Storyteller generating Millions of Monthly Views documenting Berner & Jungle Boys and others ft. Luc

Storyteller generating Millions of Monthly Views documenting Berner & Jungle Boys and others ft. Luc

Luc: Think about that day when you're sitting across the table and it's like — are you going to have leverage, or are you not? Are you going to have some money for your kids and their kids, or are you going to lose pretty much everything? Bryan Fields: What's up guys, welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I'm Bryan Fields, and this week we've got a very special guest, LMC, one of the best storytellers in the game on YouTube. How you doing, LMC? Luc: I'm good, I'm good. You can call me Luc, by the way — LMC is short for my initials, and it also stands for "Let's Make Creations." Bryan Fields: All right — breaking news. Kellen, how are you doing? Kellen: Doing really well, really excited to talk to Luc, really excited to dive into storytelling in the cannabis industry, and it's just really refreshing to have a diehard West Coaster back on the show. Bryan, how are you? Bryan Fields: That's fair, that's fair. But I do appreciate Luc's storytelling, and I saw recently we've had a lot of New York documentaries come out, so I think we can get some exposure on what's going on there, and maybe some history too. Luc, for our listeners who don't know about you, can you give a background on yourself and how you got into the cannabis space? Luc: Yeah, absolutely. I've been involved with cannabis pretty young — really from about 14 up through 22, 23. I worked in the traditional market, the medical market, up here in Seattle, Washington. I ended up losing everything in a certain way and had to rebuild. I was looking for a job and ended up getting a job with an I-502 brand, and I started to see a lot of what was going on in the Washington State market — a market most people don't really know about, kind of tucked up here in the corner. It's funny, the regulations are similar to New York's, but it's a really tough market, especially for brands — the retailers run everything. I was very frustrated, honestly, and I took a lot of that frustration and wanted to help people, as well as myself, to learn. So I started making YouTube videos just to educate people, and more so myself. That led into me doing over a thousand videos — I tried to do a thousand-plus quick-content videos on Zoom, reviewing news or breaking down strategies I saw from analyzing different companies. This was right around the beginning of COVID, the pandemic. I got to about 900-something videos and realized I had tunnel vision — I wasn't working smarter, just harder. I kept experimenting with formats, and then on a whim I put out a video essay called "Berner and the Cookies Cannabis Empire." That video blew up, and I realized, oh, this is the direction I should go. From there I did one on Ivan and Jungle Boys, and it progressed from there. I realized that with YouTube, especially in cannabis, the format I was meant to do was storytelling rather than just reporting and analysis. Storytelling brings in the masses — people who aren't even interested in cannabis but like the story — and people already in the industry like the analysis I weave in throughout. So it brings in both audiences. Kellen: I think that's perfect, and I think one of the things that's most intriguing is that cannabis has always had stories that aren't told publicly — a lot of people don't want to be found. I think it's fascinating that you can blend getting some of that underground information that isn't popular in the mainstream industry and bring it to light. So how do you develop trust and a relationship with the individuals you're portraying, since a lot of them might not want that publicity? Do they want to be shown a specific way, and how much autonomy are you given? Luc: The trust part is a big thing, especially with a lot of the OGs — people who for 30, 40 years were hardcore in the traditional market. If you were born in the late '80s or '90s and involved in the traditional market, there were definitely security measures taken, but imagine people born in the '70s — taking extreme caution because they could get 20, 30-plus years for a plant, which is crazy. So building that trust with OGs is important. As time goes on and we're thrust into this digital age, even older folks are realizing they have to build their platform online — it's the future, adapt or die — and telling your story is important, not just for yourself but to help others. Building that trust is tough, especially at first, but I think my body of work compounds on itself — people see other work of mine and go, okay, I trust this guy. I always tell people, every time I do a story on them, thank you for trusting me with your story, because that's a very important thing — it's your job to make sure their story is told right and that the audience gets authentic value from it. Bryan Fields: And I think you did a perfect job explaining that balance of trust, but also portraying the information fairly, in a way people can be proud of — especially since most of these people have been underground for a while and you can't just Google the answers. Luc: A hundred percent. I get comments like "oh you're doing too much," which is funny, because at this point people need to realize the game has been cracked wide open. Growing up, a small amount of people knew how to send packs through the mail — now everyone and their mama knows how. I was literally featured in an Esquire article about how to safely send small amounts of cannabis through the mail. It's mainstream now, that stuff's cracked open. But what's more interesting is that as long as enough time has passed, and the person feels comfortable — I've had probably six, seven, eight, nine different stories where I've told people, let's shelve this right now, we'll come back when it's the right time, because it's not safe in my opinion — it's too current, and I never want anyone to get in trouble because of my content. It's much more of a preservation thing. Lately I'm getting hit up more by people still living out their story in the traditional market who are a little ahead of themselves, and I have to tell them, this is a little too soon. I've walked that line a few times for sure. Bryan Fields: Speaking of stories, I want to hear about how you landed the Berner piece — right before you released that first true storytelling episode, did you have a feeling it was going to hit? Walk us through that process. Luc: At the end of the day, for anybody looking to get approval from a major public figure — I tried to contact Berner, I tried to contact all these big people, and why would they respond to me? They've got hundreds of thousands of people hitting them up. So in that process, I just observed and analyzed — a baseball coach once told me, "just observe," and you can learn so much from observation. There's a decent number of my early videos where I couldn't get a hold of these people, but that never stopped me — it just meant I had to do a lot more research to make sure what I was saying was true. I've gotten things wrong, but I've gotten a lot right too. Going back to the Berner video — luckily he had a lot of information out there, his own documentaries, and Empire, his music distribution company, actually claimed the video and took the ad revenue. I thought it was fair use, but no worries, I don't really care — it was one of the most important things that happened in this career. I just told the story; if you watch it there are a lot of errors, I stumble, it's pretty sloppy. It took a decent amount of time, and I realized I had to focus on quality and delayed gratification instead of instant gratification. Did I know it was going to blow up? I kind of did, but it was the first time I tried it. I think I hyped Berner up a bit in that video hoping for a retweet, but he didn't give me that until later — actually the first time we interacted was him dissing me on Twitter. Now we're acquaintances, not homies, but acquaintances. I think the best networking tactic in media is creating content about people you look up to and whose business acumen you admire — if you can't get a hold of them directly, do that, and there's a great chance you'll eventually be able to talk with them. Kellen: I think the important thing you said that I want to highlight is that this wasn't your first video — you did about a thousand videos, and those reps are what put you in a position for one to pop. You had to fail a lot of different ways. But some of your stories are more challenging — like the Glass House one, which was eye-opening because we all recognize how massive their facility is, but you opened up a different perspective on what's happening there. Were there times people pushed back and said they didn't want you to do a story, and how does that back-and-forth work? Luc: Yeah, that's a great question. Quick aside — fail fast, don't be afraid to fail, just don't make the same mistake over and over. To your question: I grew up somewhat in the streets, so I had to stand my ground, but it's a different mental toughness when you bring that into the legal space and you're dealing with PR people threatening lawsuits or investigations. For the Glass House story, I call myself more of a storyteller/journalist hybrid — I didn't go to school for journalism, I'm learning as I go. For that story, I'll admit I didn't reach out to Glass House for comment, because I already knew what they'd say, and I'd been hearing about the story for a year, year and a half before I published it. From a journalistic standpoint I probably should have reached out, and I'm open to that criticism — if I do a follow-up, I'd want their point of view. But Glass House is more of a representation, especially given they were on the cover of MJBizDaily magazine as an example for compliance — that's egregious in my opinion. They represent maybe 20 other massive greenhouse operations in California flooding the market. I wanted to use that story as a warning to small outdoor farmers that you're not going to win competing on scale against operations like that — you need to adapt or pivot. I worked in Eastern Washington, in Okanogan County, and there used to be 10-20 cultivation operations, now there's one or two left. I try to use storytelling like that as a warning — most small operators, probably 90%, are going to get crushed, but the 10% who are educated, find the cracks in the system, and adapt could grow into something amazing. Bryan Fields: How do you balance choosing a story that's relevant and a good story versus one that could be significantly impactful for small businesses? Are there times you prioritize publishing a story because it'll help small businesses make better decisions? Luc: That's a really good question. It's a balance, because that small-business-owner audience is a niche group, and spending resources there isn't necessarily incentivized for a YouTuber chasing views — but I have done plenty of niche videos. For example, right before New York legalization I did a full breakdown on how the game is rigged in New York, very analytical, based on what I saw in Seattle and Washington, which have similar regulatory systems to New York — more so than Colorado or California. That video actually got taken down about a week before 4/20 New York legalization, which is a little suspicious, though I'm not trying to be conspiratorial. It only got about 4,000 views and got age-restricted right away, but people in the comments said it was really informative — I need to find that video and repost it on Instagram or Twitter since YouTube doesn't let you download a removed video. I try to balance storytelling with elements that help small business owners, and I do it from the mindset of an aspiring cannabis business owner myself, as well as a consumer and citizen. Kellen: The part that always surprises me is that your videos get massive views, and a lot of cannabis companies are looking for ways to advertise and connect with consumers but aren't connecting the dots that working with someone like you for brand credibility and national exposure could help. Have any bigger public companies reached out wanting you to help tell their story from a marketing standpoint? Luc: Not really, actually, which is funny, because you're right that storytelling is one of the best marketing strategies for expansion into other states. I have a criteria for who I work with: one, I won't work with a big MSO — not that I'm hating on MSOs, I'd just rather help the small business, since MSOs already have such an upper hand. My criteria is a great story, not a big MSO, small-to-mid-size business, and the right timing — I have documentaries on the shelf that aren't ready yet because I want the story to fully play out first. This is a really underlooked marketing tactic: storytelling lets people understand who's behind a company, lets them see themselves in those people, and showcases hardships and how they were overcome — problem solving, and the reality that it's hard, which people relate to. I've had people message me that they cried at the end of a video. There's a Jungle Boys three-minute video from about five years ago that doesn't say a single word, just storytelling featuring a younger Ivan, one of the Jungle Boys founders, and by the end I was literally crying, even though I wasn't a grower myself — the hardships hit home. To build a healthy, vibrant media ecosystem for cannabis, we need a baseline of public knowledge so we can have more nuanced conversations — like how you'd only understand Snoop Dogg referencing Tupac and Nas if you already knew who they were. Storytelling builds that foundation for cannabis personalities and companies over time. Bryan Fields: I think that's perfectly said — storytelling makes people feel something, connects them, and it's the oldest way humans communicate. I think you humanize the individuals and demonstrate the challenges they overcame, giving personality to people fans of the industry aspire to be like — Ivan of Jungle Boys, or Berner — and you communicate those values well on screen. Luc: A hundred percent, the humanization is key. Corporations are legally considered people, but they're not people — we're in an era where everything's on camera and people want to actually know who you are. Look at Elon Musk — whether you love or hate him, we know his personality, and it's become a marketing tactic, though it can be volatile and a bit of a cult-of-personality risk long term. A lot of MSOs actually have personalities, but because they come from the corporate world they're media-trained not to show their real personality, which can be a disadvantage in this era of humanization — especially in cannabis, which carries stigma, and where the people who've been in the traditional market a long time genuinely enjoy consuming cannabis on camera, which platforms like YouTube tend to limit or demonetize. Kellen: Is there a Goldilocks zone where you're humanizing individuals but selectively incorporating cannabis use, given MSO executives are often coached that showing that side is a PR risk that could hurt their stock price? Luc: When I first started, I looked at a lot of consumption-focused influencers smoking on camera as part of their vlogs, and honestly maybe out of some envy or jealousy I judged it and wondered why people watched that. But a woman named Ariana who used to work at Weedmaps pointed out that a lot of people watching those consumption videos don't have anyone else to smoke with, so they consume alongside that creator — it clicked for me. That kind of content doesn't really help how YouTube and other platforms view cannabis, but it's part of the media ecosystem. I think we're moving into more of an "edutainment" era — educational but still entertaining, more storytelling-driven. Going back to the Goldilocks balance: you don't have to be smoking on camera, you just need authenticity and a real history of loving this plant — that's part of my criteria, because if you don't have that, what story am I going to tell? I'm actually looking to move this documentary format into other industries too. Kellen: Is there a video you think should be more popular than it is? Luc: Oh yeah, a few. The Craft Farms documentary is a big one — an hour long, got age-restricted right off the bat, which kills a video's reach. It's got 46,000 views but deserved more. Shoutout to Lance from Craft Farms — a natural storyteller — and to Ian, who I shot it with. His story is insane; that documentary took six, seven, eight months to make. I'm also proud of a video called something like "Rap's Smartest Entrepreneur," an analysis of Nipsey Hussle's story and business acumen, which didn't do as well since my channel isn't hip-hop-business-oriented and it probably got age-restricted too. "How Bribery in the Cannabis Industry Works," from about a year ago, has 9,000 views and I wish it had more. The Archive Genetics one is another that got age-restricted and should have done better. Bryan Fields: Sometimes it really is just timing — Kellen and I feel the same way about certain guest conversations we think are perfect for our audience that just don't land the way we expect. Expanding on that — has there been a time you were researching someone for eight or nine months and could tell in advance they were about to blow up? Luc: Yeah — David from Preferred Gardens. He reached out to me directly, and I did an episode with him as the third-ever episode of the High Design series, after Berner and Ivan/Jungle Boys. That video did about 150,000 views, and after it he expanded into Florida and multiple other states — though that was already in motion, I think my video just threw some gasoline on a fire that was already lit. He's one of the very few people in this industry I've never heard a single bad thing about — everyone in this industry usually has at least one or two haters, but not David. He's a great dude who does great business and grows great weed, which is rare. Bryan Fields: Has there been a time you went into a documentary with one opinion of someone and came out with a completely different view than what the media or mystique around them suggested? Luc: For sure. Quesada from Backpack Boys — the media portrayal was fine, but I didn't know what to expect going in, and he turned out to be an amazing, down-to-earth, quality guy. Berner too, to a degree — people who criticize him would probably change their tune if they talked to him in person; he's charismatic and smart, not just "a rapper." There are valid criticisms of him, absolutely, but this business changes you — it gets cutthroat, people do slimy things to you, and you adapt. Interviewing Ivan for hours, I saw he's a great businessman and person, but at a certain level all these guys are sharks; some are more careful and work with fewer people, meaning less exposure, while Berner does a ton of deals, which opens him up to more of them going bad and creating enemies. I actually think my first Berner video helped kick off more mainstream media attention on him. I remember at a party in NYC at the ASAP Club, a guy named Michael — who owns the building where the Cookies NYC clothing store is — told me he saw my video explaining how Cookies uses clothing stores as expansion tools to enter markets ahead of regulation, and it inspired him to reach out to Berner's team about that NYC space, which led directly to that deal. That's the first time I directly heard my content led to a deal. Kellen: Taking it one step further — who's the white whale, the number one person on your bucket list for a documentary? Luc: Good question — honestly I've done most of the front-facing people I really wanted to do right off the bat, so a lot of the remaining bucket-list items aren't fully apparent to me until I do them. I recently put out a White Boy Kev interview about the New York haze era that people loved. There are people behind some of the front-facing figures I'd love to talk to, but I have to wait for the right timing on those. Kellen: What about another industry entirely? Luc: Absolutely — I'd love to do a real, non-PR-puff-piece story on Ghazi, who started Empire, and on Gucci Mane, who he signed to Empire — and Young Scooter too. I grew up on that music, and I think I could do it differently than anyone else has, pulling from media formats I've studied in hip-hop. I've realized I'm pretty good at humanizing people and finding the right pressure points in a story. I want to take that into documentaries on entrepreneurs in general — people who built something from nothing — through my other channel, Luc, using my first name. It's three birds with one stone: the subject gets their story told, the audience gets education and analysis, and I get to learn and network at the same time. There are also Seattle cannabis stories I'd love to tell once I figure out how to scale the business side. Long term I want to keep the cannabis brands going, maybe move into psychedelics, and build similar storytelling brands in other spaces — I'm a political junkie and interested in a lot of things. I'm a big believer in fate — I never planned on going back into cannabis after losing everything at 22; the only job I could get was with a legal, regulated I-502 brand, and that eventually led to all of this. Bryan Fields: Do you have any takes on the cannabis industry that differ from what most people would agree with? Give me an example — like, most people agree MSOs grow bad weed. Luc: Here's the thing — even if MSOs grow great weed, they still often have shitty brands, because it's about representation and emotion. People buy on emotion. You could take the exact same weed, put it in a brand with real story and history behind it, and people say it's fire — then put that same batch in an MSO jar two months later and a portion of people will say it's garbage. There's obviously a segment of consumers who don't care at all, but as we get more brand-centric and consume more media on our phones, telling your story becomes increasingly important — not doing so is a missed opportunity. I was thinking the other day: a lot of the problem with the industry is that big public companies came in trying to build "the factory" for a brand overnight. Coca-Cola took a hundred years to become Coca-Cola, starting in a garage — but these MSO CEOs who say "we want to be the Coca-Cola of cannabis" ignore that Coca-Cola spent its first decades essentially being made in a garage. Bryan Fields (continuing the point): That's such a good parallel — that's exactly right. Luc: That's why there's so much conflict between the corporate and culture sides, and it's going to keep increasing as more culture people are pushed out of business. There's a cannabis culture that's been developing underground for 80-90 years — I grew up in Seattle's cannabis culture, spoiled with a medical card, access to markets, and growers I've known since I was 15 who are basically family. There are people like that all over the country who've invested generations into this plant, and now the government tells them they can't participate because they can't adapt to the legal corporate model. That's part of why I started my channel — to help traditional market folks learn to operate under the new rules, because that's the future, even though it's shortsighted and frankly stupid for people with no real connection to the plant to just bulldoze the industry with pure business tactics. Some newer entrants who aren't from cannabis are being smart about staying under the radar for now and learning the culture. Kellen: I slightly disagree, and here's why — brands matter, but in certain limited-license states brands don't matter as much yet, because the winning strategy there is building infrastructure and limiting competition, which everyone agrees isn't ideal. In the future, brands will be the differentiator, and I think MSOs will eventually behave more like infrastructure players — a Target or CVS — than true brand-builders, since right now they're only "branding" because they're forced to. Luc: I'm with you there. That's one of the things I despise — states that have rigged the game, though almost every state has to some degree. My long-term goal is to get money out of politics; I don't get mad at corporations so much as at politicians who are legally, or sometimes illegally, bribed. The whole game right now is limit competition, destroy the small guy — that's what big business has done in other industries by influencing politicians and taking over infrastructure. The smart MSOs will build infrastructure and then acquire the culture brands that made it — that's already starting in Florida with Trulieve. Kim Rivers understands she needs culture people on her side, needs some economic leverage over them by signing them — I've been hit up by culture people about this. Is that a sellout move for some? Maybe, but this is a business, people have to survive, and you just need to stay true to your own core principles. Bryan Fields (continuing): The playbook that works for the small guy is building brand equity, or proprietary technology, though tech advantages get flooded quickly. Imagine sitting across the table from a big-money person — they can either slide you pennies on the dollar and you take it because you're already struggling, or, if you've built real brand equity through authenticity and time, you'll have leverage in that negotiation. A billion-dollar company can't just buy that. Brand loyalty translates into brand equity, and that's the leverage point for small operators. If you're a small outdoor cultivator with no brand differentiation, you're going out of business, and it's happening faster and faster. Kellen: One of the issues Bryan brought up is that MSOs were forced into brand-building because in other industries there's a playbook — call a factory, get your custom recipe, choose packaging, and plug into a massive retail network. When big MSOs tried that in cannabis, that infrastructure didn't exist, so they had to build it themselves, sometimes at the expense of flexibility for brands with different needs. Ideally that infrastructure becomes flexible enough that small brands' products stay true to what those cultivators intended. Everyone's fighting to navigate the same broken rules, and eventually the best operators will rise and relationships will deepen — but honestly, the bigger fish, like big CPG, tobacco, alcohol, and pharma companies, are coming to disrupt everyone, including the MSOs, who are really just medium-sized fish by comparison. Luc: A hundred percent — the real big money hasn't even entered the room yet, not publicly at least. Some of it happened a bit in Canada, but the real big players have already invested years of groundwork through contracted groups preparing to enter at the right time — I've literally been contacted by people who couldn't tell me who they represented. This industry is being built in real time, and no one's done this before under these conditions — legal cannabis in the digital, social-media era, a nationally-grown consumer agricultural product with a massive existing culture. It's fascinating, but each state is like its own laboratory of democracy, and often a petri dish for corruption, since small governing bodies get the power to pick winners and losers. I love using cannabis as a lens to look at broader issues like corruption — big pharma, military contractors, and energy basically run Washington ever since Citizens United — but cannabis culture is fighting back and showcasing real people. Look at California — heavy taxation and picking winners hasn't killed the black market, which is still two to three times the size of the legal market. We're maybe in the third or fourth inning of this whole process, and we don't even have all the states online yet. States coming online last, like Idaho, likely won't get protections for local businesses, and you'll see a kind of domestic neoliberalism where big companies come in and clean house on local markets, similar to how it plays out internationally. As for Glass House, my issue isn't that they run a legal and a traditional-market side — everyone does that — it's that they keep expanding greenhouse space while small growers get shut down by the state. Backdooring product to other states is common in this industry at every level because people have to eat, and unfortunately the system pushes people into it. Bryan Fields: It's insane — you've got third- or fourth-generation growers in Humboldt who can't use those skills anymore because there's no way to make money, and it's genuinely sad, similar to the rising suicide rate among small farmers generally. Luc: It is sad. Even with Glass House, they've got so much greenhouse space — why not carve out a chunk as an incubator, partner fairly with Humboldt growers, and let that big company adopt some of that culture and expertise? Probably won't happen, but I'm trying to be a problem-solver here. Bryan Fields: We can tag Graham in the clip too. So Luc, for our listeners who want to get in touch or watch your documentaries, where can they find you? Luc: Just search LMC on YouTube and I'll pop up right away. I'd advise people to start from the beginning of my channel — I took down my early thousand-plus videos and kept the ones I think hold up and are still relevant today. The High Design documentary series covers current entrepreneurs; the Trap Tree series celebrates and preserves the stories of OG smugglers and traditional-market trappers who took real risk to build the market we operate in today — people who went to jail, friends who've died — sacrifices that built the culture we have now. There's also a High Design history series on general cannabis history. Follow me on Instagram, or search "LMC High Design" on Google for my website and all the links. The best way to reach me directly is email — highdesignbiz@gmail.com — since I have too many DMs across six different Instagram accounts to keep up with. Bryan Fields: We'll link it all up in the show notes. Thanks for taking the time, this was a lot of fun. Luc: Yeah, thank you guys, this was amazing — I really, really loved this conversation.