In today’s digital world, there’s a podcast for every conceivable subject. But so far, very few cannabis podcasts have developed a significant following and built a sustainable business model. One of the few exceptions is Planted with Sara Payan, which focuses on destigmatizing cannabis and now receives about 8,000 downloads per episode.
Marijuana Venture sat down with Sara Payan, host of the award-winning Planted podcast, to discuss the media business, the cannabis business and sad state of policy-making in the United States.
Marijuana Venture: You’re now on year six of Planted with Sara Payan. Can you talk a little about the podcast and what it’s been like
Sara Payan: Before I started the podcast, people kept asking me, “Sara, when are you going to do a podcast?” And I kind of pushed it off for a while because I was like, “Who likes to hear the sound of their own voice?”
But we were having a lot of conversations within the industry, and I was trying to think of ways to educate the general public and also create some stimulating conversations among our colleagues. One differentiator with Planted is that not only do I highlight people in our industry and in the movement that are doing great and interesting work, but I’m also highlighting politicians and celebrities, talking about different ways that cannabis touches different lives.
Before I was in cannabis, I worked in civil rights and financial empowerment, and one of my old colleagues was a financial coach who was involved in conversations about social equity. Even though she’s not in the cannabis realm, she’s a supporter of social equity, so I had her on to talk about her perspective.
It’s more than just cannabis. I like to say conversation is normalization, and it’s really a call for critical thought and also for people to get involved.
MV: How does education work hand in hand with your goal of destigmatizing cannabis?
Payan: When California legalized cannabis, I was heading up education at a large retail chain, and we would have people who would come in and say, “I can’t afford what I want because your company is greedy. and all the brands are greedy.”
You start to understand that people don’t really know how the cake is baked, and they’ve lost touch with how civics works. When we passed Prop 64 in California, there were people the next day clamoring to get into the dispensary, getting mad that they couldn’t come in.
When you start talking about pricing, you explain the high cost of doing business in California and the way taxes work, and their eyes get huge and they ask you, “What can I do?”
And I explain that we have these policies based on cultural stigma, and the people you’re voting into office have an outdated view of who you are as a cannabis consumer. So let’s talk about that. It’s your turn to get a hold of the elected officials who depend on your vote for their jobs and let them know you’re an active member of society, you use cannabis and you vote. A lot of these politicians still have a very outdated view that cannabis users aren’t voting. They lack critical thought about who may possibly be using cannabis.
So, part of the goal with Planted, is engaging the public and getting them to understand what’s going on. It’s about putting a human face on our industry and highlighting people that need to be highlighted. We have a lot of great professionals in our field that have a lot to say, and I love having those conversations to open hearts and minds around what we’re doing and what we need to do.
MV: What kind of an audience do you have and how has that evolved in six years?
Payan: It’s changed a lot, which is good because in the beginning, I was still hitting my stride, so I’m glad not as many people were listening then.
We get about 8,000 downloads per new episode now. In the last four months of 2024, our listenership was up by 20% every month, which is not sustainable, but it’s really awesome how it’s been catching on.
One of the highest compliments I’ve gotten, because I’m a big, big fan of cultivators, especially the craft cannabis farmers, is that a lot of them listen to me while they’re tending their gardens. It’s a compliment because they’re immersed in it and they have major bullshit detectors, so for them to really enjoy the content I’m putting out is really near and dear to my heart.
I constantly strive to not sugar-coat the messaging, because I think we have really balanced conversations about cannabis. For myself, as a cancer survivor, I’ve heard people say “Sara cured her cancer with cannabis.”
And I was, like, “Well … no.”
Was it a great symptom management tool? Absolutely. I could forego a lot of medications that had terrible side effects, and it made my journey a lot easier.
Were there secondary effects that affected my cancer positively? Possibly. I’ve definitely seen it with a lot of the people that I’ve worked with over the years.
But is it a cure? No.
As an educator, let’s have those balanced conversations about what it can and cannot do. If we don’t have those balanced conversations and it’s very black and white, good and bad, we could be looking at Stigma 2.0, and we’re already seeing that in the mainstream media where a lot of misinformation is coming out about cannabis and cannabis use. We’re seeing a lot of biased research out there right now.
MV: Can you talk more about your background prior to launching the podcast?
Payan: Before getting into cannabis, I worked in civil rights and financial empowerment. After I had cancer, I was going back to school for my master’s degree and ended up working for a dispensary in San Francisco, where I became the director of education, then the public education officer.
Then, because of my background in civil rights, I decided to get involved in policy, so I became the co-chair of the San Francisco Cannabis Legalization Task Force, and then I was a member of the Oversight committee, and I’m now my second term on the California Cannabis Advisory Committee.
So my work has been a lot of policy and a lot of education. I really love writing, communicating and trying to drive good policy.
One of the things I think people need to know is that it’s actually much more effective to drive policy at a local level than it is to go to the state or federal level. There’s a lot we can do at the local level.
MV: Who have been some of your favorite interviews or guests, starting with someone from the celebrity or political vein?
Payan: For my favorite celebrity, I think my most favorite interview was with David Crosby. I got one of the last interviews with him before he died, and we had a great conversation.
But more recently, I think the one that’s been one of the most impactful of my celebrity interviews was with Rick Steves. Rick has actually been on Planted twice. Most people know him being the PBS travel guru, but he’s also passionate about personal freedoms and adult choice — like when he says it’s his personal right to smoke a joint then let his mind drift off and stare into the fire, but also in the same breath, say, “But if I get behind the wheel of a car, throw the book at me.”
We got into a conversation about home grow, because everybody always asks him why he wasn’t pro-cultivation when they were looking at the laws in Washington, and his answer was that they had to take it step by step.
MV: What about a favorite interview from someone outside the celebrity realm? Maybe a name that many of us would not be familiar with.
Payan: I would say Jim Roberts and his husband Brian Adkinson, from The Bohemian Chemist, which is part of a complex called The Madrones. The Madrones is a bed and breakfast that has a beautiful outdoor consumption area, but they also have wine tasting rooms and a restaurant and they do lot of events and weddings. If you haven’t seen it, you should really check it out. They specialize in rare cannabinoids and land races, and they’re doing some amazing things like saving seeds and preserving genetics.
We had a really interesting conversation about working in the non-cannabis world and that coming out of the cannabis closet as a cultivator was like coming out a second time. For many years, he was a designer in construction and his husband was a mental health professional, and they worked very hard to create everything they had. It wasn’t like the weed money was flowing and they were throwing it everywhere. Having those conversations about people’s paths and perceptions of those paths, I think, is very important.
MV: It seems really important for the public to know that cannabis companies aren’t making money hand over fist. Ending that perception would lead to better policy decisions.
Payan: Call me idealistic, but I felt like pre-legalization, we had a unique opportunity to look at business in a whole new way. But people saw what happened in Colorado and they were, like, “Let’s tax the hell out of cannabis in every state. It saves all our problems.” It’s a really short-sighted way to look at it.
MV: Is the landscape in California as dire as it sounds?
Payan: Yes. I can’t tell you how many talented people have left the industry because they wouldn’t go back on their standards. They could not survive because they would have had to cut corners, so they opted to just step away.
We have a real big disconnect as far as policy goes in California. The state was very disappointed after the first year of legalization about how little they got in taxes. The conversation I’ve been having is if you didn’t charge as much in taxes, you’d have more people participating in the market, and you’d be receiving more taxes, but you also wouldn’t be spending as much money on enforcement, because there really wouldn’t be much to enforce. It’s not going to take away from your tax revenue. It’s actually going to put more money in the state coffers if you do that.
We should be looking at that, and I feel like we’ve missed the mark. Now, they’re talking about raise the excise tax again this year. That’s going to destroy a lot of companies.
When I was on the Oversight committee, the controller’s office came to us and did a report on the price per gram of cannabis. This was back in 2020, and they said they were seeing the price of cannabis was going up due to competition.
And I got on the mic and said if we know anything about economics, that’s not how it works. Hearing that from the controller’s office was shocking because it was further proof that when we’re looking at a stigmatized, nascent industry, common sense goes out the window. The price of a gram of cannabis has gone up because of the high cost of entry and taxation, and the fact that doing business in California is already extraordinarily expensive, when you’re looking at major metropolitan areas especially.
These are the things that we’re contending with. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and it’s all-hands on-deck.
MV: You mentioned social equity earlier in the conversation. From your perspective in California and with your background in civil rights, what are your thoughts on the state of social equity?
Payan: When I was co-chair of the legalization task force, that’s when we first started having conversations about social equity, to level the playing field for people who were impacted by the War on Drugs.
I still want to keep hope, but I feel like the technical support hasn’t been there. Hearing people with tears in their eyes talking about the fact that they’re going through their life savings and their family and friends have invested in their companies because without banking it’s really hard to get investors. Or the fact that companies have taken advantage of equity operators to get the licenses and then the equity operator actually has no say.
There are some people that are offering great technical assistance and incubators, but they’re very limited in what they can do.
And especially with this new presidency being very anti-social equity and anti-DEI, we’re in a really tough space. A lot of my activist friends think all of that is probably going to go away.
When we got into legalization, and we were seeing people offering technical assistance, it reminded me of a program that we had when I worked for lawyers in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was called “Legal Services for Entrepreneurs.”
We worked with a lot of big firms where attorneys gave pro bono hours to entrepreneurs to help them start up their businesses. And it was incredibly successful. But most social equity operators are not going to a non-cannabis organization asking for help, because they just assume the answer is going to be “no.” But what I’ve found is that there are actually a lot of attorneys from big firms that are looking for pro bono hours. We need to start looking outside of the realm of cannabis.
MV: To close out this conversation, let’s circle back to Planted. A recent study said something like 90% of podcasts never make it to the third episode, but here you are, six years in and still going strong. What has been the secret to your survival?
Payan: We’ve succeeded for six years in an ever-expanding podcast market because of our content and our ability to get interesting and engaging guests. Our number one mission at Planted with Sara Payan is to destigmatize cannabis to the greater population. Destigmatization helps move the industry forward, creating new consumers, better policy and profitability for all. We do that by curating a guest list that lives outside the usual cannabis echo chamber.
We’ve had guests like music icon David Crosby; Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett; musician and Sopranos star Little Steven Van Zandt; actor Jim Belushi; WWE Hall of Famer and ex-governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura; Congressman Earl Blumenauer; PBS travel guru Rick Steves; former head of the RNC and MSNBC political analyst Michael Steele; Congresswoman Barbara Lee; actor Peter Coyote; and a who’s who of cannabis scientists, researchers and CEOs.
We were recently awarded the Emjay for Content Creator of the Year at the International Cannabis Awards in Las Vegas, for the amazing guests and conversations we have cultivated, and we have been honored to be included in many “Best of” podcast lists. So, more than anything, our ability to connect with well-known musicians, actors and politicians has been responsible for our prolonged success in the podcasting space.