To my dedicated listeners — tighten up your bootstraps. This one’s long. When I wrapped recording, I couldn’t believe the runtime until I realized my throat hurt and I had apparently decided to let everything out at once. So yes, this episode covers a lot, and I mean a lot. But given what happened in Washington last week, it felt irresponsible to leave any of it out.
We start with the policy shock no one expected: the federal government reopening because of a hemp definition buried 900 pages deep in an appropriations bill. From there, we widen the lens — because this wasn’t just a cannabinoid clean-up. It exposed the structural weakness the U.S. has been carrying for decades: we are a tier-three player in the global natural-fiber economy, in an industry we helped invent. And that’s not a cannabis story. That’s an industrial-memory problem.
So in this episode, we walk through what continuity actually means, why France, Belgium, China, India, Bangladesh, and Türkiye kept their middle-market infrastructure intact while the U.S. dismantled its own, and how our land-grant universities quietly became the last remnants of the system we abandoned. We get into financing, risk-sharing, biological credit, the collapse of the middle, farmer distress, and why Delta-8 was never the point — it was the pressure test that exposed the hole in the hull.
If you care about hemp, supply chains, American agriculture, or the systems that keep nations competitive, this is the episode to sit with. It’s less about cannabinoids and more about the architecture we need to rebuild if we want continuity, stability, and an actual fiber economy that survives contact with policy. Buckle up — it’s a long one, but the pattern underneath is the real story.
