Stoner is taking a hiatus so I can write a book for Ten Speed based on this podcast! Gonna re-run some of my favorite Season 1 episodes over the holidays, then back with new episodes in 2019 after the book is turned in.

Ross Simonini is the the author of The Book of Formation and the longtime interviews editor of The Believer. We talked about touring in bands, cults, and self-restrictions.

Elise McDonough is the author of Bong Appétit and The High Times Cannabis Cookbook. She lives in Santa Cruz.

@CannabisEdibles420

Matt Taibbi discovered a longtime acquaintance had a secret life as a marijuana kingpin, sending product all over the United States in car trunks. With his anonymous co-author, he collaborated on 'The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing: Adventures of the Unidentified Black Male,' an intimate and detailed account of the business of grey legal marijuana.

Read the serialized 17-chapter The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing in Taibbi's Substack archive

Ann Friedman is a longtime "casual but committed " marijuana fan and a writer in Los Angeles. She co-hosts Call Your Girlfriend with previous Stoner guest Aminatou Sow.

Amanda Mac from Terp School talks about how terpenes tell you a lot more than sativa and indica labels. We also got into the differences between full spectrum and "gateway" CBD.

Paul Flannery is a sportswriter and a serious runner who went to the Colorado mountains to train with a championship ultramarathoner (Avery Collins) who runs stoned.

Read: CANNABIS IS FUELING ONE OF THE BEST RUNNERS IN AMERICA (SB Nation)

Also discussed:

🌱 Recent research about cannabis and exercise

🌱 Will the NBA ever let players use cannabis?

🌱 CBD and recovery after runs

Alexis Coe is a historian and the author of " Alice+Freda Forever." We talked about setting weed rules for yourself, why it's hard to leave a legalization state behind, and which Presidents she thinks might have smoked weed.

Justin Ouellette of Portland's Lightscale Labs returns to talk about:

🌱 why strains are a bad way to sort weed

🌱 experimenting with CBD and micro-dosing LSD

🌱 why he's starting his own cannabis garden.

Ashley Brooke & Tahirah Hairston talk to women about their weed habits at The High Ends.

Director Eduardo Sanchez and Producer Gregg Hale of Haxan Films talk weed and their longstanding creative partnership which started with The Blair Witch Project in 1999.

Anja Charbonneau is the editor-in-chief of the free weed magazine Broccoli and former creative director of Kinfolk.

Congressman Earl Blumenauer has represented Oregon's 3rd Congressional District since 1996. He is a co-founder of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus which was formed in 2017.

He doesn't smoke marijuana but has "no problem with people who do" and predicts marijuana will be legal within 5 years.

Buzzfeed tech reporter Charlie Warzel returns to discuss Elon Musk hitting a blunt on the Joe Rogan Experience and whether we're ready for a stoner CEO.

Adam Lisagor makes commercials. We talked about life before the internet, when weed takes you to a dark place, and discovering CBD.

Sandwich Video

Cornerstone Research Collective in Eagle Rock

Stoner is back for Season 2! Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker who wrote recently about the teen vaping sensation Juul. We talked about her intention to die on the moon, the etiquette of sharing popcorn with a complete stranger during a stoned viewing of Beauty and the Beast, and how she navigates her weed life.

Amanda Chicago Lewis returns to the show to discuss her new GQ story "The Great Pot Monopoly Mystery" about a shadowy business group that is trying to patent marijuana strains.

Samantha Miller does research that informs the formulation of the special vape pens that hmbldt makes branded not by strain but effect: sleep, bliss, calm, relief. Prior to becoming HMBLDT's in-house scientist, Miller founded Pure Analytics, one of the first cannabis testing labs in the country.

We talked about the value of anecdotal evidence in testing, getting feedback from a seniors group, and why she grew well before it became her job. 

Max Temkin is a co-founder of Cards Against Humanity, a "party game for horrible people," and Chicago comedians Joanna Feldman and Julia Weiss are its head writers. After a successful Kickstarter in 2011, Cards Against Humanity was released independently, reaching #1 in Amazon's Games section and spawning numerous expansion packs and copycats.

We discuss flying while stoned, what makes a card work in the Cards Against Humanity writers' room, and why Max was dreading coming on the show. 

In 1973, Digby traveled from England to Morocco seeking out villages that practiced traditional hashmaking. Forty-six years later, he's still there. 

Emma Chasen quit her job doing research trials at Brown and took her degree in Medicinal Plant Research to Portland. Within a week she had a job at Farma, where she was first a budtender and now focuses on cannabis science education.

Ricardo Baca is the founding editor of The Cannabist, a site from the _Denver Post _that covers the "marijuana industry like it was the oil industry" and the subject of the documentary Rolling Papers. He recently left The Cannabist to found Grasslands, "a content agency for cannabis."

In 2015 longtime activist Bill Levin founded the First Church of Cannabis in Indianapolis. He is currently suing for the right to use the "sacrament of cannabis" as part of his church's religious practice.

Despite being frequently written about online, the First Church of Cannabis has no website. I called the number listed on their Facebook page and a woman picked up. She gave me Bill Levin's cell number and I called him.

Charlie Warzel is a technology reporter who spent the last two weeks sitting right behind America's favorite conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in an Austin, TX courthouse. At stake in Alex Jones' custody dispute is whether the unhinged character he plays on InfoWars is real or as he claims "political satire."

On 4/20, his ex-wife's attorneys asked him about an incident wherein he was "unable to recall the names of his children's teachers after eating a big bowl of chili" and another incident where smoked a joint on the air while appearing as a guest on Joe Rogan's podcast. Jones explained that he used marijuana nearly yearly "to monitor its strength, which is how law enforcement does it" and that marijuana was too strong as a result of a mind control conspiracy backed by billionaire George Soros. 

Amanda Chicago Lewis is a journalist in Los Angeles. Amanda has spent the last few years covering the entrepreneurs, charlatans, and weirdos who make up the largest weed market in the world for LA Weekly and Buzzfeed.

We talked about California's legalization vote in November and why we won't really know how it's going until 2020.

Krishna Andavolu is the host of Weediquette, a TV show on Viceland in which he travels America and the world telling the stories of people whose lives are are deeply impacted by marijuana. Weediquette's third season kicks off as part Vice's Weed Week on April 19th. 

We talked about being asked to drive extremely high on a closed track for an episode of Weediquette, his parents reaction to him smoking weed on camera with the President of Uruguay, and how the election of Trump changed the direction of the show. 

Nick Denton founded Gawker Media in 2004. In 2016, Gawker's portfolio of sites were either sold off or shuttered after a lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan bankrupted the company. This lawsuit, over the posting of Hulk Hogan's sex tape, was financed by Peter Thiel.

But Nick and I didn't talk about any of that.

We talked about discovering marijuana later in life, his obsession with internet forums, and his post-lawsuit plans.

Aminatou Sow is the co-host of the podcast 'Call Your Girlfriend' and consults extensively in the technology industry.

Her family is Guinean and she grew up in Nigeria so I was curious to hear about her experiences as a weed-enthusiast, immigrant, and woman of color.

We talked about weed culture in Nigerian prep schools, what happens when your dealer forgets to BCC, and why legal marijuana is so terribly branded. 

Stoner is a freewheeling conversation that often starts with "when was the first time you ever smoked weed?" and can end up anywhere. Guests range from artists to musicians to those working in the marijuana economy. Host Aaron Lammer is also the co-host of the Longform Podcast and has co-written songs with Francis and the Lights for artists like Chance the Rapper and Drake.