Transcript:

Seth Adler: Hemp Spotlight Two, Kelly Thornton and Corey Sharp. Welcome to Cannabis Economy. I'm your host Seth Adler. Download episodes on CannEconomy.com. That's two N's and then word economy. All of these episodes were recorded throughout 2018 and with the passage of the farm bill or the hemp bill, it seems appropriate to release them now. So first a word from Wana Brands and then Kelly Thornton and Corey Sharp.
Want to know with Wana Brands, that's the global expansion specifically into Canada.

Speaker 2: Because it's already federally legal for medical and will be federally legal for recreational, once they are completely federally legal, they will have the opportunity to not just produce product for their own population, which is sizable, it's equal to the size of California. But they're also going to have the opportunity to produce product in Canada and ship it anywhere in the world where it is legal. And even beyond that, this is interesting, the Canadian companies, again, because it's legal, are actually able to be listed on the major stock exchanges. So they have enormous stock valuations. So they actually have the money to go directly to countries where it's legal and just set up operations there.
So it's a very exciting opportunity for us to partner with the right group in Canada.

Seth Adler: I feel like you have an appreciation for life.

Kelly Thornton: I do.

Seth Adler: Right?

Kelly Thornton: Yes.

Seth Adler: If we're here, why not live it type of thing?

Kelly Thornton: That's right.

Seth Adler: Is that your take?

Kelly Thornton: Absolutely.

Seth Adler: Have you always had that take?

Kelly Thornton: I've always been kind of a steward for the planet, so yeah.

Seth Adler: Steward for the planet. What do we mean by that?

Kelly Thornton: I've always recycled as long as I was able to. A lot of community garbage places never got into recycling. A matter of fact, I recycled so well when I lived in Illinois, that I canceled my garbage service until the city me a letter that said, "Well, there's a city code that says you have to have garbage service."

Seth Adler: Even though you were recycling everything.

Kelly Thornton: Right. Even though I didn't have any trash.

Seth Adler: But you still have to pay for trash, sir.

Kelly Thornton: Absolutely.

Seth Adler: Is what the city says.

Kelly Thornton: Yeah. They need that capital coming in.

Seth Adler: Okay. All right. Well, how much was it a month, do we know?

Kelly Thornton: $15-$20. But it's the point of ...

Seth Adler: Digestible.

Kelly Thornton: ... let's recycle. I've been to Europe. I have a lot of friends in Europe. Germany's like one of the ace countries for recycling.

Seth Adler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kelly Thornton: They've got glass bins where you put each different colored glass. You don't just throw it all in one. You throw it in five different bins.

Seth Adler: Green, brown.

Kelly Thornton: Yep.

Seth Adler: Clear.

Kelly Thornton: Blue, red. They'll walk down there with their little basket of wine bottles and just chink, chink, chink. Doing their thing.

Seth Adler: Wow. All right. So you've subscribed to that for as long as you could have.

Kelly Thornton: Absolutely.

Seth Adler: All right. Steward for the planet. Any other steward for the planet kind of things before we dive into hemp here?

Kelly Thornton: Well, so I'm a huge fan of the national parks.

Seth Adler: Sure.

Kelly Thornton: As a hydrogeologist, I'm adamantly against fracking.

Seth Adler: Okay.

Kelly Thornton: Because I'm against big oil and gas, but that's just me. And I know ...

Seth Adler: Are those two different things though? In other words, what does fracking do?

Kelly Thornton: Oh, so when you're drilling, you're sending this hydraulic fluid into the bed rock below to crack it open to release the gases or the oil that's down there.

Seth Adler: Right.

Kelly Thornton: But the fracking fluids one of the centers of controversy. What's in it? Because you've seen the videos of the people saying, "Well, why don't you drink some frack water," and they present it to the person who's pro fracking, be it a corporate head or whatever. And they're like, "Oh, I'm not drinking that." You know what I mean? Of course not. Because it's poisonous. And then there's a lot of methane released. You've seen maybe ...

Seth Adler: Lighting my water on fire.

Kelly Thornton: Yeah. What's the Fox movie? Gas Land.

Seth Adler: Okay. Yeah.

Kelly Thornton: He does an excellent piece, and he's in Pennsylvania for half of it, and then he's in Weld County Colorado because I think they have over a million fracking wells. I can't even conceive of such a thing.

Seth Adler: Got it. So just besides your maybe distaste for the companies, exclusive of that, the actual fracking is an issue for we the people.

Kelly Thornton: Absolutely.

Seth Adler: Okay.

Kelly Thornton: I think so.

Seth Adler: All right.

Kelly Thornton: I'm a big fan ... I don't know if we can use profanity.

Seth Adler: And you're a geologist.

Kelly Thornton: Yeah. I have a master's in hydrogeology.

Seth Adler: Okay. So you do know what you're talking about there.

Kelly Thornton: A little bit. I'm not an expert by any means, but yeah, I've got an idea of what goes on.

Seth Adler: Would you call what you just said an opinion or is it more based in fact?

Kelly Thornton: I think the downsides of fracking are extremely factual.

Seth Adler: Okay.

Kelly Thornton: Not fractual.

Seth Adler: They are that too.

Kelly Thornton: Some people being able to light their well water on fire because methane has leaked into their well and it's coming into their homes. I mean, this isn't a fantasy. I mean, this actually occurs. You've seen the videos.

Seth Adler: Yeah.

Kelly Thornton: And there's also ... I mean, people's property values going down to zero because their land is now contaminated. I'm not even a global warming ...

Seth Adler: Proponent.

Kelly Thornton: ... proponent as much I am an anti-pollution proponent because we're polluting. I think pollution is the thing we need to worry about not the actual gases in the environment os much. And, like I said, I'm not an expert. That's opinion. But I know we are polluting on a massive scale, and we just keep going. Like there's no end. And if I can be candid, I think my favorite idiom that I've ever heard in my entire lifetime is don't shit where you eat.

Seth Adler: Yeah, no. That's something.

Kelly Thornton: So why pollute the soil, the air, the water.

Seth Adler: Why would we do that?

Kelly Thornton: Yeah, why would we do that?

Seth Adler: You said if I can be candid, I hope that you're candid the whole time, Kelly. That's our goal I think together here.
All right. So you said the words global warming, and I wonder if you chose those and if there is a difference in your mind to climate change or is that all in the same area?

Kelly Thornton: Well, the opponents of climate change always refer to the earth having cyclical warming periods.

Seth Adler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kelly Thornton: It's a fact. I mean, they do. If you've seen the book The Little Ice Age, when the Vikings came across, they were able to grow grapes in New Finland, which is traditionally too cold I would imagine to grow grapes. But during that period of time ...

Seth Adler: New Finland is how I know it. So all the way up in Canada, all the way east. Okay, go ahead.

Kelly Thornton: So there was a warming. I mean, it was green historically is what the record says, and they were able to grow the food they needed to sustain themselves there. But then it got cold again and guess what, glaciers, whatever. We have lots of stuff going on. But I think global warming's thrown around too easily, and right now if we could do a whole podcast on geo-engineering, but the excuse for geo-engineering, which we now see our skies painted with checkerboards and crisscrosses, which never happened when I was a kid. Contrails came out of the back of the jet and then they disappeared. They didn't stay there all day and then eventually form a mat of clouds, to which they argue, and NASA's admitted this, this much of it anyway. Is that they're trying to block the sun to ward off global warming. I'm like, "Excuse me. The planet relies on the sun's energy and UV rays."

Seth Adler: Right. Yeah.

Kelly Thornton: And who are you to block that? The planet's UV rays. So I don't know what their deal is.

Seth Adler: Why are trails staying there, I guess? If we could just quickly ...

Kelly Thornton: Well, they're spraying particulates into the air to ... So they're doing cloud seeding. They are making a mat that's supposedly will reflect UV rays is my understanding.

Seth Adler: Because we opened up the ozone layer and this is to try to close it?

Kelly Thornton: Well, I don't know about any of that. It's just to stop the UV rays from coming down and warming the planet anymore than it already has. It's all the sun and the earth hasn't been here for 13 billion years.

Seth Adler: You're outside of my depth now. You've lost me as far as that's concerned. But I just want to make sure ... So climate change does happen is your point. It is cyclical.

Kelly Thornton: Yeah.

Seth Adler: But your point also is humans are doing harm to the planet.

Kelly Thornton: Yeah. I believe that's totally through pollution. I mean, if you look at the plastic sheets in the Pacific, if you look at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington where they buried a lot of nuclear waste right along the Columbia River. I know MSNBC's actually done a couple of exposes on that, Rachel Maddow in particular. Denver was always the hottest if you looked at our nuclear or radioactive map of the United States. Denver on Rocky Flash just west of the city was always the hottest spot in the United States until Fukushima kind of took over and was letting that stuff flow towards the coast of California or the entire west coast really.

Seth Adler: Just a couple years ago.

Kelly Thornton: Well, I think it's going on 11 or 12 years now.

Seth Adler: Is it that long?

Kelly Thornton: It's been leaking.

Seth Adler: Oh my god.

Kelly Thornton: Yeah. And DepCo, of course. They're not doing anything. I wish they would seed bomb it with hemp. They did throw hemp in Chernobyl and they got actually surprisingly good results from ... Because the plants such an amazing bioremediator if we want to segway into the hemp.

Seth Adler: Yeah, let's do it. But I just want to make sure because you mentioned a name that would ... My hope is that listeners are from kind of all points on the circle that is political affiliation as opposed to left and right.

Kelly Thornton: Right.

Seth Adler: So you mentioned Rachel Maddow. I wonder if you could just share what you feel your politics are to make sure that everyone understands where you're coming from.

Kelly Thornton: Well, I heard a wise man once say that he's now apolitical, and I think ...

Seth Adler: That's me. I just told you that.

Kelly Thornton: That's right. You did just tell me that, and I think that's probably where I'm at now. Thinking in the boxes of left/right, moderate/conservative, Republican/Democrat, I mean, it's just abject failure. There's nothing that ever comes out of it.

Seth Adler: What it does is it puts you against someone else.

Kelly Thornton: Right. Instead of against the people we should be against probably, the ones causing a lot of the pollution and a lot of other things. But anyway, so that being said, I tend ... I was always identified more with Democrats until I just learned the whole game was ... I mean, it's a lot of rich people sitting in Washington acting like they're bickering or maybe they're really bickering because they're like two rich kids fighting.

Seth Adler: Yeah. That's what it feels like.

Kelly Thornton: Yeah, that's what it feels like.

Seth Adler: So the whole drain the swamp thing, actually a good idea, right?

Kelly Thornton: Yeah. If it was ever actually able to be perpetrated. I don't think it is.

Seth Adler: So we'll see.

Kelly Thornton: Yeah, sure.

Seth Adler: In the meantime, let's talk about hemp, right?

Kelly Thornton: Okay.

Seth Adler: Kelly, does that make sense?

Kelly Thornton: Sure, that's great.

Seth Adler: So you're a hurd guy, is what it is.

Kelly Thornton: I am a hemp hurd connoisseur I guess you'd say.

Seth Adler: So to set this up, we've got the .3 and above folks, those are the people that I'm used to talking to.

Kelly Thornton: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Seth Adler: Then you've got the .3 below, and as I understand it, there's the flower people, which are the CBD, the consumption people.

Kelly Thornton: Sure.

Seth Adler: And then you make your way down the planet ...

Kelly Thornton: There's also seeds in that too.

Seth Adler: Seeds.

Kelly Thornton: For just the non-medicinal, hemp seed oil, Manitoba Harvest kind of thing where you go by the hold hemp hearts in the grocery store and put them on your salad or your yogurt.

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