[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Mark, who's going to introduce himself and his company, Kyoto Botanicals and give us an idea of why we should trust him in his specific niche and expertise.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So thanks for the intro. Happy to be here. So, yeah, I'm Mark Gilliland. I'm the founder and operator of Kyoto Botanicals and we do all botanical mechanical based wellness.
So primarily and kind of historically the main crux of the business has been hemp derived cbd. So all THC free. So broad spectrum hemp extract products focused on wellness, not any sort of high or psychoactive impacts.
So that's kind of been the heartbeat of the business since we started six years ago.
Started with the business being Kyoto Botanicals, knowing I always wanted to expand into more botanical wellness options in the future beyond just hemp cbd and actually just did that about six weeks ago. So launched our first functional mushroom product as well. So excited about that. So just trying to get full wellness product profile of predictions, products that are as close to nature as possible. So just try to bring in whole plant hemp extracts into people's lives in an easy way.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Tell me more about mushrooms and what that looks like. Because I familiar colloquially with mushrooms, but that's very much more on a psychedelic psychological type of perspective. So tell me about them.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I have the product right on the other side of the counter. Do you want me to go grab it real quick or stay on?
[00:01:59] Speaker A: Sure, you can tell me about it. You can show it to me however
[00:02:02] Speaker B: you want to roll.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Show and tell. Show and tell. For those who are listening, I do also publish on YouTube. So we can.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Perfect.
Oh yeah. So we use, so we use lion's mane, reishi chaga and cordyceps. So kind of the four like really main functional mushrooms.
And then we do a dual extraction process to break down the tough cell walls of mushrooms. So they're called, it's called chitin. And you can't. It reduces bioavailability. You can't digest the cell walls of mushrooms, so you don't really get any benefit if they're not done the way that we do them.
So and then we mix it with just raw cacao powder, those four different mushroom extracts. So you get, um, probably can't see it. Oh yeah, you can see.
So it just comes in a powder. Um, you can mix it in your coffee. I put it in my smoothie every day. You can put it in hot milk, whatever type of milk you want and make Like a hot chocolate. It's fantastic. Um, so not. I actually just did a big educational blog post on this last week. So not psychedelic at all. Um, not even closely related in the fungi.
Uh, what kingdom?
Um, so no.
What's the. What's the psychedelic part of mushrooms? I always forget the complicated name of the chemical psilocybin. Um, so they are not in the family of mushrooms that have psilocybin at all. So there's no, no high, no psychoactive impact. So just like with hemp, do everything non psychoactive. I'm here for wellness, not for altered states.
So, yeah, they help kind of ground your nervous system.
So they help with focus.
They help with kind of just quieting everything. They have immune benefits as well, so really just kind of similar to hemp. They attack different pathways in your body. So hemp is the endocannabinoid system.
The functional mushrooms are more your neurological system and your immunological system.
So they just. It helps complement the hemp extracts and it's just a perfect kind of addition to keep layering on attacking or not attacking, sorry, supporting different systems in your body.
And so it's really a great. The functional mushrooms are great for kind of cognitive benefits. So focus, mental, all that stuff. I love it.
Does that answer is that.
[00:04:51] Speaker A: Yeah, no. That's fantastic. I'm always surprised at that. The depth, you know, of scientific process behind the scenes. Did some subcontracting with the guy who.
Evergreen Marketing, and he works exclusively with CBD type companies and we did some SEO and optimization on a company that was doing, you know, processors and extraction.
And there's a lot to that.
Trying to derive these compounds safely, repeatably, without destroying or altering, you know, the original benefit of whatever it is that you're trying to get. And so, you know, purity. I had to learn quite a bit about, you know, pressure and quality. And it's very surprisingly scientific and science based. You know, people, you know, maybe it's a layman's thing, but like, yeah, stoners are like, they're getting in their CBD and their gummies and stuff. But I think there's a lot more to it than that. Can you give us some of your expertise or some of the adventure that you've gone on while bringing these products to market to meet those medical standards to talk about the science of it?
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. You hit the nail on the head there. So I think a lot of people.
And they shouldn't. Why should they? They're not in the category. They don't understand how complex it is like you were just talking about to get to the final.
And the key being safe for consumption extract.
So like, you know, if you're smoking a joint or something, it's very simple. You just take the, you just take the cannabis plant, the marijuana plant that's been bred to have high thc. You just dry it in its raw form and then when you smoke it, the heat is what converts all the cannabinoids into what your body can do something with. So like THC in the plant is thca, which you can't do anything with. You can eat a raw weed flower and it's not going to do much to you. But when you apply heat to it, it's called decarboxylation.
So that's what converts the THCA into Delta 9 THC, which is what actually gets you high.
So when you're smoking weed, you just do it right there in front of you. You just hit it with a lighter and it gets hot and the conversion happens right there in the bowl. And you've taken delta 9 instead of thca in. With hemp ingestibles for wellness, you don't, you're not going to just sell. People do. People do sell smokable CBD products, but most people don't want to be, don't want to be smoking cbd. It's something you can do just like with thc. But to get it in an ingestible, consumable ready form, you have to do that heating step during the extraction process to convert the enzyme into the what the CBD that your body can actually use. So yeah, it's a very complicated drying process, extraction process with CO2 under high pressure.
And then we have a third step where you actually. So if you just did the, all of that, you end up with what's called full spectrum, which is all the cannabinoids, including trace amounts of THC below the 0.3% legal limit.
I don't want to have any THC in the products or non detectable levels of thc. So we do another step where you actually remove the THC as well. So it's all a very complicated lab process that ends up with the full cannabinoid profile, phytocompound profile of the hemp flower just without the THC in it.
So yeah, it's a very, it's a very complex, very expensive process.
That is why high quality CBD products are a lot more expensive than people expect and a lot more expensive than what you're getting when you get like a gas Station CBD product which is typically just CBD isolate.
So that's kind of a much simpler product where you just take the extract and you just, just pull all the CBD out, get rid of all the other stuff, so it just becomes the isolated CBD molecule. That's what like they do for pharmaceuticals and stuff. They just isolate one molecule and that's what they deliver to you.
Yeah, because you're not getting the entourage effect of the entire plant compound. Phytocompound base.
It's gotta be a lot stronger. So that's why, like, pharmaceuticals are super duper high levels of whatever that specific compound is.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: To me, a little bit about the regulation game, it seems to me, you know, I, I see one headline here, one headline there, One state is doing this, another party switches its stance and this and that. So what's it really like trying to play hopscotch across the United States with different rigs?
[00:10:04] Speaker B: So it's very difficult.
Um, so like, I, you know, like, I conveyed at the beginning, I got into this in the beginning for purely wellness.
I'm not a THC guy.
Not because I'm anti. Just because it makes me extremely paranoid and it's miserable and I hate it.
And so I intentionally made these products from the beginning to be THC free.
I anticipated and, you know, wasn't surprised, was, but was disappointed after the 2018 farm bill passed that this whole explosion of Delta 8 THC and people getting around how much THC is actually in the product by just making like bigger sizes or higher strength products, where the 0.3% THC rule then allows for more actual milligrams of THC in the bottle. So right now, my, my tincture bottle has 0.0% THC in it.
Somebody that does a full spectrum, they can have that same THC bottle, make it really potent in terms of C, B, D. And because it's. Because it's capped at 0.3%, not a certain milligram of THC, the higher potency of the C, B, D, the higher milligrams of THC gonna go up because it's a ratio 0.3%. So.
So that is why we are in a very regulatory confusing environment right now. And it's a lot to do with that and a lot to do with the Delta 8, which is just synthetic cannabinoids, which the 2008 farm bill was never meant to address. So where we've ended up now is a world in which unintentionally people have found ways to get THC Strong milligram THC products into people's hands in places where they're not supposed to have it, where it's illegal by state regulations, it's not covered in the 2008 farm bill. It's kind of like. It's kind of like an awful loophole. So they're working to close that. But in the meantime, it does mean that you have this patchwork of state regulations.
So that's difficult to manage, but not impossible.
That's where kind of my decision from the beginning to be THC free really helped, because without any THC in the products, it's pretty safe in most every state because it meets every requirement any state is putting on.
So it's generally much safer.
But yes, it is. Until the FDA decides to start regulating it as a dietary supplement, which they do not at this present moment, it's going to continue to be a massive patchwork, which is unfortunate. So what that means for. For the consumer is they have to be very careful about the brands that they choose because FDA is not regulating it as a dietary supplement. It's up to.
It's up to the individual brands and manufacturers to do it how they want to do it. Most do a very good job, lab test everything, make sure that it has what it says it has in it. Make sure it's free from things so residual solvents, pesticides, mold, yeast, fungus, bacterial stuff like E. Coli. Right. So we do a full suite of lab tests to make sure that it's safe to consume and is free from THC and all the things you don't want.
Most companies do, but there are always going to be extreme capitalists out there that are going to do whatever they want as cheaply as possible and make the money really quickly and disappear before anybody catches them or knows any different. So unfortunately, since it isn't regulated as a dietary supplement by the fda, it's. It's really important that individual consumers just do the research on the product and the brand they're buying, make sure it's trustworthy, make sure that you can figure out who's behind it. That's kind of a big one.
And then make sure that they have all of their lab results a done be very easily accessible, whether it's through a QR code on the bottle, on the website, with batch codes that you could match to your bottle, that sort of thing. So all of it should be who's behind it? And the lab results should be very easy to find.
And for most companies, they are. For us, they are. But there are companies out there that make it very difficult. And that's a big red flag when
[00:14:50] Speaker A: it came to coming up with the, the line based off of the mushrooms. Was that having to find new processes or were you able to use some of the tech and processes that you already had in house to kind of work with a different substance, with its own challenges, or what was that journey like?
[00:15:09] Speaker B: No, it's totally new.
So I did not have experience in that.
But I, over the course of, of doing this over the last six years, I came to know somebody that's a mushroom savant. He loves mushrooms. It's what he does.
He grows mushrooms, he sells them, he makes extracts.
Excuse me.
So I've been working with him for the last few months to develop these.
So kind of took the role that I had on the hemp side and leaned on his expertise on the mushroom side to develop this product and make sure it's exactly what people are looking for. And then the extracts go through the, the same testing process as well. So obviously you don't do testing for cannabinoids because they don't have them in it, but the same safety checks. Right. So residual solvents, pesticides, biological contamination, that sort of thing. So to make sure they're all still safe to consume.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: So tell me from like the small business marketing side, public awareness side, you know, you've chosen two products that you know are more, they have their own niche audiences and even with mushrooms, you know, it's something where, you know, there, there's, there's naughty mushrooms and then there's good mushrooms. There's portobellos, which everybody's familiar with. But there's also, you know, I worked with Dr. Josh Trax in the alternate health wellness space for supplements. And around 2018, you know, he had done a lot, we had done a lion's job to make sure they did a lot of scientific research in their marketing. Every article they published was like 2,500 words, long cited, five studies. And then Google flipped the switch and said, yeah, but you're a chiropractor so you know, we're going trust this two sentence post on Healthline more than you and cut his organic Google traffic in half overnight and happened across the board with what was called the Medic Update.
And that's just kind of a reflection in general of alternative health and wellness and you know, mainline doctor pharmaceutical medical information out there. What's the state of play as far as like the awareness of consumers, the appetite for alternative medicines, the attitudes towards almost feels like a homeschool versus Public school type of argument in some cases where it's just passionately argued by some people.
What, what's your take on that? Alternative wellness versus traditional medicinal or pharmaceutical approaches to things.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: Yeah, so you hit on a number of different things. From a marketing perspective.
What you experience with a chiropractor is always a risk in this category.
It's just inevitable.
This is kind of even more severe than the chiropractor example because it is a your money, your life kind of SEO category. So the rug could get pulled out from under it at any moment by Google.
So that's always kind of a risk.
So my approach, similar to how we developed the products and everything is I am very conservative by nature. So I don't do any wild claims. I don't do anything that the research doesn't support.
You got people out there making insane CBD cures. X, Y and Z claims don't do any of that stuff. So keep a very structure, function, very just support your health and well being.
There's research that's been proven true, which is what we talk about in claims, and then there's research that shows promise, which is really awesome and super exciting stuff. That's five, ten, whatever years down the future, down the road, in the future. We don't talk about any of those because they're just the data is just not there to say 100% that it's going to do X, Y and Z.
So I just focus from a consumer perspective, from an SEO perspective, from a PR perspective, just trying to educate people. You know, I'm the face of it all. So I do it all myself. So I do videos, I write all the blog posts, I use all my experience and all my expertise and all my conservative bias to just try to explain to people in a digital ecosystem how I explain to them when I'm like at a market selling one on one, right? So as a human being, not making crazy promises, not saying it's going to fix everything, but it's worth a try.
And then as far as kind of penetration of the category, openness awareness for the category, it's, it's flipped a ton in the last. I've been in CBD for 10 years now about. And even in the last 10 years it's changed a ton. Everybody of all generations are just becoming more open to it, starting to see that hey, maybe our just say no policies that stemmed from whatever, the 60s, the 80s, the Reagan's, whatever it is, maybe they aren't a great idea with cannabis. It's not like a Lab made hallucinogen, like, like other things. It does actually have health benefits. So I think people are just starting to be more open to that of all generations. And then again, being THC free, that helps a ton to be able to say, hey, we have non detectable levels of THC. It's basically 0.0% THC in our products. So, yeah, you're free to try it for 30 days and see if, see what the health benefits are for, you know, helping improve your nighttime routines and your sleep routines and your daily calm and your recovery from exercise and that sort of thing. You know, try it for 30 days. You're. We have all the test results saying it's, it's not going to get you high. So that's not a concern. This is just. This is just a wellness supplement.
And then the medical, the specific, you know, medical versus alternative health.
I mean that from a marketing perspective, that is what it is. It's. It's. There's nothing that I can do that's gonna change that. Healthline and, you know, I love Mayo Clinic and they're awesome, and I go to Mayo Clinic for all of my, my medical questions and stuff, but they're just, they're serving different purposes. There's a spot for both.
Just like you. There's tons of conflicting, like what you should be eating and what diet you should, should do and all that stuff. Right? It's no different than that. So I think every. I'm not gonna sit here and say everybody should be taking CBD or everybody should be taking functional mushrooms. Just like, I wouldn't sit here. I used to work for Atkins Diet. Just like I would never sit here and say everybody should be on a, on a keto diet. It just doesn't make sense for everybody.
But I think everybody should try them for sure, because you never know. Um, but I'm not gonna sit here and say you, you have to take it. Right? It's just.
I'm a big believer in.
Find things that work for you, make small changes, you know, one at a time over the course of years. And just sort of my life, my adult life has kind of always been about making little tweaks and little changes. And adding CBD was one little change that I made. Now adding functional mushrooms is another one.
Exercising a lot more is another one. So it's just. They're all kind of.
It's a buffet, right? Try. Try everything and build it. Build your plate how you want, whatever makes you happy. I don't know. That was kind of rambling but no,
[00:23:18] Speaker A: no, you, you hit, you hit those points. I, I loaded you up with three different points in that and you knocked them all out. So definitely great.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: I would say like a big red flag of mine in this category. In any health and wellness category in life, if someone says it's going to do XYZ for you, your alarm bells should be going off, right? Like, everybody's different. Everybody's metabolism's different, everybody's body's different. Everybody's life is different, everybody's lifestyle is different.
Things aren't going to be the same for everybody. Everybody's needs aren't the same.
So that's back to my point of just find out what works for you. Try different things. Try our products. If they work, great. If they don't, let me know. I refund everybody if they don't work. I want people to try them. I want them to have a good experience. I'm not here to force sales on people or force a lifestyle on people. And if anyone's telling you like you have to take XYZ supplement or you have to take CBD because otherwise bad, it's just not, it's not true. Because we're all unique and different physiologically.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: So I think that's true.
I am curious. You did throw down some pretty good technical SEO jargon there for a second. So I'm curious what your SEO chops are.
Did that just come from a bigger knuckle box and trying to get your site ranking with this marketing or did it come out of previous marketing experience?
[00:24:56] Speaker B: No. So my, so I have been in marketing for, for a long, pretty much my whole career.
So I've been in mostly brand management. So consumer package, good brand management for almost 20 years.
But that is not SEO. So my SEO, that's a good way of describing it.
It's been the street fight for the last six months.
So I knew, I knew what SEO was like a five year old in five year old levels literally six months ago. And then I don't even know why six months ago I was just like, this is not, this is like in this category.
This is the secret.
It's very restricted from an advertising perspective.
And advertising with such a niche category that's so high trust is just not the same as like I used to work for Hot Pockets, like selling Hot Pockets. Everybody knows Pockets. Are you hungry? Are you not? You can do mass advertising. Like if you're hungry after school, go buy Hot Pockets. If you're not, you're not. This category is much more difficult to do mass media advertising.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:07] Speaker B: So SEO just became like, okay, this is a way I can kind of really quickly scale my, I'm talking to one person approach, kind of, if that makes sense.
So I've literally spent the last six months, at least 10 hours a day, seven days a week teaching myself SEO and just breaking things fast on my site and fixing them and learning.
Oh boy, when you, when you break stuff, it is bad
[00:26:45] Speaker A: that it's, it is true. You know, search engine optimization, you know, you can read something one day, try to implement it and you can either see really good results, sometimes really fast, or you can see how badly you just broke something bad.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: In my very short experience, I've gone from 0 to 100 on SEO in the last six months. I've seen, or at least I've learned that doing stuff right, you don't see for a very long time and you just have to have faith. But when you do something wrong, you, I've at least seen it real fast.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: So I, I love the practical learning curve on it. I mean it's funny because it's, you know, I taught, I, I had an adjunct professor asked me to come and teach, you know, at, at his class and I saw his curriculum, like this curriculum's 10 years out of date. But like, what can you do? You know, you can't like SEO changes like the past three years of SEO have really, 90% has changed but 10% has remained exactly the same and even more so. So I just kind of treat it as, you know, you know, as a moving target. So just getting in, in the last six months, getting deep into it, you know, you're probably better served by having, you know, that hands on experience with something where you're investing in like, because like the best way to learn SEO is to implement, implement, implement. I treat it like Tai chi or like karate. I started taking karate like last September and like it's just doing the small repetitive motions again and again.
Even if you look ridiculous doing it at first, eventually it does start to get faster. It does start to have a cumulative impact. So yeah, my take on it, I love that.
[00:28:48] Speaker B: I appreciate that. Yeah, it's been, I've loved it. It's been super fun. I'm a big believer in brands kind of owning the brand. I've never been a fan of like hiring outside agencies.
Obviously sometimes you have to, but at this stage I don't have to yet. So I've loved that. I know every single line of code in my site now and understand why they're there. And edit them to make SEO improvements and stuff.
So it's been really awesome. But then also in this category, so in the functional mushroom and the CBD category, it's.
It's next to impossible to rank for, let's say CBD gummies. It's just not going to happen for 99% of brands.
It'd be like launching a clothing line and trying to rank for jeans, but even harder because it is a restricted category in Google. So they. You can't just like make a pair of jeans in your garage and put it in SEO, right? Because Google's going to.
Google is going to sandbox you just because you're in a restricted category. And it takes a long time to build up enough trust with Google to even rank for terrible keywords.
So with this category kind of doing all of my SEO and learning it all myself and like I said, breaking it all fast, it's kind of been. To your point, it's been a godsend, like hiring an agency to do this. They just don't understand my business. They wouldn't have understood the category. They wouldn't have understand the complexity. They wouldn't have been able to educate customers as well as Google and write content. You know, with my voice and my experience, that's helped me build significant trust with Google really quickly, actually, in that six months. So, yeah, I think it's been really good. I recommend everybody do it. It's absolutely. I think SEO is like your game, right? It's what you do, right? It's your, it's your jam.
So I'm not going to try to take business away from you, but I would recommend having done it myself and still doing it. I would recommend anybody that has their own business to just throw yourself into it, even if it's just for like a week. Don't do anything. You can break stuff, but like learn, learn about it. Because it is. If I had just stayed in brand management, I would have never learned about the kind of technical aspects of running a business. And I think I would have been a lot poorer for it.
[00:31:31] Speaker A: I always made on my individual consultancies a point to do as much education as the person wanted or could get themselves wrapped up into, because knowing because it's. It fertilizes the whole business. Because if you look at SEO as from the perspective of, you know, what are the functional problems that my clients are trying to solve and thinking of your site as a repository of how can I answer and unblock that friction to my end sales goal with them. If you do that successfully for your existing clients, then you're also addressing that potential search market of other people who aren't your current customers who can learn that by discovering your article through a search.
And you've just killed two birds with one stone, you've made it much easier for you to sell at the end while also addressing your marketing at the same time. You know, it's, it's like cross pollinating with your social media. Any influencers that you're tapped into. It just works so much better if you think of your organic, you know, your site as a tool to cooperate with your email campaign, to cooperate with your social media process, to cooperate with your paid budget, wherever it might go, as both a supplement and an augmented.
[00:32:56] Speaker B: Yeah, totally agree with you. Wish I had, wish I had met you six months ago. I probably could have sped up my last six months a little bit.
[00:33:07] Speaker A: That's fair. That's fair.
You know, I've been doing this for SEO since 2007. And so, you know, I've seen, I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, as Royer Hauer would say.
But, you know, all that also comes with 20 years of baggage.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: So part of my work is sorting out what's still relevant to talk about. What are the tactics and strategies that actually move the needle? You know, it's like the, the parable of the plumber.
You know, he walks in, takes out a hammer and hits a pipe and then charges you a hundred dollars. And like that took 30 seconds. How much? Why am I paying you so much money? Well, it's, you know, $5 for hitting the pipe, but DOL dollars for knowing which pipe to hit where and when and how hard.
[00:33:59] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:34:03] Speaker A: So I'm curious, just kind of in general, what are you looking at next in your marketing? Looking at next as a small business owner, is it, you know, digging deeper into mushrooms? Is it other botanicals that you want to expand into? Is this, you know, the, the 10, 5, 10 year plan for Group Kyoto? What are you looking at?
[00:34:24] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's going to be mushrooms just for a little while. So I launched this business just about six years ago. So it took six years to even get the next botanical product outside of hemp out the door.
So now, and I like to keep my, I'm big into keeping my product line focused. I think it's, it just helps customers in an already chaotic and confusing regulatory landscape and brand landscape and product landscape. I deliberately keep everything very slow and methodical and simple. So I have four CBD products And now I have this one mushroom product which I'll stay with for a little while and then probably expand usage occasion on that. So right now it's a beverage mix, this powder.
So you know, it'll probably be next, over the next couple of years a flavor expansion. So right now it's cacao. So next, you know, a flavor expansion and then probably a form expansion. So like in CBD I have gummies and tinctures, which are the two main ingestible categories. And then I have one topical product and so it'll probably be a similar path with the, the mushrooms. So right now the beverage mix, probably another beverage mix flavor, although I don't know if I'll need that because everybody likes chocolate.
And then probably similar to the cbd, a gummy.
And then after that, I mean that's that you're probably looking at two years because like I said, I like to keep it simple and slow and methodical. I spent way too long in corporate brand management and the corporate world where it was like, if you're not launching a new SKU every month, you fail. There's nothing new to talk about.
We can't do any advertising, we can't get new shelf space at the grocery store if we're not launching new skis all the time. I don't, I've had enough of that game.
I don't want all of the operational complexity of a big product catalog.
So yeah, then beyond that I don't, you know, I've got, I've got things. I love products, I love products that are important to me from a health and wellness perspective. So maybe get into that or just start adding that to the existing kind of mushroom and hemp base.
Like magnesium is something I've discovered over like the last year that's just been unbelievable that now I'm like, well, I gotta tell everybody about magnesium, but I can't do that until I have a product for it.
So we'll see. We'll see where the, where the world takes me.
You know, as a, as a founder and a very, you know, kind of hands on operator. I'm in the weeds pretty much every day, so.
And I like it. And that's kind of why I started this.
I like doing that.
So I'm going to just keep doing that and keep making really good products and see where it all takes me in five years.
[00:37:42] Speaker A: I love it. I love the attitude.
I know there's a very popular show right now where a guy gets onto a subway and he talks to random people and Gives them a mic and says, what's your hot take?
So this is your subway moment, wherever you want to take it. What's your hottest take from any part of your life?
[00:38:04] Speaker B: My hottest take from any part of my life.
I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but something that I'm trying to come up with, I'm just going to start talking rather than trying to come up with the right way to say it. So momentum.
I'm kind of obsessed with momentum over the last two to two to three years.
And it's been kind of a complete flip from the 20 years probably before that, where I didn't really do. And this is health and wellness kind of lifestyle focused at this point, but it really applies to everything.
I didn't do anything. I worked. I love my family. I hung out with my family, but I just kind of not even thought, but just left sort of my health alone. I'd ignored it and just sort of lived and just did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.
And then now, you know, obviously when I started this company, so about six years ago, that was kind of the first kind of step into doing little steps at a time from a health and wellness perspective. And it sort of just snowballed from there. So kind of like. Like what I mentioned earlier about just making little changes and stacking them over time, one at a time, so you could see if they work or not independently, right?
Independent. Don't change, don't change. Too many variables at a time.
What I found is I started doing that. I started just like I had momentum not to do anything for decades earlier in my life. I had suddenly built like this momentum machine where I was kind of like, like obsessed with. Became obsessed with changing things. And then they just. It's probably. I'm probably like, I've never read it, but I feel like I'm probably just describing.
What's that Atomic Habits book like? I think this is the whole premise of Atomic Habits, right?
[00:40:04] Speaker A: It's habit stacking. Yeah, no, no, definitely.
[00:40:06] Speaker B: But, like, what I.
What I didn't. Sorry, I'll just finish. What I didn't realize about it is how, like, addicting it becomes when you start stacking successful habits on top of each other. Right? So I did this. I take mushrooms. I started working out. I started going to bed at a reasonable time, putting my. Not looking at my phone at a certain time every night, right? Like, it just. It just snowballed and became addicting. Like, ooh, what's the next cool thing I can do in my life? That's actually going to make me feel better.
Like, I was worried it was gonna. I was worried when I started it, it was gonna be like a struggle, but it's actually the opposite. Like, once you break through, there's a struggle to be. Like, going to the gym all the time sucked at the beginning. But there was an unseen, like, wall that I broke through at some point where I was like, oh, all of these things are just great and I feel awesome. And I wake up every day and I'm happier and my mood is better. Like, what can I do?
What can I do next to make it even better? So that's kind of my.
That was another very long winded answer to your subway moment. But that's kind of been my enlightenment over the last few years of my life that I wasn't expecting and I didn't set out to find. It just sort of happened.
[00:41:24] Speaker A: I love that. And I feel that same flow in the same way because I was blessed with an extraordinary genetics.
42.
And I remember that I wore size 34 jeans and was 134 pounds until I turned 28.
Then my brother had warned me, said, jeremy, when you turn 28, you got to do something. I'm like, I don't know what you mean. And then I turned 28 and, you know, gained weight, gained weight. And, you know, it wasn't until I actually, you know, took up karate in the fall of, like, intentionally, you know, doing something specifically as a habit, you know, going Tuesday and Thursday and kind of building on those skills, you know, starting out the least flexible person in the room to the second least flexible person in the room.
Progress, progress, progress. But no, I, I feel that habit stacking because now, like, I, I finally challenged myself to, like, care what I'm eating. And so I did something crazy this last last two weeks of.
Because St. Patrick's Day was coming up and so the brisket was on sale. I'm like, you know what? I'm going to eat a St. Patrick's Day meal as the primary meal of the day, and eggs and supplements and see how I do for a week. And it's been crazy to like, see how much of my life was like, oh, get stopping at the grocery store to pick up, you know, a snack or, oh, the kids are hungry and I'll have some Doritos with them. Like, there was so much extra snacking that I didn't consciously think about that I was doing. And now I'm literally just eating, you know, brisket with cabbage, potatoes and carrots Last night I had to switch up because I ran out of brisket, but I had stew meat. So it's the exact same thing, just rosemary flavored instead of same ingredients, but a stew instead. But it's just been getting into the habit, changing positively. I feel that same momentum now that you're talking about from both Grottian from like, well, I'm. I've lost £4 doing this, so not bad.
Um, probably as much as not from eating as much and not eating as much junk. But as a. I'm sure that somebody listening is like, okay, that's a lot of sodium because brine.
[00:44:16] Speaker B: You can't be perfect.
[00:44:18] Speaker A: You can't be perfect. You can't. Can't balance everything. And actually I'm. I'm really liking the stew version of it instead. It's the same kind of medium.
So I think I'm just going live off of stew for the next month and see, see where it gets me.
[00:44:32] Speaker B: I love it. See, you're in the same place I am.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:44:37] Speaker B: Just try little things all the time.
I love that. Talking about where you are.
[00:44:41] Speaker A: Give a final shout out as we kind of wrap up this adventure. Where can people find you if they want to chat at you, if they want to find your brand? Is there anything interesting that you've written about recently or going to any conferences? Where can people find out more about Kyoto?
[00:45:02] Speaker B: Yeah, so just the website is the main place. So very simple, just kyotobotanicals.com K Y O T O and then all the socials, they're all Kyoto botanicals.
I predominantly now I move around a lot on the socials. I'm pretty bad about that, but I've kind of settled recently on YouTube just because it's a really awesome place where I can try to, like I've said before, do that one on one connection at scale. So I kind of treat YouTube like a video version of my blog that I have on the site. And then kyotobotanicals.com is where kind of the written form and the much deeper content of those is. So I do a lot of YouTube shorts and then I do a lot of blog posts, a lot of blog posts. So there's a ton of information on our site about cbd, about mushrooms, that sort of thing. So those are the main.
Those are the main areas.
You know, I've been talking quite a bit lately about legality on the blog. You asked a question earlier today about legality of the category.
I'm sure people have a lot of questions around what's going on with Congress right now with Hampshire.
[00:46:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:21] Speaker B: And the switch from the.03, the 0.3% rule to the 0.4 milligram rule per container, which gets at, you know, what I was talking about earlier. If it's a ratio of 0.3%, you can get a lot of milligrams of THC in a bottle of hemp product, Whereas if it's 0.4 milligrams in the whole bottle, that's nothing.
Um, my products are underneath that limit.
Most CBD products out there in the market are not underneath that limit. Not even close. Most have all full spectrum CBD products. Most of them have more than.04 milligrams of THC per serving, let alone per bottle.
Um, which is another side of the industry. People don't realize.
A full spectrum CBD gummy has a milligram of THC in it. A 25 milligram CBD gummy has about a milligram of THC, which is a pretty good amount of THC, especially for people that aren't used to it. But anyway, so if people are curious, like what's going on with the hemp regulatory world, Congress is potentially going to pass, so that's potentially going to pass in November of this year of 2026.
So our products are within the legal limits. But if people have questions about that, what that means for their product, I've got stuff on the blog about that and they can reach out to us directly
[email protected] for any direct questions. And I love talking about it, so I'll help anybody I can.
[00:47:58] Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, I appreciate the conversation and see you around.
[00:48:03] Speaker B: That was great.
Well, thanks so much.
