Xzibit: It’s the Lasagna Ganja Podcast. It’s Mr. X to the Z, Xzibit.

Tammy: And I’m your girl, Tammy, a.k.a. The Cannabis Cutie.

Xzibit: Another amazing addition to the podcast. We call it Lasagna Ganja because there are layers to the cannabis industry. No lasagna…sorry to disappoint!

Tammy: I might start bringing lasagna!

Xzibit: You know, when we start talking about food and cannabis, we are talking about one of the elite pairings.

It’s right up there with music. Weed and music go hand-in-hand. They are spiritual brothers and sisters.

Do you get high and then get hungry? Or do you eat and get high?

Tammy: I don’t really get the munchies anymore. Those days are gone.

Unless it’s edibles. I feel like edibles make my stomach go numb and then it’s endless eating.

Xzibit: That brings us to our show today. Sean Black of The Cannabis Cafe is here with us today.

I am always a fan of new ventures in this industry that travel along a different type of ‘lane.’

Everybody’s a distributor, a cultivator, or owns a dispensary. Rarely do you see people going for the other lanes.

Sean: Hey guys, thanks so much for having me.

Xzibit: How did you get into cannabis?

Sean: My first introduction to the plant was boarding school. I just got high all the time.

A lot of my friends would drink, but for me, from the beginning, weed was for me. I’m not even into caffeine.

And I’ve always felt that people who are into whiskey have all this fancy stuff. And coffee lovers have premium roasts and stuff like that. It’s all treated as so highbrow.

And my hobby came in a plastic bag and was looked down on and that annoyed me.

My initial foray into the industry was in 2011.

I wanted to create a cannabis company where the product felt like it had always been legal.

So I created this brand called Lowell. The cannabis came in a pack and you could pull it open and pull out a tray and so on.

It really took off in 2015. I ended up partnering with some big business people. I’m not really a business person, more of a creative type.

They raised 75 million for the business. I had a dispute with them and left. But in the meantime, I had a business called the Lowell Cafe. It was made to promote the house brand.

And so the origin of the cafe starts in 2018 when Lowell was really taking off.

It felt like Harley Davidson. Harley is a company by motorcycle people, for motorcycle people. The people at the company care about the riders.

I wanted to create a cannabis company where the people really love weed and all the decisions are made for weed lovers.

I had some success, but the cafe we just opened is the most fun we’ve had with it. It’s the first cannabis restaurant in the world.

Xzibit: When you look back at the beginning of Lowells, what were some of the things you would’ve done differently?

Sean: I made so many mistakes. It’s hard to pick.

Xzibit: You were one of the first to do what you did, though.

Sean: We were one of the first brands that had high-end packaging and branding. We stood for something. It was in the early medical days.

There were mistakes with the consumers and mistakes with the business. I think my biggest mistakes were on the business side.

I think I picked the wrong partners on the business and operational side of it. They weren’t as successful as my side of things and they didn’t really care about cannabis people in the same way.

I think if you’re trying to build a brand that’s supposed to be meaningful to people, everybody at the company has to be on the same page. There can’t be someone who says “weed people suck, let’s rip them off.”

But on the consumer side, I believed fundamentally that people should be proud of cannabis. It shouldn’t be stigmatized and people should show it off.

And I don’t think that mattered as much to consumers. I think the lesson is that if you want to do right by your consumers, you have to bring them the best possible product at the best possible price.

Don’t worry about packaging as much. Every advertisement, every packaging, all of it is adding pennies to the cost of the product, so you have to spend money wisely.

Having a better price and product is more important.

Xzibit: You have to protect your intellectual property, though. Cannabis is highly duplicated with blackmarket knock offs.

My first brand, Brass Knuckles, was highly knocked off.

You have to walk a fine line between having easily duplicated packaging and expensive, hard to reproduce packaging.

Sean: Here’s my question for you. Do you think there’s brand authenticity from being in trap markets?

Xzibit: When we sell legal cannabis, we get squeezed so much with taxes and fees.

And the harder we work, the more success and money the trapper across the street collects. All he does is collect.

Sean: There’s a part of the market that feels that if you buy legal weed, you’re a sucker. They’re like, “I’m not paying 30% in taxes.” I’m not a tourist. I have a hook up.

You can’t access that market because you’re a legal business. These trappers can.

Tammy: There are ways to break through it. I would say that, from a cultural perspective, there’s a huge disconnect between the legal and the legacy market. Are these markets even talking to each other?

If we could somehow marry the two, it would be better. We can’t help that the legal market is here. It’s here. But you have to talk to the culture.

Xzibit: It’s just difficult to see your hard work knocked off and sold in places where you don’t get to actually use the benefits.

Sean: And if it’s a crappy product, it’s doing damage to your brand.

Tammy: Real recognizes real. There’s a reason people copy certain brands because people know what it is.

So you just have to do your best and stay ahead of the game. Keep changing it up.

Sean: Having a relationship with customers is so important. It’s why it’s so frustrating that social media is so hard on cannabis accounts with blocking and shadow banning.

Xzibit: I saw something the other day on social media. A guy shoots another guy who’s sleeping. And that’s up. It’s not flagged or anything. But cannabis gets flagged and shadow banned.

It’s odd. It feels like something is up.

Tammy: Before social media, there were ways of silencing people who were speaking against what our government stood for.

Now they can go to the tech giants and ask them to suppress certain things. I think it’s a modern form of censorship and a violation of our rights.

A televised death? Show that. It gives people something to focus on and be mad about while not seeing the things the government doesn’t want you to see.

Xzibit: You reopened The Cannabis Cafe. What was the mindset about getting that started?

Sean: When we originally opened under the name Lowell, I was trying to build a brand around the idea that cannabis should be an equal citizen to alcohol.

I think it should actually be a higher citizen. I think cannabis is safer and healthier than alcohol.

But our goal is that weed should be treated equally to alcohol.

So we wanted a restaurant where you could go in and order a joint, just like when you go into a restaurant and order a glass of wine.

We go and pitch this idea to the city of West Hollywood. They are a tourist destination. They have more hotel rooms than any other municipality.

But I asked where these tourists were supposed to smoke weed? We told them that they should create the first cannabis consumption license in America.

And we were the first cannabis restaurant in America. It was a blowout.

The parent company Lowell didn’t like it. The CEO didn’t like that he wasn’t the focus.

So I separated from them. I lost all of Lowell. The CEO ran it into the ground and the investors foreclosed on it.

In the dispute, I got the rights to the name. So we opened again. Only 5 months after we opened, COVID hit and shut us down.

We had no resources. We tried to get someone to buy it, but we weren’t having any luck.

This kind of business is culturally exciting. But if you’re someone looking to purchase a business, you just look at the hard facts.

The facts are that if you go to a dispensary, you spend 200 bucks in 10 minutes. If you go to a cafe, you spend 30 bucks in 90 minutes. Restaurants are not as good a business model.

No one wanted to buy it. And the ones that did were kind of flaky and weird.

We sold it, but it fell through. I went to some of the people I’d worked with. They got me hooked up with a lawyer.

They said that if I could get the business back from the deal, they would give us some start-up capital in return for us only selling their brands of cannabis.

So now we have Helena, which is our outdoor brand. And then there’s Wave, which is our indoor brand. And then Dizzys, which is very flavored.

We’ve been open to customers for about a month, but we haven’t even emailed people to tell them that we’ve re-opened.

Tammy: The food has been a big improvement.

Sean: We have Jonah Johnson, from Jonah’s Kitchen in Santa Monica. He was Leonardo DiCaprio’s private chef.

We just want to create a place where people can hang out. If you want to smoke your own weed, it’s $25 for a table of 3 or $50 for a table of 4 or more.

Alcohol people and coffee people have always had a place to hang out. Stoner people have never had a place to hang out.

We’ve always had to do it in the parking lot or a car.

Xzibit: What about age? You can’t take your kids.

Sean: You actually can. The city gave us a consumption license but the state has no concept of this kind of license.

To the state, we’re just a dispensary. So we rented out our space and partitioned it into 3 different businesses.

So we have a dispensary, a restaurant, and a shared seating area for both.

But the side benefit is that we have a patio that you cannot smoke cannabis on because it’s the restaurant’s patio. It doesn’t belong to the dispensary.

But we can serve alcohol on the patio. But because it’s only a restaurant space, you can bring your kids with you on the patio.

So you can come to the all-ages patio, go inside to the bar and smoke a joint, and then come back to the patio to sit with your all-ages friends.

Xzibit: How many square feet is the business?

Sean: I actually don’t know. Maybe 3 or 4 thousand?

Tammy: For West Hollywood, that’s pretty big.

Xzibit: Are you going to expand? Franchise out?

Sean: The problem is that it’s just not that great of a business.

Xzibit: Yet.

Sean: Yet. Ok. Who knows the future?

I would love for it to be the Hard Rock Cafe of cannabis culture. If you go in, we have pictures on the wall of important moments in cannabis history.

I would love to bring it to other areas. The problem is that I’m good at creating a fun cannabis experience for everyone, but the turning a profit part hasn’t really come about.

Restaurants and the hospitality industry are so much more difficult than a dispensary.

And people don’t spend as much at the restaurant. At a dispensary, you stock up on your weed for a couple weeks. At the restaurant, you just want to get high in the moment.

Xzibit: I feel like everybody is at a crossroads with their brands. It’s tough for everybody. But you’ve chosen to go a path where you’re not just fighting 1 juggernaut, you’re fighting 2!

So I believe that if you can persevere a few more years, some of the rules and taxation will be brought down to Earth and those things will be a little easier for everyone.

Sean: I hope so. And we have the benefit of having a supporting company.

So if these brands are successful in places other than California, we’ll have sort of a ‘sugar daddy’ expanding out.

Have you guys heard about ‘live soil cannabis?’

Xzibit: I’ve heard about it briefly. What is it?

Sean: They say that when you grow indoors, you have to add nutrients to get the most out of the plant. Supposedly there’s a new way where you can grow indoors with specially made soil that has all the nutrients already there.

And so you only ever have to feed the plant water. The end result is that you can supposedly get up to 15-20 terpenes in the plant.

Xzibit: Wow.

Sean: I don’t know anything about cultivating. I’m going to leave you guys some. You guys tell me if it’s good.

They test almost zero for metals and stuff because you're not adding things artificially.

Tammy: For anything concerning the cannabis plant, a general rule-of-thumb is that the more real things you use, the better and healthier the plant.

For example, the sun gives out rays that a lightbulb can’t.

Sean: Well I’d love to hear what you guys think.

Xzibit: I’m really rooting for you. I love what you’re doing with your products. I can’t wait to experience the restaurant.

Sean: You’re welcome to come down. You guys can do a podcast there.

Xzibit: Just going to throw this out there. Karaoke pairs really well with weed and food.

Tammy: They just had a karaoke night!

Sean: Yeah, last Tuesday night.

Xzibit: We should do a Lasagna Ganja karaoke night.

What’s the address? How do they get to you?

Sean: It’s 1201 N La Brea Ave. On Instagram and Twitter we are @ogcannabiscafe.

Xzibit: Well do yourself a favor, make sure you stop by.

This is a call out. There are a lot of people who we have not met in the cannabis industry. And relationships are important.

If you have credentials, reach out to Sean and let’s see how we can make The Cannabis Cafe profitable. If you have ideas that you want to share, reach out.

Thank you for coming on, Sean.

You can always find us at dcpofficial.com or @lasagnaganja on Instagram.

We appreciate you guys. Stay turned.