In episode 16 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, we meet a "CBD specialist" and learn about nano-encapsulated CBD.
Our host Matt interviews Ambary Garden's CBD Specialist Jess Reynolds. They talk about growing hemp in Colorado, getting into the hemp industry, Ambary Gardens nano full spectrum CBD, and finding the right dose of CBD for your needs.
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In the Ministry of Hemp podcast, we meet Jess Reynolds, a CBD specialist. Plus, how do you know the right dose of CBD?
Below you'll find the complete written transcript for this episode:
Matt Baum: 00:03 This is the ministry of hemp podcast. I'm your host, Matt Baum, and today on the show we're going to talk to Jess Reynolds. Jess is the resident CBD expert at Ambary Gardens out of Colorado. We'll talk more about what exactly is a CBD expert in a little bit. I thought it was kind of funny when he said it, too. It turns out he's not kidding. The guy's a CBD expert. He's smart, he's funny, and he was a lot of fun to talk to.
Matt Baum: 00:28 But before we get into that, I wanted to touch on something that John and I talk about briefly later on in the interview. It's about how to approach finding the right dosage of CBD for you. You'll hear it towards the end of the interview, we go into a little bit about pharmaceutical medicine and how it's tailored with certain rules. If you're this size or this age or this weight, take this much. And that's not necessarily the case with CBD.
Matt Baum: 00:58 CBD affects everybody differently, so it's harder to figure out the proper dosage. From what I've learned and from what I hope you've learned on this show, the best way to go is to start slow and low. From my experience, a 250 milliliter tincture … And that is CBD that is bonded with some type of oil, usually an MCT coconut oil. Start with half a dropper in the morning, half a dropper at night and see if that helps. You can always go up from there. If you find that you're doing a full dropper in the morning or a full dropper at night, don't be afraid to move on to maybe a 500 milligram bottle, or even 1000 milligram bottle, which is what I use pretty regularly. Everybody's metabolism is different, of course, and like I said, CBD is going to affect everybody differently. So don't be afraid to experiment with it, and don't get frustrated.
Matt Baum: 01:53 It may take a little time to find the right dosage for you, but keep at it and you will. Just be sure that you're dealing with honest and upfront companies that are growing the hemp the right way, extracting the CBD properly, and using the right ingredients for either their tinctures, or their pills, or their balms, or whatever they're using.
Matt Baum: 02:14 Now keep in mind anybody that tells you that this is a cure all or a miracle drug, or you don't need chemotherapy, you just need CBD, well, they're lying, and that's just not the case. CBD is very good for anxiety. It's very good for pain. It's very good for helping with sleeping, and that's about where it ends. We're learning a lot about CBD, and there may be other benefits that are coming down the pike that science will discover, but, for now, you need to find companies that are doing it right, that are open with their lab results, that aren't over promising, and are delivering what they say is in the bottle. And a great place to find a list of those companies is right on ministryofhemp.com, under our CBD reviews tab. It's like the third one in on our website. You'll find a bunch of responsible, amazing companies. They're doing incredible stuff with CBD, just like Ambary Gardens. Speaking of which, let's get to my discussion with Jess Reynolds of Ambary Gardens.
Matt Baum: 03:21 So, Jess, when you say you're the CBD specialist, what does that entail?
Jess Reynolds: 03:26 CBD specialist is a title I was actually given about two years ago when pretty much anyone at Ambary had a question about the molecule of CBD, how it functioned within the human body, things like that. Those questions continually wound up at me, and I spent my last, probably about, five years constantly being asked questions about either how CBD works, how the history of it is, just kind of general terminology around it, all the way into finally pulling up research papers, and being able to give definitive, hopefully, answers as to how it works and all those kinds of things. I started feeling confident in calling myself a CBD specialist when, actually, Dr. Cohen, who's a pretty well known medical marijuana specialist and doctor throughout Colorado-
Matt Baum: 04:16 Yeah, I've heard of him, actually.
Jess Reynolds: 04:17 I sat down across from him at a table, and kind of went tit for tat on quite a few bits of cannabinoid knowledge, and really realized it was something I had a pretty deep specialty in.
Matt Baum: 04:27 What is your background? Where'd you come from?
Jess Reynolds: 04:30 That's my favorite question because it's, by no means, from the cannabis world or anything like that. I'm actually the head of-
Matt Baum: 04:34 Nobody in hemp is, though. Everybody comes from all over the place. It's crazy.
Jess Reynolds: 04:38 Exactly. That's my favorite part about the industry, to be honest. I am actually a former music educator and band director. I have a music education certificate, and actually found all of my passion for utilizing CBD in the public space throughout my work with students being put on anti-anxiety, and antiseizure, and anti-ADD medications throughout the classes that I taught. Being that I was a person that was in charge of manifesting creative energies and and the more excitement half of the school day out of some kids, I really saw what some of these things can do. So I found a lot of my motivations in trying to find a little bit of a different way to do things through that, and found myself actually in the medical marijuana space after that, and then to Ambary Gardens after that.
Matt Baum: 05:30 See, I heard a rumor you marched in the OSU marching band, too.
Jess Reynolds: 05:33 I was in the OU marching band, yes.
Matt Baum: 05:35 Oh, pardon me. OU … That's even worse. That's even worse.
Jess Reynolds: 05:38 It's even worse. Yeah, exactly. I marched in the pride of Oklahoma for five years. I was a section leader in the band.
Matt Baum: 05:44 This is old Husker or Oklahoma hatred. We don't have to bring this in.
Jess Reynolds: 05:47 There we go. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Even in that, throughout the time that I spent in music, one of the things I've loved about what I do with CBD is the broad reach that it has. Even throughout the music world, I have seen and continually been able to go back in different issues that I had in my own life, be it physically or mentally, and found how CBD can apply there. So even throughout the contacts that I made in the music world and in every other place, CBD finds a route through all of it.
Matt Baum: 06:17 Yeah. That's how I found it too. I was a touring drummer and a chef, so everything I did was-
Jess Reynolds: 06:22 Nice.
Matt Baum: 06:23 … repetitive motion, and my hands and my joints were ruined. And that's kind of how I came to CBD, because it was that or pain pills. You get to pick.
Jess Reynolds: 06:31 Exactly. Yeah, that's honestly about two thirds of the conversation we have with customers and wholesalers and a lot of people that I work with. I do a lot of the education in spreading knowledge about the expertise that we found in CBD, and a lot of what we find continually is people are basically picking … It's this or pain meds, this or sleep meds.
Matt Baum: 06:53 Yeah, absolutely.
Jess Reynolds: 06:55 So it's a pretty cool place to be for that.
Matt Baum: 06:56 So you guys are in Kittredge, Colorado. You told me it's just about 15 minutes outside of Denver. Since you're in Colorado, you have to grow everything indoors. Right?
Jess Reynolds: 07:05 That is something that we do. Now, to say that it's because we're in Colorado, not necessarily. There are definitely people that still do grow outdoors. It's just not very smiled upon, if you will. There's a lot harder regulation around it. They regulate a lot of the mileage, and square footage, and things like that much harder. If you're trying to grow cannabis in, I think, the most efficient per square footage way, it's always been done indoors. So our operation definitely is indoors, but that's actually due more to the nature of the cleanliness, the control, and, and the fact that we do perpetual harvest. So we really require that ability to control light cycles and all those kinds of things.
Matt Baum: 07:46 What kind of lights are you guys using? Is it LED? Are you using halogen? What are we talking?
Jess Reynolds: 07:51 We use a high wattage HPSs. Yeah, they're basically just giant, almost regular type light bulbs, to be honest. LEDs are something that really, I think, took the world by storm for a really long time, but they're unbelievably expensive.
Matt Baum: 08:05 Yeah, they really are.
Jess Reynolds: 08:07 Yeah, it's an incredible technology and being able to follow these light spectrums are really cool, but some of these high wattage HPSs can provide a very, very similar spectrum to what exactly the sun produces, to the point that you can't look directly at them. They're like those things you show in shop class back in 7th grade, where like, "I'm going to burn this, and you can't look at it." It's the same kind of thing with those lights. When I do tours through the grow, I always talk about the lights, and then very quickly I have to say, But don't look at them." Everything we do is trying to replicate the most natural and organic ways that things are done, and actually just following a blatant, outright sunlight light is what we're going for with our HPSs.
Matt Baum: 08:49 Is that like 6,500 spectrum, or do you go a little higher?
Jess Reynolds: 08:53 I've got to be honest. For the exact detail, I'd have to bring in my grow specialist.
Matt Baum: 08:58 Your light guy?
Jess Reynolds: 08:59 Yeah. To be honest, I probably could just run in there and look really quickly, but it's not something I remember off the top of my head.
Matt Baum: 09:04 No, it's not important. I just ask because I'm an aquarium nerd, too, and I grow plants in my aquarium.
Jess Reynolds: 09:07 I love that. One of those things … Our guy Josh, he's the head grower here. One of my favorite things about Ambary Gardens, we're only 15 now, actually, 18 people deep, and we're all good friends. We all know each other well, hang out with each other on birthdays and things. Ironically, our head grower and I actually share the same birthday, too. Date …
Matt Baum: 09:25 Oh wow.
Jess Reynolds: 09:26 We're the same exact day old. He and I, really, we get along well. We've had a lot of great time in working together. He's the kind of guy that would be able to come in, and anything you need to know about the grow, he'd be able to know.
Matt Baum: 09:37 Did you guys start the company together?
Jess Reynolds: 09:40 In some ways, the Ambary Garden story is a pretty long one, and it's gone through a couple of transitions. In the very beginning, infancy stages, of the company, very few of us that are now here existed at all, other than the CEO. Our owner and founder, Steve Cohen, was together with two other people who had, later on, split off, and now Steve has found the rest of these teams that built from then on. I'm a part of that original team that was brought in and, if you will, the second generation.
Jess Reynolds: 10:10 We've been here for about four years. Myself and Josh and a guy named Grant, who's our head lab tech, and then just a couple other people have been with it. In a lot of ways, what we consider the beginning, when we had barely any products made … We were a very, very tiny operation, and we've really watched this thing grow into what is consistently put in the top 10 or top dozen in the world of CBD brands. A very humbling growth and something that's really cool to see …
Jess Reynolds: 10:36 We've done it from just a tiny operation. It's amazing to see what the plant can do from that perpetual harvest to trying to grow more per square foot, which was a very radical idea in the beginning. It's now really paying off. You can see that we are able to really provide to huge amounts of people with literally one acre of [inaudible 00:10:55].
Matt Baum: 10:56 That's amazing. Because you're growing everything indoors, you can control humidity. You control sun. You can control temperature. Now, I'm just guessing, but I would guess you don't really need to use any pesticides whatsoever because you're inside.
Jess Reynolds: 11:13 Now, the thing … And any grower that you ask, including Josh … He'll say it. You never have pests until you bring pests. So keeping the grow locked down and clean is always the way you want to go. Unfortunately, it is unrealistic to think that you could ever maintain a grow in a 100% environment without those pass between [crosstalk 00:00:11:34].
Matt Baum: 11:35 Right. And yellow suits with the window and everything.
Jess Reynolds: 11:38 It's going … With the window … Really, really [inaudible 00:11:39].
Matt Baum: 11:38 Yeah.
Jess Reynolds: 11:40 Yeah. Every once in a while, we'll have to do some very organic pesticide work, and that is quite literally with live bugs we buy. There are different kinds of predator bugs released throughout this environment that eat pests we need eaten.
Matt Baum: 11:55 That is amazing.
Jess Reynolds: 11:57 Yeah. What a lot of people I don't think realize is the largest pesticide you ever have is the human hand and a person actually being able to access and touch a plant. So if we ever had a problem that came so far as the plants being sick or something that could spread, it would never happen with us. We get to see the plants so often and have such a personal touch to them that the only issues we could ever have is if somebody happened to walk in a pest on accident, which then we would be able to eradicate with our own natural releasing of pests. Then if we needed it, things like peppermint oil or something like that, but every [crosstalk 00:12:32]-
Matt Baum: 12:32 What kind of bugs are we talking about? I got to ask. What kind of bugs?
Jess Reynolds: 12:36 I've got to run the exact ones that they do, but we've done everything from a ladybugs. We've had, I think, they're like maybe a kind of aphid. I don't want to like misquote here.
Matt Baum: 12:46 Right, right, right.
Jess Reynolds: 12:47 I want to get 100% [crosstalk 00:12:48]-
Matt Baum: 12:48 So the insect guy hears that, goes, "They're using aphids? Oh my God."
Jess Reynolds: 12:52 Right. So I need to [inaudible 00:12:53] back a little. But there's a particular breed and type of bug that you get that eats these other types of bugs. So you can go to these kinds of breeders that provide you with live specimens you release and eat things. I know for a while we even tried praying mantis, but they attack the people trying to harvest, so they can't be used. There's been a lot, so-
Matt Baum: 13:15 So you had to bring in snakes to kill the praying mantises, and then hawks to kill the snakes.
Jess Reynolds: 13:21 They fight you. They fight you. Yeah. Right now though, I know we've pulled together a pretty consistent system of bugs they are using, and I want to get you the official name of which one it was. The one that I was there to ever see was when we released ladybugs, and that was about two years ago or so.
Matt Baum: 13:34 Cool.
Jess Reynolds: 13:35 It was a really fascinating thing to see. They actually come cryogenically frozen.
Matt Baum: 13:40 What?
Jess Reynolds: 13:40 You just set them out, and they wake up, and fly away. So it's a pretty crazy … I'm used to buying crickets in bags for lizard, way back day. They've really progressed. [crosstalk 00:00:13:51]-
Matt Baum: 13:50 Yeah. I just figured you got a box full of ladybugs, and you open it up, and they flew away. You know?
Jess Reynolds: 13:54 There you go. Yeah. It's gotten to be much beyond that. They show up in this half sleep, and you have to keep them oxygenated until they wake up.
Matt Baum: 14:01 That is so cool.
Jess Reynolds: 14:02 It's a pretty cool process. Yeah.
Matt Baum: 14:04 You said you have one acre that you guys deal with?
Jess Reynolds: 14:07 Yeah. Our entire property that we work on is on the side of the road in Kittredge. I would say an acre is even kind of robust for what it is. It's about four greenhouses, and that provides the entire plant base for our operation.
Matt Baum: 14:19 How much does that produce, roughly? We were just talking raw hemp.
Jess Reynolds: 14:22 Poundage-wise, in terms of the plants that we pull, it's 100 to 120 pounds per, what we call, a flip, and usually you're getting a flip every week and a half to two weeks or so.
Matt Baum: 14:35 Oh, wow.
Jess Reynolds: 14:36 So the amount that is pulled is what most people usually consider to be a pretty large sized harvest for a small organization. It's not anything where you're looking at literally acres and acres, tens of thou … But what we do, more importantly … The poundage is one thing, and that's actually not how we've built the operation's strength from the start. It's actually in potency of plant per square foot. So the actual physical amount of CBD that our plants produce is far higher than most things that we've really seen in the common market, sometimes exceeding 15, 17% CBD in our just plant base.
Jess Reynolds: 15:17 So when we're able to extract and pull from such a rich amount of CBD, the poundage is one part of it. And then the richness of the plant base is the other much bigger half.
Matt Baum: 15:28 Why do you think that is? Do you think growing it inside and controlling it the way you do, do you think that's-
Jess Reynolds: 15:33 That's part of it? Definitely, part of it. It's selective breeding. Something that I think … A lot of really cannabis technology, if you will, has really gone a pretty amazing way. If you look at the original High Times, if you will, magazine, the original haze they had on the cover of that they've tested. It was like 3% and 4% THC, so it was low.
Matt Baum: 15:57 Yeah, it was nothing to it.
Jess Reynolds: 15:59 Exactly. And then over the course of many decades, as the black market grew cannabis and quite literally, the stickier it was, the more you could sell it for it, they didn't know, but they were increasing THC that entire time. We finally get to the ability, later on, to actually test these chemical compounds, and be able to see, after going to this amount, this plant grew more. Awesome, I want to use that. They were able to, in a much more pronounced way, selectively breed the things you want from the cannabis plant.
Jess Reynolds: 16:29 In the way that the black market increased THC, we actually decreased it. In the way that you selectively breed to get a higher amount of THC, usually … It's kind of what most people think of.
Matt Baum: 16:39 Yeah, you just do the opposite.
Jess Reynolds: 16:40 We do the opposite. Yeah. And you breed THC out. You start to find that in the cannabis world, when you lose THC, CBD seems to go up.
Matt Baum: 16:49 Really?
Jess Reynolds: 16:49 One of the hardest things to do is create a cannabis plant that has a whole ton of both THC and CBD. Most of the time, we're able to get a huge amount of one or the other, or pretty decent numbers, 8% to 12% or so of both of them. But to get the plant to really produce one or the other is a selective breeding process over time. So we bred our plants to be rich in CBD, low THC, instead of where we feel like a lot of other operations did. Their business was in just buying a seed mass that was already considered agricultural hemp. And considering it, it just literally means you only have a lack of THC, not necessarily a large amount of CBD. So there's a chance some of these plant masses are only producing fractional percentage amounts of CBD where, once again, if we're getting 17 to 20 you know, we're going to be able to produce a massively larger amount of CBD per square foot in a row.
Matt Baum: 17:47 Right. It's like the difference of using industrial hemp to make CBD or using a plant that you have tailored and proven.
Jess Reynolds: 17:55 Right.
Matt Baum: 17:56 Has a much larger percentage.
Jess Reynolds: 17:57 The confusing part to the industry overall is the fact that we can, essentially, take a plant that has medical marijuana, and breed it into being hemp. A lot of people, when they come in and talk to us … In fact, we actually had a customer in just this morning, that's a perfect example, who said that she had heard on the internet that she needs to look for marijuana and not hemp. We had to make this distinction for her that there's many different kinds of cannabis, and we have given it a lot of different names over the years. And one of the distinctions people get really confused around is marijuana versus hemp. Since we have this 2014 and, now, 2018 actual federal definition to work off of, the only defining factor is a lack of THC.
Jess Reynolds: 18:43 In that regard, you have some agricultural hemp farms that can sit right next to us, in terms of a quality control environment for what they're given by the outside sources, if you will. And our 17% plant mass is going to look identical, in some people's eyes, to these giant outdoor farms that are grown with what I feel like is very little care to the plant. They're harvested by gas propelled tractors and all kinds of things like that. We do things very differently, but because of this regulatory setup that we're in, we're put on the same shelf right next to them.
Matt Baum: 19:18 Sure. Let's talk about your CBD for a little bit. How do you guys go about extraction?
Jess Reynolds: 19:23 We are an ethanol brand. Extraction is one of the biggest things ever talked about, and ethanol, I think, gets really lost in the mix. CO2 is always so toted as your cleanest and most efficient. I really can't argue the cleanliness of CO2 extracts. When you push a super critical CO2 through something, it comes out the other end, and poof, it's gone. It's evaporated. You have nothing to worry about. A lot of people, I think, when it comes to the butanes and the hexanes and even something like ethanol, they kind of put these things together, and we're not going to get the cleaner product on the back end. We need people to always understand that the ability to purge extracts really allows us the same quality and consistency control, which they'd actually being fully organically being able to reuse our ethanol every single time. It's something that we really believe in as the most old school method you can do.
Jess Reynolds: 20:19 We're trying to bring it a little more into the 21st century with a lot of very particular cooling processes that are used in it, and obviously the purging at the end to remove all of that ethanol.
Matt Baum: 20:28 How does that purge work? Explain that to me, the purge.
Jess Reynolds: 20:31 Purging is a process through which you're taking the solvent that you use to extract the product, and then you remove it out. In the olden days, if you will, they literally just left a … They would extract something with ethyl alcohol, and they would leave it outside in the sun and heat, and it would evaporate the alcohol over time. Then by the time it got bearable, you would eat it, and it would still have some alcoholic.
Jess Reynolds: 20:59 Australia has created these vacuum purge ovens. That's now become pretty much the standard throughout, especially the cannabis industry, of being able to purge a solvent out of a original mass. You're essentially cooking it under vacuum pressure and removing these chemical compounds that you don't want to have in your-
Matt Baum: 21:19 Right. The alcohol burns off first, just like when you [de-glaze 00:21:22] a plan or something.
Jess Reynolds: 21:23 You want a low temperature and able to pull that off in a way. For us, we then like to do it over a distillation method that re-cools it, so we can then take it back and reuse it. But in some cases, you just cook it off and burned away [inaudible 00:21:36]. We re-batch it to be able to reuse that as an [inaudible 00:21:40].
Matt Baum: 21:41 From there, you have a CBD that I've never really seen before. It has a milky white color to it?
Jess Reynolds: 21:48 Yeah.
Matt Baum: 21:49 Why is that?
Jess Reynolds: 21:51 Nano-encapsulates … That is one of my favorite products we make that. That product is the reason why I came to Ambary Gardens. I was working as a, what they … They called me the MMJ specialist at a dispensary. Literally, a bud tender … I was just working behind the counter. And one of the … What do you call them … employees from Ambary, who's not with us any longer, but she was just doing the rounds, if you will, and brought that nano-encapsulate to me to try.
Jess Reynolds: 22:19 I myself suffer for ADD and ADHD. It's something that I've worked with my entire life, and then I actually suffered a pretty traumatic brain injury when it was 22. I was actually in a cliff diving accident, and really-
Matt Baum: 22:29 Oh my God. Jumped off a cliff and hit a rock?
Jess Reynolds: 22:34 It was pretty nuts, man. Yeah, I literally dove onto a rock in a river.
Matt Baum: 22:38 Geez.
Jess Reynolds: 22:39 Yeah, not fun. I don't know if you notice [inaudible 00:22:41] at the Harry Potter story.
Matt Baum: 22:43 Yeah, I can totally see it. That's tough. I like it.
Jess Reynolds: 22:47 The long term of that really got me to a point that I kept trying to find better and better help for myself. CBD was, a lot of times, the help for me. My body, I metabolize very fast, I can just all kinds of garbage and stay skinny. My wife loves me for that.
Matt Baum: 23:04 Oh, rub it in. Some of us poor fat people over here, you know …
Jess Reynolds: 23:07 So many people love me for this, it's ridiculous. But anyway … In that my body, I think, burns through things so fast … once again, my own theory … There's a lot of other factors to this, but I happen to require a very large amount of CBD per milligram when taking tinctures, or edible forms, or whatever it may be. I'm taking 80 to 100 milligrams at a time, where our usual daily dose for people floats closer to 20.
Jess Reynolds: 23:31 I took this nano-encapsulate. I was given a little, quite literally, a little packet of liquid. I just opened up and took it. She said, "That as five milligrams of CBD." I felt it worked the same for me that some of these 80 and 100 milligram dosages of CBD had [inaudible 00:23:46].
Matt Baum: 23:48 Just because you absorbed it so fast? Is that-
Jess Reynolds: 23:50 That's part of it, yeah. Now, the issue always is going to be in the very end of every CBD question is the why. Everything that we're looking at and trying to figure out, in CBD research today, still deals with the how, much more around, "Hey, it didn't do this. How could it do this? Is this possible?", all those things. The why is the very last part of pharmaceutical returns?
Jess Reynolds: 24:13 So we're still, a lot of times, left in the dark at the very end of these, and we have to assume. But in the end, what we do know about nano-encapsulate technology is it is bypassing the ways that your body would normally absorb something. Nano-encapsulate has been used in many, many, many different forms of medications and vitamins, and they actually nano-encapsulate makeup.
Matt Baum: 24:37 What?
Jess Reynolds: 24:38 It's used in a lot of different media, if you will. Essentially, what you're trying to do is where the body produces certain things to break something down in a certain way, we're trying to make it go a different route. The way that I likely explain it to people is that I am going to the same destination down a different highway. For me, what I found was that the nano-encapsulate, first of all … I felt the effect so much faster, to a point that it made me question if I could even be feeling it this fast. Forty-five seconds to a minute, I could start actually feeling the normalized effects of CBD for me, which are a mental focus that I don't find from really anything else.
Matt Baum: 25:26 And you were just right under the tongue, forty-five seconds to a minute, and you were getting it?
Jess Reynolds: 25:29 That's the craziest part. I just swallowed it. Not even under the tongue … I just drank.
Matt Baum: 25:32 Really?
Jess Reynolds: 25:34 What we look at in the actual technology that is involved is taking the CBD molecule, attaching it to a third party vehicle, if you will. In this case, we've chosen soy lecithin. That's why it's white. The soy lecithin is that milky white substance that it's bonded to. Normally, you're used to a tincture being bonded to fats. They're bonded to MCT coconut oil-
Matt Baum: 25:56 Coconut oil, yeah.
Jess Reynolds: 25:58 Exactly. That's the big one we all know. A lot of people aren't aware. Just fun side note … CBD is actually made bonded to fats in a mother's breast milk, and that's a lot of times why the most, if you will, old-school and naturalist way to absorb CBD is to bond it to a fat.
Matt Baum: 26:15 Really?
Jess Reynolds: 26:15 That's the way that your body is naturally apt to break it down.
Matt Baum: 26:20 Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So the soy lecithin, is it essentially like a soy milk?
Jess Reynolds: 26:26 You could almost say that. It's really in the same way … I think a lot of people get confused about MCT coconut, for example. MCT coconut oil started as coconut oil, and then they fractionated it to the point that it's its own unique substance. You can say the same thing with soy lecithin. We have taken what is the building block, the molecular structure of soy, and we're using that, but it's not going to taste like soy. It's not going to give a lot of the same reactions that soy can. That's why some people with MCT coconut oil can have a coconut allergy and still drink MCT coconut with no problem. It's a very different [inaudible 00:27:03].
Jess Reynolds: 27:04 It's using the molecular build of soy, which from what I had looked at and understood, the reason why we did that is that soy … The molecule almost looks like an old-school model of a spaceship. It has like a central wall and then a disc around it. There's a lot of real estate there to stick stuff. It's a very easy place for that kind of wrappings and bond to bond to.
Jess Reynolds: 27:27 The first place and first thing you do is bond the CBD to the soy lecithin, and then it's pushed through an incredibly tiny micron screen at thousands of pounds of pressure. It actually he obliterates the particle size from being such a large thing that your body would recognize as something I need to now break down, into being so tiny that it just slips through whatever cell structure that-
Matt Baum: 27:52 It's something you just absorbs, literally.
Jess Reynolds: 27:53 Exactly. Perfectly, yeah. Exactly. The euphemism I always use is a bouncer at a club. This one is, essentially, that if the bouncer is standing there at the front of the club, this is just a person that's so … It's like, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Maybe it's one pass and no one can ever-
Matt Baum: 28:09 Sure, sure. It's like a gnat passing him into the club, basically.
Jess Reynolds: 28:12 Right. Exactly. Now, in the world that we've worked in, in CBD, the only downsides to this that we've seen are that the technology itself requires a pretty particular temperature, which is being cold, to stay mixed. So coconut oil formulations are really great because you can just pop them in your bag, and take out into the world. And then … you know. These really need to stay refrigerated. We've had to send them out with cold packs and stuff when you mail them to people.
Matt Baum: 28:37 No kidding?
Jess Reynolds: 28:38 They come with a couple little complications. Then the only other thing, on top of that, is that in the wide world of CBD, you always find people who need very drastically different amounts of CBD. Some people do need very large, large amounts, and you'll find that with how these dosages work, we have to make them lower milligrams to make them so efficient. And for some people, it just won't quite be strong enough to hit the ceiling that they're looking for. It's not like it's just this technology that replaces all other needs and I was like, "[inaudible 00:29:07] are dead. This is …". But the main place we've actually seen some of the greatest functionality of this oil is with people going through chemotherapy.
Jess Reynolds: 29:17 Believe it or not, one of the most interesting things to me in how CBD is broken down is that your body breaks it down with what's called the cytochrome 450 enzyme, the P450.
Matt Baum: 29:27 I'll take your word for it.
Jess Reynolds: 29:30 Yeah, sorry. It's an enzyme that's used incredibly common within your body. It's something that your body brings out really often. So just, to me, makes it feel like CBD is a member of a party that we really know well, if you will. When it's breaking this stuff down, it's very necessary to do so and allow your body to be able to use CBD. Going through chemo, your liver function, your kidney function, a lot of different parts of your body, can be very compromised. We've continually seen a lot of stories out there of people going through chemo, trying to embrace the oil to help with their nausea or help with a lot of different things like that, and just not able to get the relief they were looking for [crosstalk 00:30:09]-
Matt Baum: 30:10 Because their body's not breaking it down as much, basically.
Jess Reynolds: 30:11 Exactly, exactly. So having an ability to possibly bypass that lesser used digestion method could really be helpful for people in that case.
Matt Baum: 30:22 Yeah, that's brilliant, actually. Speaking of health-related, you guys have a certificate from the Denver Department of Public Health. How did you pull that off?
Jess Reynolds: 30:33 A lot, a lot, a lot of the phone calls …
Matt Baum: 30:35 That's how any of those things get done though, right?
Jess Reynolds: 30:39 Yeah. The craziest thing about the CBD world, and I've gone around and done a lot of talks at retirement homes and at … I teach a class at the Denver School of Nursing here.
Matt Baum: 30:49 Oh cool.
Jess Reynolds: 30:50 I do a lot of educational reach out wherever I possibly can, and we always end up at why aren't you more regulated? When I go and give these talks and end up working with people, they always want to find out, "Who regulates you, right? Who do you have that is … Basically, who allows you to do this?" What's kind of funny for us is that we've found, consistently, that the only way to get regulation in this industry right now is to quite literally pick an office that you want regulation from, and call them-
Matt Baum: 31:23 Yeah, and go find it, basically.
Jess Reynolds: 31:26 Yeah, and tell them, "Hey, we are such and such a company. We would really like you to come and certify us, and be able to show that we are doing this in such and such a way." It did take a little while, because it wasn't a program that they had very formally set up, but it essentially ended up being a food safety food handlers level permit.
Jess Reynolds: 31:46 Beyond that, we were able to get our CBD isolates set up and done throughout the Department of Health. We had that one certified through the state Department of Health.
Matt Baum: 31:55 Oh wow. Wow.
Jess Reynolds: 31:56 Then we got and are working consistently on getting the brand new USDA certification for organic hemp.
Matt Baum: 32:04 You guys love headaches is what you're saying.
Jess Reynolds: 32:06 Yeah, that one's taking a long time. We got the [crosstalk 00:32:09] two, but-
Matt Baum: 32:08 Bureaucrats and headaches, who doesn't love it?
Jess Reynolds: 32:11 Right, yeah. We're really hoping to have as much regulation as we ever can, but the long and short of … Pretty basically, anytime you find us finding a regulation, there's an Ambary employee who just wouldn't be ignored, and just kept making the phone call to finally get a person and out here to get the right paperwork [inaudible 00:32:30].
Matt Baum: 32:32 It's crazy, but the hemp industry seems to be the only industry that is screaming for regulation, like, "Please, please, please, regulate us."
Jess Reynolds: 32:40 It's funny to me, because I find that unique in a very good way. It's an honor to be a part of an industry that is like that, and it's also, on the other end, something for me that has provided a lot of platform for the education that we give, because until they give this higher level of regulation, I have to expect public to just know how to do all of this research. So, going out there and even giving that education consistently brings people back to us in the end. But I just want people to always be knowing and looking out to find that kind of regulation, and get the places that are doing it right. We've done this operation from the start is that we know the CBD works. We built this operation around the knowledge that CBD works, and so all we have to do is find the right product.
Matt Baum: 33:26 Sure. It's like that with anything. They say start low and go slow, and you will figure it out, and you'll … And that's what I did, basically. So yeah, I will definitely shoot too low.
Jess Reynolds: 33:35 You and me both, man. I started very low, and then ended up at my 84 to 85 milligram dosage that I need [crosstalk 00:33:41] so it's sometimes a long journey, too.
Matt Baum: 33:43 I was frustrated at first, honestly. I started really slow, and I stuck with it because of a good friend of mine was saying, "Mo, look, you'll find it. You'll find it. You'll find it." And then I did. And now, daily, I just stay there, and it's not like I'm chasing the dragon or something, and I constantly need more and more. I know where my level is, and it's good for me. I love it.
Jess Reynolds: 34:02 Yeah, that's one of the things I'm hoping to get more people on the understanding of. That journey to find your dose is your journey. To me, one of the things that gets the most confusing for most people is the second they listen to a friend. Again, the second they hear from anybody else how they used CBD, they're instantly continued, but if I can ever get a person to just go their own route with it and figure out, "Here's how my day was. Here's what I took, and did it work", and just keep with it. It's something that I also found empowering in the end, to be honest, to not have someone just tell me, "Here's what you need. Here's exactly what you should do. And if it doesn't work, then there's something wrong with you." It's something that gives you a system to build a better life for yourself.
Matt Baum: 34:47 You do get the exact same, like opposite though, where like if you deal with … And I'm not saying, "Don't talk to your doctor. Don't do that."
Jess Reynolds: 34:55 No. Yeah. Yeah, I know.
Matt Baum: 34:55 I am very pro Western medicine-
Jess Reynolds: 34:57 Me, too.
Matt Baum: 34:57 … but I will say that doctors will try a lot of medications, and they don't work. They just take you off of it, and give you a new medication. And we've learned through time and pharmaceuticals that that's what you do. Oh, this pain killer doesn't work, but that painkiller does. It says because I'm this age, I take two. You know? And that's how it works, right? No, that's not how it works.
Jess Reynolds: 35:15 Yeah, man. When I'm talking about my educational background, that's actually one of the biggest things that motivated me even before I got to the teaching space. One of the most damning bits of evidence I had was in what they call my ed psych courses, where you deal a lot with special needs students in a lot of these things where kids … You learn how to help a kid having a seizure and all those kinds of things. One of the things I always love to do was look at textbooks, sometimes 10 and 20 years before. And it was really frightening, the conversations as to what medications were being given out in the '70s, versus the '80s, versus the '90s.
Matt Baum: 35:46 Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure.
Jess Reynolds: 35:48 It's like a wheel that they just rotate. It's like the anti-psychotics are now this and the anti-seizures are now this, and anti-
Matt Baum: 35:53 It's literally a dartboard that they're throwing darts at.
Jess Reynolds: 35:57 I just have always felt, when you look at that from a very singular and very simplistic perspective, that just shows you don't know what you're doing.
Matt Baum: 36:04 Exactly.
Jess Reynolds: 36:05 Just trying this with one, and moving into the other.
Matt Baum: 36:07 Right. We just try a larger Band-Aid next time.
Jess Reynolds: 36:08 I was never comfortable being that pin cushion, and I think more and more people are starting to realize that they don't have to be.
Matt Baum: 36:15 You're fighting the good fight, and we appreciate that here at Ministry of Hemp.
Jess Reynolds: 36:17 Thank you, man.
Matt Baum: 36:18 That's all you can do, right?
Jess Reynolds: 36:19 Thank you. Right, yeah. That's what we wanted to do from the start.
Matt Baum: 36:26 Thanks again to Jess Reynolds from Ambary Gardens for sitting down and talking with me. I will have links to both the Ministry of Hemp review of the Ambary Gardens' CBD, and links to the Ambary Gardens site.
Matt Baum: 36:39 Next time on the show, we're going to be talking about the first legal harvest of hemp in the United States. It's going on right now, and it's very exciting. I can't wait to talk to you guys about it.
Matt Baum: 36:50 Now, I'm sure you have questions, and that's cool. We want to hear from you. You can call me at (402) 819-6417 and ask your hemp related questions, and anything goes. Ask me about industrial hemp, about CBD, about hemp in plastics, about how you can make hemp out of wood. We're going to talk about that in an upcoming show, too. We want to hear from you, because we do these Q&A shows every once in a while, where Kit, the editor in chief of ministryofhemp.com and I, answer your questions.
Matt Baum: 37:23 You can always find the latest hemp news and reviews of incredible hemp products at ministryofhemp.com. Hit us up on Twitter at Ministry of Hemp, or on Facebook/ministryofhemp, both of which are also perfect places to post your questions. Maybe you're too shy to call. That's fine. And you can also email me directly. [email protected] … That's Matt with two T's.
Matt Baum: 37:49 Thank you again to everybody that's been downloading, listening, and supporting this show. And if you really want to do us a favor, leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. Maybe it's just a thumbs up or a star, but it really does help us get discovered by others that are looking for this information. It pushes us up in search analytics, and it really is the easiest way to help this show, if you're enjoying it.
Matt Baum: 38:12 Again, my name is Matt. I'm your host, and producer, and editor of the Ministry of Hemp podcast. Until next time, remember to take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will you? This is Matt Baum with the Ministry of Hemp podcast, signing off.
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