can you share with people what it is?

 Len May: Yeah, it's called endocana of health. Our website is endodna.com. That's the product. And not only can you use the test to get your results, but you can also take your 23 me and your ancestry, any other DNA testsyou can upload your raw data that you own and you'll get a report instantaneously on your endocannabinoid system.

 Wade Lightheart: And who are some of the people that are using endo DNA and, you know, cause I think of so many different applications that you could leverage this for. Is it the end users? Are we also starting to see it be something that's being integrated into a medicine?

 Len May: Yeah. So I'll give you a couple of different examples. From a demographic standpoint, the person who uses our test the most is the whole foods shopper, the mom and whole foods. Who's making buying decisions for their family. The second is a person who has a condition. So they're looking to alleviate some sort of condition, whether it's a chronic condition of pain or they can't sleep or something else people that have adverse effects before, like they smoked and said, Oh no, I get anxiety. Let me find something that works for me where the kind of curious somebody is scared and like, I want to try, but I want to see that I can not have an adverse effect. So but I'll give you some example. So I use grandma Mary because people can relate to grandma. So grandma was a she ate a brownie 60 years ago at a party and flipped out, had a stressful event, let's call it. She was super high and she was all.

 Wade Lightheart: Yeah and an uncle that paid a whole box of brownies one time was stoned for three days. I heard that story like as you know, secondary information from my parents,

 Len May: I tell you man THC, your liver converts THC to 11 Oxy hydroxide Delta nine tetrahydrocannabinol. It's five to 50 times more powerful than THC. So if people are doing edibles, they're in for a complete different experience. However….

 Wade Lightheart: Some people really do well in edibles. And some people don't like, I got a friend that's just, he's totally Geiling on edibles.

 Len May: I'll explain why it's exactly what I'm getting to. So grandma, 60 years later, she's in an assisted living facility. This is a real story. And she's watching Sanjay Gupta on CNN and he's talking about cannabis and she's diagnosed with cancer. And the doctor recommended she try cannabis. And I think she was going through chemo and all that stuff. So she's like, well, if Sanjay Gupta said, it's good, so Sanjay Gupta. So she went to the dispensary and the bud tender there recommended a chocolate for her and said, grandma, you know, don't take too much, take a little. And she's like, how much? I don't know, take a piece. So she went and took that and she had an awful experience. Not only was she stressed, but also she had, she was hallucinating, almost turned into psychosis. And she went around and started telling people, you know, don't consume this. It's not good or for shit, it's all that other stuff. So when she took the DNA test, there was a couple of things that she noticed. Number one, she saw this, she was a poor metabolizer THC to her digestive system. So don't take an animal, you know, and number two, she was prone to stress and I'll explain how that works or this gene called faa that actually breaks down an antdemite. So the more faa you have, the less than antdemite you have and I'll explain kind of how that works. So when she realized that she would take a much more balanced formulation, so more of a one-to-one her terpene profile was completely different. So linolu was her dominant terpene. And it's found in lavender too. And what it does, it suppresses the anxiety that's provoked by THC, if it's liminal dominant. And then she started taking it as a tincture or a sublingual underneath her tongue, so she can bypass her liver. And now she was getting chemo and she was giving out our business card to all the people there. She was like, Hey, you should check these guys out if you want to take cannabis. So that's a perfect example of how somebody would use it. We had another woman who was 78 years old and this is not just for the elderly. I'm just using this as an example. And the reason why I found this fascinating, cause I've never heard this before in terms of edibles. So her doctor recommended cannabis. She went to a dispensary again, a budtender recommended gummies. So shave one gummy that I think each one is 10 milligrams. She had another gummy, nothing. She ended up eating, I think like 10 gummies belt, nothing.

 Wade Lightheart: Wow.

 Len May: And we were like,

 Wade Lightheart: How's that possible? Right.

 Len May: So we have a drug interaction report. So when she went and uploaded her perscription.

 Len May: She had a medication that she was taken. There was an inducer. She had to take 400 times the amount of THC to the average person to feel it because of the drug that she was on. So grandma does not need to eat a bag full of gummies. You know? So those are the some of the things that we show people that you can take. And then I was talking about fah. This is really interesting because so we're around 42% of the population has a genetic predisposition. And that's where a lot of people I feel have this anxiety provoked by THC because t turns on their genetic expression of this fah predisposition so FAH it produces an enzyme that breaks down an andimite, which we remember is the bliss hormone, right? So if that's the case, what happens is people are much more prone to stress. So what happens in stress? You know this, and you can probably chime in if I'm wrong about this in certain ways. Soif somebody gets cut off in traffic, you have all these things that are stress response, fight, or flight, you have journalin, you have perinephric. You have a cortisol that's pumped into your bloodstream, and then you realize there's no lion chasing your jungle. So your endocannabinoid system starts to release an antisemite to be able to get you back to balance among other things within your body. Now, if you have too much fah, it's like, Pac-Man eating an andimite. If you have too much faa, which is homozygous. If anybody wants to be a science, he is the homozygous, a lethal combination on the faa snip. So that happens. You are actually producing less than the andimite to Navish population. And over time, you express more cortisol that hangs around. And as the case, it actually elevates your pH level makes you more acidic. And if that's the case, your immune system really doesn't like that sort of starts attacking that. So you have these inflammation, especially in your joints and your ankles and your knees and all that stuff. So people walk around and flame because they're acidic and plus the food they eat and everything else that you can, you talk about it as well. So if that's the case, you can actually subsidize that with THC. So understanding you're getting enough THC, so you can subsidize what you're lacking in your national enendomide. But if you take too much THC, it actually does the opposite. It triggers that expression of your stress, genes, stress via activity. And you can have the panic attacks and paranoia that people with the cannabis can cause…

 Wade Lightheart: So with this testing. Are you not only able to see which cannabinoid families are derivatives or what's going to be best for you, but also you can kind of maybe dial in your ratios or that sort of thing, so that you get the optimal experience that you're looking for. Is that accurate?

 Len May: That's exactly. So it gives your ideal formulation of cannabinoids and terpenes. It tells you how much to consume based in metabolic function and then where to get the exact products that match your genetic predisposition.

 Wade Lightheart: So it actually with the dispensary's that would have that. So they're registered on a…

 Len May: Yeah. Well, the way we work is we work with manufacturers. So it depends on the state or country because we're international. So whoever provides a certificate of analysis, we run through another pattern algorithm. We run through that, and we show you, these products are 70, 50, 80% match. Then you go onto their website, you put in your zip code and I'll show you the dispensary's are closest to you. Geo-Fence we can find those products.

 Wade Lightheart: So eventually this will probably all be contained on blockchain transactions. So that you'll know where the whole flow of everything so that everything, you know, has been guaranteed, certified, perfect and in alignment, and then sent to your house or at your local dispensary…

 Len May: And I'll tell you when Amazon, when things go super legal and they ridiculous prohibition, you know, Amazon drones can be delivering, you know, your personalized formulations, right to your house, the same day,

 Wade Lightheart: Sitting up on the balcony and the drones will be flying in joints to everybody out there on their own customized joint to each person.

 Len May: This is last joint. Enjoy!

 Wade Lightheart: Some guy that was smoking some long time ago. That already saw that vision probably. Right.

 Len May: I think I was. Wouldn't it be cool for drone? Just drop this off for you too.

 Wade Lightheart: I think I said a bag of chips too. I would like to cut and come into some specific too about you know you mentioned, which I thought was curious because we're in the health and wellness industry. For me, THC is it's impossible to stay on a diet. And I didn't have friends who will use THC and then they don't eat. So what would be the genetic variance between like, what would be happening there if you have any idea?

 Len May: Yeah. It's not really genetics as much, which it does play somewhat of a role. It's more about stimulating an area of your brain that is that stimulating of your needs. That's a pleasure, a part of your brain. And what it does is when you're stimulated that with THC, you begin to crave things that are pleasurable. So you crave salt, you crave sugar and you crave fat. Nobody smokes a joint says, I get some kale and sex. Oh man, I want that kale right now. No, it doesn't. But sometimes…

 Wade Lightheart: So why is that?

 Len May: Because it releases a certain chemical that actually stimulates a part of your brain, that makes you want to have that, you know, the pleasure chemicals that are in your brain, release that makes you want to have some of those things right now we've shown that certain cannabinoids actually work against their appetite suppressant like THCV.

 Wade Lightheart: Well, that's like you mentioned. And I thought that was interesting.

 Len May: Right. So if your strainer or chemovars cultivar is high in THCV, perhaps that is suppressing that part of the brain, the stimulation of wanting to have that, some of thosethe munchies.

 Wade Lightheart: Is there, would there be a variance as well with the individual, I guess, because some people that's not going to activate that part of their brand. Some…

 Len May: Some people get activation, some people get less activation. Well, we're still gathering their information on the feedback to see what genetic is, my belief is not just one gene, it's a combination of different genotypes. So we're trying to see like through AI to see which combinations work best. And we're doing that in studies too. Like when we're doing clinical studies and we have two clinical trials and we have a few observational studies that are going on now, we have one that we just finished we're publishing on something called cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, which is something that people report having vomiting and nausea by consuming cannabis, heavy users after a while it triggers that. So what we found is in our study, we have, there is a percentage of our cohort that has a combination of genes that are prevalent in like 60 to 70% of our population. And that combination is only prevalent in point to the general population. So we're finding genetic variants that work together to produce an effect that is different in certain people than other people. And that's kind of the research we're working on now.

 Wade Lightheart: I love the level of sophistication and detail and aspects of this. And I find that it's fascinating about the cannabis plant, or hamper, or whatever you want to call it as here isit was the largest, most commercially successful plant in history, an aspect of the foundational part. And then I think it was the cotton industry, which kind of created this whole kind of negative campaign. And it kind of just got pushed where everybody used to grow cannabis on their farms, you know, a hundred years ago. And then all of a sudden and what's interesting, it wasn't one of the plants that went through the commercialization of agriculture that happened in the last 80 years. Yeah. It's starting to get hyper commercialized and we know what's happened with the plants. What are your concerns as someone, you know, intimately connected with this, about the commercialization? Cause I've heard there's challenges sometimes with the big grow ops, you know, with actually producing quality plants. And then there's like the local, I would say people who are really like the, it's almost like there's the big agriculture kind of mindset of yield and percentages and stuff. And then there's like the organic guy at the farmer's market. That's got the stuff that he's been passed on. He's a third generation grower and they've cultivated and know everything about it.

 Len May: Yeah. I mean, and I'll go back to your history of lights illegal in a second too, if you're interested, but I feel, and I hate to sort of make the analogy to the alcohol industry, but it's sort of like the Anheuser-Busch versus the craft brewery. So you're going to have massive ag and they produce all kinds of, especially with CBD now. I mean every single product you can possibly imagine, they just put CBD in it. So you need biomass, tons of it because hemp doesn't express as much cannabidiol. It just doesn't that, wasn't the intent of the plat, but somebody said, wait, well, if you grow some it's 0.3% THC or less, it's legal part of them, how they came up with that number. I mean, no, there's no science. They just say, yeah. I'm like why? And in Europe it's 0.2. So I don't even know.

 Wade Lightheart: Kind of like impaired driving levels or something.

 Len May: Yeah. It's like for me, because we're all different and it doesn't make any sense. And you have craft brewers that are going to take care and they're going to make different types of plants. Hopefully they'll both survive. Who knows, but you know, with prohibition, hopefully going away, I think we'll have both. And I think there'll be a room for both those cultivators who are creating these amazing crosses. And now tissue culture sample is a big thing. So they're talking about consistency. You can't get consistency if you're grown. And the reason why is the further you're away from the seed, the more genetic drift that you have, so more do you clone, clone, clone, you have exposure of this plant and different, you know, viruses and everything else.

 Wade Lightheart: Can you explain cloning to people, so they understand that?

 Len May: Yeah. So you have a mother who is a female plant who doesn't produce seeds. You actually take clippings of that and you plant it and make little babies. And from there you can keep cutting the mom and creating these little babies into mature plants until the mom gets tired. Then you take your favored, clone strain, or cultivar. And that's also female because the females are producing the flowers and you make that your next mom. So that's kind of cloning. If I explain it easy way, it's better.

 Wade Lightheart: It has naturally, there's a male plan and a female plant, right? And then the male plant is usually where most of the hemp proteins those stuff.

 Len May: Well also the male pump produces the seeds. So if you're inseminating, you're inseminating the female to produce the flower without the seeds. So back in the day, we used to not understand. So some of our flower had seed in it and we had some Aphrodite and all these other things, but now we dialed it in that we're only producing females to flower without seed. So we can do that insemination in different ways. And then in order to produce, so you have to pop a seed and you have to grow from a seed, a plant that can take months to grow or you may have one or two crops a year, but now with cloning, you can have six weeks cycles, eight weeks cycles, depending on the strain, nine week cycles that you can keep turning over your crop and keep creating yield. And that's in a way to accelerate the cultivation of these trends and with tissue culture, where you do is you take the tissue in a Petri dish, you clone that and you create a specific clones right from the tissue. So you can make an exact replica and copy of that strain that may have been the high yield that you wanted, or maybe the most potent one, or maybe the most robust with Cannabis those you're looking for. So you'll be able to grow and dial in new cultivation through genetic editing.

 Wade Lightheart: It's truly incredible because really what we're talking about, what's happening in, and it's interesting compared to other plants, other types of crops out there, it seems that the acceleration through this, considering how short it's even been legal in some States and it's expanding and probably have national legalizationI think within the next, certainly I would say probably in this election cycle. Why do you think this plant per se has gotten so much atraction, so much attention and so much inflow, like it's literally passing other types of plants and its vast array and exploration.

 Len May: I mean, they say stoners or it dumbs you down. And I mean, I've met the absolute, most brilliant people in the world. They're in the cannabis industry. It's just, it's fascinating.

 Wade Lightheart: I mean, Elon Musk is smoking on Joe Rogan and both of these guys are pretty smart.

 Len May: We should let out here. Right.

 Wade Lightheart: Yeah.

 Len May: It's just an amazing, so it's polarizing, it's interesting for scientists, even scientists that don't consume they find it fascinating because it's so many different components in a… It's like the new frontier, you have this plan to produce so many different things. What can you do to isolate them? What can you do to make three together or a hundred? You know, it's really exciting for the scientific community. For the business community. I mean, you have great business opportunity. Multi-Billion dollar opportunity. That's the next frontier in the green rush or whatever you want to call it. And then you have people who've been in it for a long time, like me to pinch myself every day. And I'm like, I am so lucky. I cannot believe I'm in the century. I've friends of mine were locked up. I've been, you know, there's all kinds of things. And then you have people who are really passionate about it that are coming to the forefront now. So it's a combination of many different things. I think what's happening is with big business, you having people come in, you know, the suits are coming in that are trying to take over and it's another, it's going to happen. Anything like this happens, there's gonna be consolidation. And this is the challenges because it's federally illegal. You don't have the same law. You don't monopoly laws. You don't have all those things. There's some point we can blink and have three companies don't own everything, you know, that can easily happen with a consolidation because we're not really policing any of that stuff. So I think that quality will probably be lost if you look at all the big multi-state operators, not all of them, but a lot of them don't have the same standard of quality as you craft a, you know, a cultivator somebody who's been cultivating for three generations. So you have a lot of those issues. And we always knew the, you know, the activist part of me, we always knew the reason why this was, you know, illegal or prohibited. It has nothing to do with the planet itself. It had to do with racism. They have to do with there's political reasons. There's all kinds of… You mentioned cotton. Well, you know, if you look at before the 1937 marijuana tax stamp tax act was passed jazz was a big part of the life in the US. So you had, you know, black and white, all dancing together and hanging out together. And you had a farmers from Mexico that would bring over marihuana. That's why it was called marijuana and you know, conservative whites really didn't like their white daughter hanging out with a black jazz musician, all that stuff. So they started pushing back and William Randolph Hearst through Harry Anslinger figured out a way what they can do. So DuPont and Hearst, they partnered together to start making fabrics, synthetic fabrics with DuPont. You mentioned Cod, but also synthetic fabrics and also paper. So hers had an empire of newspapers, magazines and all of those stuff. So they can print on wood paper, paper made out of wood no longer have, because everything was hemp. Prior to that and fabrics, they can push everybody out. And one of the ways this, or doing that before Anslinger started really locking people up for a cultivation was that they started incentivizing farmers to change their crop from camp to corn and started financially incentivizing. So farmers like, and then when the tax act passed, it was extremely expensive for them to grow hemp, whether they were given a financial incentive to go Corp. So we became the number one exporter of corn around the world.

 Wade Lightheart: So instead of having corn chips, we would have had hemp chips have that not happened.

 Len May: Cook corn oil and it, you know, kind of syruo is everything right now.

 Wade Lightheart: Yeah. High fructose corn syrup as opposed to him, which is now proliferating in the holistic health industry. And for me as a plant-based guy coming out of British Columbia, you knowwe are one of the first companies in the world to start selling hemp protein back in the day, you know, 15 years ago online. And then of course, hemp oil is an extremely powerful, essential fatty acid oil complex. And then all the, now we're seeing all the derivatives of hemp and fiber and clothing, and it's just, it's such a versatile plan. I want to swing right back to who this is forwhy they should get it. And what's the process to do that working with your company.

 Len May: So this is for anybody that is interested in consuming cannabis or making cannabis part of their life and looking at their own endocannabinoid system and seeing where they have some deficiencies and where they don't. So they can start looking at modulating their endocannabinoid system. So that's who it's for. The processes really, really simple. I mean, I can open the…

 Wade Lightheart: Let's see how it works.

 Len May: So you can go to endodna.com. You can go and you can go and purchase this online. They'll be delivered right to your home. And when you open it up, the first thing you will see is a license key over here, there's a license key and it's in a couple of different places. License key is really, really important because the first thing you would do is register this. We are HIPAA compliant. All the data is fully encrypted and anonymized. So it's, de-identified we're built on FameBit using a technique we're built on Amazon's AWS platform and we're HIPAA under Amazon's AWS, which is like a 61 page document. So are your personal information is a one place. Unlike other companies that sell their data we are a data company that is interested in result driven data, but not your personal information. Okay. So you were registered, then you would take out your nurse like instructors in here and our privacy policy, which is on the back here. And it's also on our website, there's a little box. So we're here for your too. And it comes with this two end swab. So what you would do is you would take this out, you would swab the inside of your cheek. You use this and you would flip this around, put it back in the reagent, which is this little purple liquid that keeps us suspended. Then you would put everything into this bio bag. So it doesn't leak just in case. And you put this in the bag, put the label on this. That's already pre-addressed stamped and mailed directly to the lab.

 Wade Lightheart: Now, do you need to get one of these kits because I can see the value of having this and being able to get specific on everything, you know, do you order it online? Do you have to have a medical doctor? How does that…

 Len May: No. It's so you go to endodna.com and you can just order, shipped directly to your home and you can get it. We have many medical professionals, physicians to sell these out of their clinics everywhere, all over the world, you can go to retail locations like Erewhonfor instance, in Los Angeles to buy them, but you can get it directly online endodna.com. And also, if you, like I mentioned before, if you have a 23 me or ancestry or anything like that, you go to endo DNA, you don't have to swab, and you can just say, upload your data that you already own. And you get an instantaneous report.

 Wade Lightheart: You mean, so if you're already on a, if you've already done your DNA, you can just send that information in without swabbing.

 Len May: Yes. Correct.

 Wade Lightheart: So all we do is register.

 Len May: You register and you go into shopping card, you say a raw data upload, and you take the data that's on your 23 me, for instance, you upload and you get a report. Now the caveat to that is it's only as good as the version of the 23 me it's used. We're looking at 700,000 snips right now. So some of them are not covered in different versions of 23 million assets.

 Wade Lightheart: You're better off to do the direct one.

 Len May: The direct one we'll get you. So it all depends, instantaneous gratification versus I like to wait for three weeks until I get my results or I want them now, even though may not be as comprehensive, but I want them now. So it depends where you want to do. And this is one 99 for the full kit retail, and it's 49 95 for the raw data upload.

 Wade Lightheart: That's great. And in regards to that, so now, as you said, we're in the middle of the discovery of a lot of things as someone who's, let's say, put their information in here, are you going to get updates or new information that's going to come forward? How does that work?

 Len May: So, lifetime updates. So every single time there's a new study. You get a notification. If something new came up, we even had contradictory studies. So one of the things that we decided was we have to have a peer review reference for everything that we say, by the way, I'd like to offer a few, want to do this. One of the things that we can do is I can come back or whatever. I can go over your results with you real time. And then we'll talk to your audience and see if if it makes sense.

 Wade Lightheart: Yeah. That'd be so fun. I think that's a definite go and it'd be really fun to do that and to share that with people, because it's really cool.

 Len May: But yeah, I definitely believe that you know, in looking at your endocannabinoid system, what it does, it empowers you to understand a little bit more about yourself and how you would take different cannabinoids and terpenes as a supplement. What can I do to subsidize different things when on my body and avoid those sharp corners that may make me feel a little bit off to having, like, I'll give you another example. I don't want to scare anybody because cannabis is an extremely, extremely safe.

 Wade Lightheart: Far safer than alcohol or many of the prescription medication that people are dealing with today.

 Len May: Exactly. But there's still adverse effects. So I had an reporter thatthey interviewed me, I don't know, six months ago, I kind of forgot about it. It was for some article, I forgot about it. I'm like, I don't know, I get interviewed. Not that I'm a big shove that I forget because I'm focused on operating your business. So a couple months go by three months, whatever, go by. And I get an email says, Hey, Len, I'm sorry, I didn't publish the article. I intend to do this next week. I had a psychotic episode like, Oh, she goes, you've for warn me about it because I went over her DNA results. And I showed her where she has predisposition to psychosis. There's a gene called AKT. One, for instance, that's associated with psychosis. But one over, she has a medical condition that she takes cannabis for. She not listen. She just continued to do what she did. She say, I'm fine. I've been smoking for whatever 15 years never had an issue. All of a sudden she consumed a concentrated thing. She was vaping or something that, and she had a psychotic episode. She had to go get hospitalized for a psychotic episode. And she was so upset, not only because she had the episode was she was so upset that she couldn't consume cannabis anymore because this is her medicine. And I went over her result. I called her and I said, would you want me to go over this again? Let's go over your suggestions. What does it say? And it was a completely different formulation. It was very high in CBD, very low in THC, complete different terpene profile, all these different things. She had like a perfect storm of predispositions and she called me up and she give us testimonial to, she called me up, said, Oh my God, I am so grateful because I can be meet again. And how was it? And that's why. And that's the purpose. That's why we do what we do. I mean, that's my favorite thing to hear is like this work, it's not about somebody. Who's like, you know, a stoner many years. I did. I don't think he'll mind if I mentioned Zander, Tommy Chong, for instance, who everybody knows like in his eighties, he smoked all his life. He's, you know, and he was so surprised and he confided in me. He's like, Oh my God, the scrap, I actually had this. I'm like, I never knew like, yeah, well, they won't show you in a movie. Right. But he had some of these predispositions that were triggered by certain things. So he even learned something.

 Wade Lightheart: Well, when you're teaching Tommy Chong about cannabinoids, you know, you're on the right track. Len thank you for being here. Can you share with people where they can reach you Facebook, social media, all that sort of stuff?

 Len May: Yeah. I'm Len, may, L E N M A Y. Len May DNA is Instagram and Len May on Facebook and Twitter. Len May DNA and everywhere else, Len May, L E N M A Y.

 Wade Lightheart: I'm going to do this test and get all the information and get your back real soon. Take care, man.

 Len May: Alright. Thank you.
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