dry vape

Kannaboomers Podcast, Episode 20: John Bailey, Davinci Vaporizers
Kannaboomers: (00:00)

Hey, it's Tom. Welcome back to the Kannaboomers Podcast, episode 19. For a while I've been trying to find someone who can talk about dry herb vaporizing, and I finally ran into John Bailey, product development manager at Davinci vaporizer and we had a great conversation. I've been curious about this for awhile. You know, we know kids are blowing big clouds of vape and putting nicotine in there, their box mods and stuff. This is something different. This is grinding your herbs and putting it in a specially designed vaporizer that lets you dial the temperature to exactly what you want. Very interesting conversation. And um, after we hung up, uh, John and I kept talking and he mentioned that he's got two mantras. One is ‘I'm going to blow your mind,’ two is, ‘we're going to replace everything in your medicine cabinet.’ We didn't quite get that far, but give it a listen and I think you're going to be very interested. I know I was. So here he is, John Bailey, of Davinci vaporizers.

Kannaboomers: (00:53)

This is, “Let's talk about Weed” the Kannaboomers podcast, CBD, micro dosing, and all things related to medical cannabis for baby boomers. From San Diego, here's your host, Thomas J.

Kannaboomers: (01:04)

A lot of baby boomers are unfamiliar with the vaping technology. You can vape E-Liquids, which we know about, but you guys make a drive vaporizer that is a totally different thing from kids blowing clouds. Right?

John: (01:15)

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, the kids blowing clouds thing is definitely, you know, the, the e-cig or box mod type of environment. It's obviously, um, there's some mixtures of nicotine and other oils. They're a carrier oil is what they call them normally to help facilitate that, that, you know, um, result, uh, dry herb vaporizers, you know, uh, even concentrate vaporizers are a little bit of a different mix. They deal with more of the plant itself, so there's not another agent added to that property to produce, you know, heavy billows of vapor. It's much more of a simple, cleaner, actual vaporization method that, it's, basically baking off any unit of the moisture molecules or anything in the plant itself. And that's where you're actually extracting from them.

Kannaboomers: (01:59)

Some of those carrier liquids, there's a debate whether they're, they're healthy or not. Right?

John: (02:03)

Absolutely. Absolutely. Like the most common when you hear of is PG, which is propylene glycol. Um, obviously that's, it's not a good one. We don't know that term. You know, it's not a household name. So for the most part we should know about PG is that it's a synthetic based, uh, material. This is made, it's FDA approved, you know, and, and a lot of consumer products, but overall there's not been a lot of testing on the long term exposure of heat and flash heat to that material then thus to the lungs and how you absorb it. So it's kind of like right now gray area, I'd say, you know, there's just been over time has not been enough study to really bring that to whether or not it's good, yes or no, you know? Um, definite.

Kannaboomers: (02:41)

So there's kind of a great experiment going on. It's hard to do a clinical study on something like that. There's so many different variables. There's so many different products. There's different vaporizers, different vape juices.

John: (02:52)

You see it like in a lot of different things. I think that you've seen over the last let's say 50 years just in people using products outside of your norm, you know, for inhalation purposes or for eating purposes or drinking purposes that, you know, you look at the soda industry, they deal with the same kind of slack. Is it okay to use high fructose corn syrup or not or any of these artificial sweeteners? And so there's always going to be this debate and as much as we know is what we know of the human body outside of doing 10, 20, 30 year trials and really knowing that somebody was like a daily user of these products over and over again for that 10 years and equating some kind of results to that. It's definitely an ongoing, uh, so, you know, research.

Kannaboomers: (03:28)

Let's talk then about dry herb vaping and it's sort of a farm to mouth sort of model where there aren't additives. It's just maybe you're growing it yourself and you just grind that herb up and put it in your vaporizer. Right?

John: (03:41)

Uh, yeah, absolutely. And probably growing it yourself as, I mean you have complete control over the environment that's involved in the soil, the water, everything that's producing that result, you know, versus you know, even a large cultivations or things are going to have to be looking for whether or not these pesticides or whether or not they're using other types of materials or adding certain things to the soil to maybe boost their yield or create a, you know, same effect that you've seen in agricultural use. You know, with fruits and vegetables. So there's a, there's a game to play there as well. But for the most part, if you grow it yourself, you're in control of that environment.

John: (04:14)

And it becomes the same thing as if you're planting tomatoes in your garden and you're eating your own tomatoes, you're probably the closest to source as possible and you're minimizing the rate dramatically.

Kannaboomers: (04:25)

Do you find that that's the type of customer that gravitates to your product as people who want to kind of control it from the soil to, to their mouth?

John: (04:34)

Yeah. Yes, absolutely. For currently as we sit, you know, we've really made an impact in the industry from being a little bit more of that. Um, we're not, we're not called simple by any means or a little bit more complex because is our consumer generally we found is the cannabis connoisseur or somebody that is looking to dial in temperatures, really taste the material that they're using. I get a lot of times that people have never really, I guess, tasted or really understood the flavors of their cannabis.

John: (05:03)

And so our devices really bring that to fruition. So we found in the past a lot of those consumers that we targeted and have been the user that really wants control over their experience in all spectrums, especially the medical user. Um, but you know, as, as time has started to adopt it and legalization is getting better, um, we're seeing a lot more new users. So we're seeing a lot of new people that, you know, they were, we weren't attracting to attracted to traditional smoking methods. Know that whether it be for stigmas and stereotypes or just in general, they're a person that's healthy and they're very much not, like I don't, I don't smoke anything. What's my alternative? Because I'm also looking for something that is helping with nausea or helping with pain relief. And so we get to experience that now all over again with a new consumer, which has been very exciting.

Kannaboomers: (05:43)

Right. As you mentioned, a lot of people just don't like to inhale burning plant matter chemically. There's combustion that creates a certain experience and then there's inhaling vapor, which they're are two different things completely, right?

John: (05:56)

Yeah. Uh, smoking, you know, uh, traditional smoking methods, burning plant matter, uh, produces a lot of carcinogens, it produces a lot of harmful material just from fire, igniting a, you know, and creating an ash. If you think about it, when you smoke something, it just, it just all goes away. You're, I mean, you, you have an ashtray or you ash it and that's about the most that's left the remnants of, of that material. Whereas when you vape, you'll find that a lot of your mass, a lot of the matter of it is still still there. Matter of fact, even, uh, you know, a little known secret is that that stuff is actually, we call it ABV, which is “already been vaped” material.

And that material actually is chemically active as well. So you, you haven't even harmed the plant enough to make the material that's leftover unusable. It's actually still usable. Um, so, you know, so it's like really like the best, the best method for both of yourself, but as well as preserving all the medical benefits of the plant.

Kannaboomers: (06:48)

You're inhaling resins, right?

John: (06:51)

Yeah, we're, yeah. Resins, a lot of the, basically like if you think of like a, like a tree, almost like a sap or their glands, you know, the material that's coming from the glands of the flower.

Kannaboomers: (07:00)

Okay. And then let's talk about terpenes cause that's a big piece of it too, right? The different temperatures. You're gonna activate different terpenes. Is that correct?

John: (07:08)

Yeah, that's correct. So terpenes are like anything else that you experience in the world right now. For example with food and um, you know, flowers and trees, a lot of that already produces, which are just natural aromas and flavors.

John: (07:21)

So these materials, uh, these chemicals are preserved at certain temperatures. And then at certain temperatures they release their, their benefits as well. So the same reaction that you get from an air freshener in your house that has that pine smell and you get that euphoric like, oh, I'm in the forest. And that's like a good reminder. It's basically triggering, you know, signals in the brain that are allowing for euphoric feelings, whether it be just a, uh, on the surface level, which is an emotional response or something that you feel versus something that's actually chemically reacting with your body and opening up different sensory receptors. And so you hear a lot about your endocannabinoid system and if you go deeper, you hear about your CB 1 and CB 2 receptors. These are receptors that actually embrace, uh, cannabinoids, endocannabinoid system, which is triggering a response. Your recovery system, these terpenes, they react in the same way.

So they allow your body to really ready for the material that you're about to consume or ingest or whatever word you want to use for that method. Uh, essentially bringing the best positive results and enhancing them, you know, the experience.

Kannaboomers: (08:23)

So aromatherapy is a real thing. It's not some imaginary function. It actually works.

John: (08:30)

Yeah, that's correct. And you see it a lot more. I mean that's why a lot of healthy people, really healthy people embrace aromatherapy because they're in the best position really to receive the benefits from aromatherapy. They probably aren't smokers, they probably don't eat a lot of bad food. They probably exercise regularly. And so they're the people that their body, they've been maintaining almost like a, a vehicle. So, uh, it's at its most optimal performance. It's ready to really receive any material. Obviously that's not harmful that you can contribute to the body.

What you find that people that aren't really buying the whole aromatherapy thing, it's because their body really isn't ready or prepared for that either. So you'll find that, um, you find that a, if they're not, they don't eat well. And a lot of fast food, a lot of soda or sugary drinks or bodies already working really hard to compensate to recover from a lot of that absorption of things that we don't normally absorb in the real world that are natural world that way. And so you know, and something like aroma therapy definitely isn't gonna break through those barriers either it's going to just be at best surface level, they might get an experience from it. It might be more of an emotional response, but the physical is lacking there unfortunately.

Kannaboomers: (09:37)

Okay. So I kind of hear you saying uh, users of your product might be more just more sensitive with aromas and that has pretty far reaching health effects just in, in sort of a cleaner experience all the way around with, with taste and smell.

John: (09:52)

100% yeah, they definitely are on there. Their bodies are just ready at that level to experience a little bit more of the natural world in a better way.

Kannaboomers: (10:00)

You said some of your early users users were more medicinally inclined than the newer people who are getting into vaping. Are some of the people you've spoken about who are just kind of clean living? I mean, uh, clean food and clean cannabis.

John: (10:14)

Yeah, we see that definitely, you know, the more, uh, they're more in the wellness industry. They already obviously are believers of homeopathic type of remedies or wellness and just being more of a natural source. Uh, we also find that it's not even just, I guess the people that are healthy that are a new customer, but as well as people that are looking for a change anyways. Like maybe there they did stop smoking or maybe they, um, saw smoking is always a bad thing. Know when they were in high school there was the guys that were like huddled up on the corner on the, you know, around the corner from the school and they were smoking on the corner and they just have a negative response to that. So they want something that seems to be, you know, or is coming across a more positive for them.

Kannaboomers: (10:56)

Let’s talk about the high itself cause I've done some dry vaping and I've noticed that, you know, some of the things that sometimes afflict you if you're too impaired. Paranoia, anxiety really don't show up when you're dry vaping for me at least.

John: (11:11)

Yeah. The overload of the material is as much more dialed down in vaping and vaping. You can get to a level where there's control and when you can control your temperatures, you know there's, there's these things called boiling points. When you can control these, you're activating the plant that it's at a more finite level. You're basically dialing in with that at that higher, that euphoric experience or the healing is, is really going to produce when you smoke, you're igniting the whole bouquet all at once and just basically like, hey, give it to me all. And sometimes our bodies, our receptors are not, um, there, there may be that it's what we equate it to is what's called tolerance. But really what it does is that there's only certain amount of bioavailability for any way that you ingest cannabis. And when smoking comes into play, it's definitely not, it's actually not the most ideal, um, method, uh, of, of bioavailability.

Because it's uncontrolled. There's like a large spectrum and it's something from like 20 to 40% and it can swing one way or the other just depending on how you're doing it. Maybe you're tackling with your water, whatever. The point is that it's so uncontrollable that your body just kind of reacts and sometimes it's too much and it overloads the system. And so those things like panic and those things like a, you know, anxiety and nausea come into play because your body's not really knowing what to do with this chemical and then tell it where, you know, runs it through your system. It's going to be a little bit of a bumpy road. It's going to be overload. Whether it got carried through oxygen too fast to the brain or you know, or some people experience it the other way around where they, their body just becomes completely low, almost like lethargic and only get like those heavy indica strains where you're like stuck in the couch and that's where that name comes from.

It's really because it's just, it put your body into overload and maybe your body was already working on something else at the time. So you can't, you can't control the experience. Whereas like in vaping, you know, there's a spectrum and you know, for us we equated that a lot to teas. We're very good on understanding, you know, herbs and plants. We actually started in the aroma therapy space already. We were teaching people how to vape with peppermint and eucalyptus and they were like, what? You can't do that? And we're like, yes you can. And this is how essentially like when you smoke, when you drink tea, tea's are better activated at different temperatures of water as well. So, for example, oolong tea or green tea, they may be in the lower two hundreds or mid 200's so you don't generally use scorching boiling water for tea.

John: (13:39)

And that's what a lot of people don't really know. So when you grab that Lipton packet and you throw it in the boiling water and you wait a few minutes for it to steep and you drink it, you're like, yeah, this is helping me. Maybe it was a therapeutic one and it might, for the most part, if you want the most optimal experience, you're going to look up to temperatures and you're gonna see that's why you have electric kettles out there that have temperature control because there's actually a certain temperature to release the boiling point of that plant and it produced its, you know its benefit. Cannabis is similar. So we're vaping, we're doing the same thing. We're saying, hey, cannabis has 432 compounds, 70 known cannabinoids. Like those all can be dissected and simplified down and there's a temperature for it. And there's also a temperature that reacts with the terpenes. That's part of that profile as well. So when people are like, I don't really see much vapor and you're at 340 degrees and you're kind of just picking up taste. There's also carrier agents that are coming with it. There's benefits that are coming with it and the people that are always looking for like that high, they're like, I, I'm using cannabis, I should get high. It gets changed. So that's why you see in vaporizers, your experience is going to be a lot more fine tuned to what you're getting. So you can remove the fear of anxiety or nausea because you now have said, I'm going to just control what that experience is going to be for myself.

Kannaboomers: (15:00)

So there's a lot of trial and error and a lot of learning that goes into this, right? I mean a lot of experimentation. Do you help educate your consumers? Are there resources they can look at and say, okay, I want to set the temperature at 360 and see how that goes. What would you say to someone who's just wading into this as kind of a rookie? How do they figure out what is best for them?

John: (15:22)

Again, I think, I think you pinned it pretty well. It's about trial and error. It's about really learning yourself the same. It was, it would be if you all of a sudden we're starting a diet and you're like, okay, where do I start? Somebody going to be like, okay, here's a bunch of green drink juices and here's a bunch of smoothies you can have and here's, here's a, here's some foods you can put together, but you really don't know because everybody's different. Everybody's body types are different. So yes, we have a temperature scale and we say, okay, visit our website or go to our blog or our youtube and we talk all about this step Wellington at points, you know how best practices, things like that. What it comes down to though at the end is you still have to learn yourself and how you react with that because every, every person is different from one to the next.

John: (16:03)

So if I told somebody, yeah, I mean low temperature for cannabis and you'll get just THC-A and it's going to protect against like neurodegenerative diseases and epilepsy and stuff. Cool. That's good to know. All right. But well then we go into something further like CBD-A it's a, you know, anti-inflammatory and there's some antibacterial stuff and you're like, no, I did that and it's still not working for me and I'm still, my muscles are still hurting. My joints were still hurting. Okay, well we get to learn from that. Now what else can we do? Or do we need to find a strain that has a higher percentage mix and you, so you're going to have to journal, you're gonna have to document, you're going to have to really record what's working best for you. I know that my experience, I still to this day get introduced to a strain and not know what it's going to produce.

I, regardless of what the label says, regardless of the percentage, make second say, okay, um, you know, it's got a high level of THC, but it's got a really high level of CBD as well. And those are supposed to counter each other and this and that. And then I go to smoke it, I go to vape it and then totally different experience from when I thought I was going to be. Why? Because I'm a different person and whoever before me might've set of 10 people in the room, they all experienced “x.” Cool. Um, but I'm to experience maybe “y” and this and because my body's type is different or because maybe because I have my own favorite strains and I already used that three hours ago in the day you don't know what the next three hours it looks like. So it's really about recording and you know time of day, the mood you've been in, you know what you've eaten that day.

If you really want to get technical, you really want to dial it down like what works for you. It has to be kind of divided up that way. There's no one shoe fits all. But for the most part we go to shows, we go to a lot of local stuff here. We're involved in normal, we're involved in a lot of the dispensaries. The Budtender classes and we go and we start to say, hey, this is what you should be saying at the counter. This is what you should be asking to really you know, help that customer along for the consumer, the somebody that's asking for information and then a on our website and on our YouTube we tried to do the same thing but it's still very surface. We were, it's, it's almost like I wanna say like we're doctors but we definitely want to like understand you more. We definitely want to say what works for you and what temperatures work for you and probably do a good trial of it too.

Kannaboomers: (18:15)

There's so much to unpack here. So, you mentioned like THC-A and say we know that that is available at a certain temperature. If you go above that temperature, are you still going to get that THC-A or are you closing the door on it?

John: (18:29)

No, you'll still get the temperature. It's still going to be activated at that temperature. What ends up happening is, again this is a lot of science that we are continuing to research. Say you go above that and you start getting into the higher levels, you're getting into more of your, um, let's say humulene for example, which is like a anti-inflammatory, but it's at the top end of the, uh, temperature spectrum that not only you getting THC-A but you're also getting humulene and as well. And you're also getting CBC as well. And these other cannabinoids, they played their own roles, right? So it's not that you're not just getting the THC-A now, now you're introducing the other cannabinoids spectrums and it could skew the results of what originally you were trying to get him from the THC-A. Um, you know, absorption. So you have to, you have to play that game as well. Okay. So I went 10 degrees higher and I activated this one as well. What happened there? You know, was there an adverse effect? Was it the same effect? Was it better? It was boosted and, and again, so it's granular. It gets a little micro like that. But for the most part answer your question. Yes, you are going to still absorb THC-A and then you're just going to introduce the next levels as well.

Kannaboomers: (19:37)

Without the possibility of overwhelm that you spoke of with smoking, where you're getting the whole bouquet at once. You can still dial in and say, say long-term, I'm concerned about Alzheimer's and I want to give myself the terpenes that I, I believe are going to protect my brain against that disease. Can I reliably do that or is there, there's some guesswork involved?

John: (20:00)

There's guesswork involved. There's also, there's, there's a reliability, but it would take some time of the guesswork to really make sure that you're making the impact that you're trying to make with that.

Kannaboomers: (20:11)

Right. There's so many variables or strains. There's temperature, there's, as you said, time of day food, your stomach, mood, all that stuff. You mentioned the peppermint and Eucalyptus. Are you guys actually talking about vaping? Other, other herbs?

John: (20:26)

Yes, absolutely. Um, we, while back actually when I first joined the company, in fact when I first joined DaVinci, um, I was actually in more in the marketing side and at that time I was definitely doing a lot of cannabis research and I was very involved in the community because being in the marketing side, I got to work with a lot of the affiliates. It's, I got to hear a lot of customer concerns. And one thing I noticed was because we did have the aroma and go really strong at that time too, I said, let me understand this more. So I actually took the time, looked at the wide spectrum of different herbs and plants. So we're talking eucalyptus or peppermint and orange blossom, you know, caffeine, uh, Kava or was it cola? You know, there's like so cola and that's what they used as like a base in Coca Cola.

There's so many different things. We said, okay, let me, let me pull all these spectrums in. I looked at things or we can't even get here in the U.S. Just to see what is out there. And they all have a boiling point. So at some point I said, all right, let's make some cocktails. Let's make some herb cocktails. Instead of saying, okay, if you vape peppermint, uh, you'll get, or let's say eucalyptus and you have a sore throat, it's going to help soothe your sore throat. It's going to open up some of your, uh, your nasal cavities. It's going to really, really help you the same way eucalyptus does that's in your Vicks or your creams or you know, they, I think they have like baths, you know, salts or whatever you can do and does the same process. Right. But this way you're inhaling it.

John: (21:44)

We thought, okay, let's do that. We have a bunch of, uh, earlier videos on our Davinci. I encourage anybody check them out because they're so funny. I think I'm on a couple of them, which is you can bake, you can vape. What? And they were, they were our crew vaping, different things, caffeine and eucalyptus and all kinds of stuff. Even tobacco, you know, we tried it and we tried everything in the vaporizer and we're like, wow, that's pretty amazing. Some things really work. Like caffeine really works in a vaporizer. It gets you a little buzz and you get going and it's energetic and it's really, it's really cool, really cool. So I went and said, all right, let me make some recipes. So we had some interesting recipes, like a Netflix and chill and it's like a lot of more soothers like lavender and camomile and uh, these things, they, they, they worked, you know, they're not like super impactful.

It's not like taking an Ambien, but it's definitely going to, there's a definite mood shift. Is it just a change? And it's just interesting. So I asked, I encourage anybody to experiment, whether if you already into teas or you're already into herbs, you know, a fresh ones for sure. I you can't like, I mean you're cooking stuff is, is dry, so there's not a lot of moisture to pull out of there for vapor. But you got like a, a sprig of basil. It's like all of a sudden you can activate like that feeling and maybe you have like a pasta dish after it just going to enhance it more. There's actually a chef in Chicago. He has a five star restaurant. It's like one of it's on the top 100 world. A really cool experience, um, when I first saw that a vaporizer was being used with cooking was he feels a little pillows full of like basil and uh, like parsley and thyme, right?

And the Italian seasoning type of blend. And he puts that pillow on the, on the bottom, cuts a little slit in it, puts the plate on top. And so the, the, the person that's eating the food, every time they cut into the plate, every time they cut into the food, it releases a little bit of vapor and they get both at the same time while they're eating. Like really enhancing the experience is a 100% vape. Um, crazy herbs out there just go wild.

Kannaboomers: (23:37)

But humans have been inhaling smoke for thousands of years. I'm sure medicinally the use of cannabis as a burning element, it goes back to who knows when. And we've been smoking tobacco a long time too, but the idea of using the lungs as sort of a medical delivery system is fairly new, I guess. And again, there's a level of experimentation going on here. I think?

John: (24:00)

Yeah, I know. I would agree with that. We seem to want to experiment with all kinds of stuff. Right? Um, so, so as humans where like I equate it to almost like the caveman visual where it's just like I'm, I'm there and I'm tinkering with some tools. I'm just trying to figure it out. I feel like we're just like at that level, it's super evolved and that we're still trying to figure it out and we're still trying to make fire within a sense like we're tasting everything, we're eating everything where, you know, we're, we're figuring out what works best for us. Um, I've found personally it's usually whatever comes out of the ground is probably the first place that I really want to start, which is what is earth provide for me already? Um, and so smoking is, interesting enough. It's kind of like a result of an action, which is like we learned to make fire, we started burning stuff somewhere. At some point we inhaled some smoke and it either created a result one way or the other. It's a very interesting, like I wish we could go back and see all the documents that experience of shamans burning these herbs and plants and trying to heal their villages and be like, what were you doing? Cause that might be relative to what we're doing now.

Kannaboomers: (25:00)

The first thing for anybody prescribing any kind of medicine is do no harm and is vaping harmful? We don't really know for sure, but it seems to be less harmful than inhaling burnt matter.

John: (25:12)

Yeah, that's correct. I mean, you still get at a certain temperature. You still are simulating combustion, right? You're still 392 degrees in in a window to 411. There's, there's a combustion period happening where you can produce harmful, you know, material humulene is not exactly your most favorited, um, cannabinoid. It's, it was, it's in a spectrum. And as you get further up, there's other things that are like, they're harmful for you. Are they as harmful as lighting and smoking something? Not as much. And that's why I think that the most times when I try to tell somebody, okay, if you're going to smoke it, that's your experience. You want to try to use water, you know, to use a recycler. So you're at least filtering out most of the harmful carbons, cause carbons are bad for us.

John: (26:01)

You know, we don't like to burn things that you, you know, people die from sitting in your car with it running in a garage, just trapping yourself with those gases we've already known. They're very harmful for you. Vaping can play a role. It just really depends on what they're using. That's why, you know, Davinci, we take what we heat it with very seriously. So we're using ceramic with, uh, you know, glass, a glazed pot ovens or we're using a glass path. Are we like, we're in the IQ, so we used to Zirconia ceramic, we use materials that were durable, that had high, high, high k rating so that they could not be harmful if baked off of any way, shape or form. So that we understood that at least at the heating level, or warming the material with the least possible extra introduction to other materials being in that bulb, not air path.

So when you see people with like metal coils, there's a concern there because metal over time oxidizes causes harmful chemicals and you add that to another material, say like resins from cannabis, you know, eventually over and over again it becomes more of a carbon material. So you see the ash and the heavy darkness at the bottom of your pipe or stuff like that. That's, it's really not good stuff. You know, like if you should be cleaning more regularly, so if you have a smoker's cough or some issues, it's generally because you're now, you know, you're, you're involving a lot of those carbons into your system, which is just going to start blocking. It's not going to, there's no good effect to that. So I urge people, even with vaporizers know what you're, you know, you know where you're getting into because metal coils or the wrong kind of glass, maybe it's not quartz and it's a cheaper version, you know that you're essentially introducing the harmful chemicals.

John: (27:38)

So something is great. A cannabis that is very helpful that has been proven to, you know, really start breaking the mold and the ideas of what is harmful to us. Like diseases like cancer and things like that, that that's actually doing it. Positive benefit. You don't want to be countering that benefit by using a vaporizer that isn't doing well with that. And for the most part you're already playing dangerously because you get into high heats anyways. That's why dabbing and those higher temperatures can also be very concerning as well. So when our vaporizers, as we tried to just bring it back to, okay, what is the most minimal impact, what's the safest way to heat it is too hot becomes what's called like flashpoint. Whereas if you go ramp up to 430 degrees fast, you probably have a material there that has it's flashing heat and that Abrasiveness it, it causes it to really, um, you know, almost like explode again combustion, same way. Like you have a boiling pan on the, on the stove and you know, you put a little oil in it and all of a sudden you drop your onions and interests cross. I got a huge splatter reaction. It's the same thing's happening in your body if you have a vaporizer that does the same result. So be mindful of that.

Kannaboomers: (28:47)

And I'd like to get your, your opinion on vape pens, pens that are pre-filled with PG and stuff, and then the quality of your machine, the quality of your vaporizer has far reaching ramifications too. I mean, if you're getting a cheap thing from China, you want to be really careful.

John: (29:04)

Absolutely. Um, yeah. So we're, we're gonna unpack on that. So first of all, yeah, yeah. Let me, let me, uh, so I heard you say a few things. Is it the first thing let's say. Okay, so if I were looking at the choice of materials to use the my, my cannabis or my even material herbs, uh, Eucalyptus, whatever, what you want to do, you want to be calling us enough? It's just the entire experience. So as you're at the, you know the retail front, like a smoke shop or something like that or you're online, you're looking at it, you're saying, okay it looks good. It my complement my life and it's got a nice color. The button looks pretty decent, screen looks good. You know, you kind of look at all these surface ideas and you say, okay this is great. I know put an x ray machine on that and look at everything else from the inside out.

John: (29:49)

What does the air path look like? Where does the air come in from? You know, it was, a lot of vaporizers. As you get smaller, as you get more compacted into you getting some danger zones, there's only so much stuff you can fit inside of a small device like this. So you're like, okay, where does the air come in? Cause if he ever comes in and it's coming in from one section of the vaporizer, maybe it's coming from the bottom, right. Well that started the journey from that point on. Anything that's going to be introduced into that, that experience is going to be something we need to look at. So if air comes in from the side and say it's the side with the buttons and then say right behind the buttons is a PCB board and then the oven's right next to the PCB board.

John: (30:24)

So we have some, some interesting things that we're playing with their, so we're playing with a PCB board that has a microchips and different materials, silica in metals and um, soldering material. And you're going, okay. And then it gets, maybe it's a little warm because the oven's next to it. So now whatever, even at low temperature that could be off gassing from those materials is now introduced from your path as well. So you're like, okay, now from there to there, to your material than the material out, hey, what's the air path look like? Is it a plastic shaft? Can I see it? Can I clean it? Can I remove it? You know, a lot of the IQ, the reason why we built the flavor chamber, uh, was too that you can remove it and actually have a cleanable path, like a path you can see all the way down to the oven.

John: (31:07)

Um, you know, where a lot of other materials, a vaporizer is out there. If they don't come apart that way, maybe they give you a pipe cleaner. What else is going on in there? You know, and what does collecting in there, your material, vaping over a long periods of time, it's going to last forever. Not going to be, it's not a, you know, a controlled environment where whatever the healthier parts of that was actually being embraced. Now it's over time and it's an organic matter, right? So everything we know of in life molds everything we know in life, you know, deteriorates and becomes a degenerative. So if you have material collecting in your, in your path and you're heating it up and then it's cooling down and heating it up and down here you're experiencing all the spectrum of things that you probably don't want to ingest.

John: (31:53)

So you know when, when we look at vaporizers that way we say, okay, like let's break it down piece by piece by piece. If I can't see my air path, if I can't clean my mouthpiece so I can't. Why? What's it made of? Plastics, silicones, things that are not that great. And then the other, the other area that you mentioned, which is like stuff that's coming cheap from China two two things to understand what that one, are there cheap things available they're made in China? Yes. Or that she thinks available the minute and U.S. Yes, absolutely. It was a 100% it then becomes, well what's the responsibility of the reliability of the person or the brand of the company that's bringing that to user. Did they ask for the cheapest thing? Did they say, you know, I need this thing to be below a certain amount so that I don't charge my customers more than this amount.

John: (32:35)

And they say, okay, well the only options you have are X, Y and Z, and you get to whether or not you want to release that to the public and it would be that be your thing and you chose the cheapest and you really didn't think about the consumer like you did in cost, but what it was, the cost of it and long term when they, you might be exposing people to harmful materials. So my point in that goes, okay, well let's roll it down to what you mentioned, which is the oil pen market. Interesting market to see booming right now. I would say that it's one of the most prominent angles of the cannabis industry that are growing exponentially. Just overall the adoption rate because it's convenient because it's, it's accessible, it's very discreet. Um, it's not so threatening is like when you're handling the plant itself, which is, you know, again, it becomes more of a connoisseur type thing.

John: (33:24)

So some people don't like handling the material hands on, especially new people. And new people are like, they still have a negative stigma. They still have something that they've held onto. And then had an idea and said, I don't really want to touch that because that makes me “x” whatever name that they've learned for their, you know, their lifetime. And so they'd say, oh, but this oil thing, this seems very, oh my friend's doing it. Okay, so let me do that. But let's break that down. What's the oil made of? Cannabis is not oil. So it's like, um, I relate everything to the cooking industry cause I, I love being in the kitchen and it's probably close to what my experiences with cannabis too. I'd like to know how things interact. So I know that olive oil has like a really high smoke point versus something like coconut oil.

John: (34:09)

So coconut, it's going to be better for frying and because it just won't cook or bake off a lot of smoke. Well there's similar, similar to cannabis. It's like, okay, well there's oils that are at certain grades and levels. So when you break down an oil pen versus you gotta be, what was the oil used, uh, where did it come from? What was, what was added to it to make it so thin, so gold. So you know, vibrant and ready for me because cannabis doesn't look like that. It's a plant, you know, so it's green, it's brown, it's red. It's, you know, it's got colors and spectrum. So how did we get it to clear? How do we get it to get like that glow, bold flavor or gold look, there's that part, right? It's the process. Look into your extraction labs, look into the cultivation, make sure that they have all their certifications.

John: (34:51)

Checked and regulations are in place and they're doing a good job. And then the tech becomes another part of it. As we are a tech company, we don't directly deal with the flower and the cannabis. Again, we started as aromatherapy company. So we were actually pretty far from the cannabis industry initially. And then we, you know, over time, medical patients, people just started coming out of the woodwork saying, we love your product for my cannabis use. And they're like, oh, okay, let's understand that more. That was years ago. So now oil pens, we've looked at it and said, okay, you know, uh, what is the heater? What's the method that it goes into? What's the, the clear glass looking window that's around it glass? Is it plastic? Is it, you know, um, uh, different material all together does it bore silica does it, you know, so yeah, look at that.

John: (35:32)

You got to look at what is the heater. You can't see it, right? So you don't nearly know. Magic's happening inside of there and it's producing something and you trust that it's all great. But you know, what you come to find is you break one down, they use a, maybe a fill a cotton or a fabric of some sorts to use as a, like an absorption a damper method. There's a coil inside. It obviously gets hot. There's a heating method of some point. And so I feel, you know, I feel, you know, we feel in some aspects that there's a little bit of a, some ambiguity to how that process is working. And so as being herb vaporizer producer manufacturer for this long, we've looked at the oil industry in it because we can't answer all those questions confidently. We've been continuing to test and research on our side. So I can't give you a yes or no. I can't give you like a, is it better, is it not? I can only break down the materials. I can break down what the processes and the chemicals and then go reverted all back to why we vape to begin with, which is it should be healthier, it should be a better alternative than smoking.

Kannaboomers: (36:34)

That makes sense. I mean the, the type that you can again go straight to the plant without any additives I think is what is appealing to a lot of people who, who take up dry vaping. Absolutely. Now I'm looking at your product line and you have a, you got the “IQ” and the “Ascent” and uh, there's a, all of “IQ” are these convection or conduction.

John: (36:54)

So these are conduction vaporizers. Um, so you mentioned convection. There's a difference between the two. Right? Conduction is more of heating the material like in an oven. So whenever the vessel is that the material sits in whether for example, we use more of spherical oven bowl and there's heat lines that are baked into and um, laid into the ceramic so that your furthest away from the heat source directly one and then two, it's line through the whole oven so that you get an even heating all the way around. And it's essentially like putting your, you know, your muffins in the oven and baking them. It's um, you know, just a radiant radiating heat so it has a slower heat up time. It's definitely, the longer you have it on the hotter whenever that vessel might be gets just because it's an oven in your hand overall though it's a clean, even bake the material and you find that just overall long period of time.

John: (37:52)

That's what we've chosen to use because it gives you the best control of your temperature. Um, we've, we've dialed down the science and the math so well as far as our power control and how we control the amount of flow that goes to those heater, the heater to the material that we can get pretty close to within one to four degrees swing up or down and say this is where you're at and this is what you should be getting. Convection is the process of having heat or having herbs in, in, you know, in a container in some way and the heat source being separate and pulling heat over the material and thus activating and then bringing it to you in a motion. So for a good example is a tabletop vaporizer volcano. The volcano has a big bowl that sits on top of this volcano looking device that sits on your desktop and it has a fan built in and then you connect a bag to it, which is like a big Turkey bag and it once you turn it on you can hear the fan blowing.

John: (38:52)

It's blowing from the heater over the material and filling up the bag full of vapor. Without that process though, without the fan, the heat would just be happening and the herb be happening. But neither one of them would be working together. Some, some really enjoy this method of heating because it's more of an instant, um, result. For example, like the “Firefly”, uh, it's a vaporizer that has a heat source and a bowl and when you draw, you're pulling the air from the heat source over the material and into your lungs, thus creating the result and it being more instant because the heat you turn on the heat and activated as you're, you know, absorbing the material. So a good convection vaporizer should be able to produce more of an instant result. We feel as a company that we've looked at convection and said, we don't really feel like it's been done so well as far as what convection scientifically says, it's just, it's a little difficult to process depending on how close or far away the heater is and all of the science stuff, you know, it kind of still could be a hybrid of conduction and convection.

John: (39:54)

Cause if the heat is really close to the material, it's more of a, it's still baking it, even if it wasn't, if you weren't pulling air through it. So there's a, there's like, there's that. So we've said, all right, we're just going to focus on induction. We control it. We know the temperature is going to be pretty stable and steady and the user is going to get the result that they're looking for. For those that are looking for more of an instant result, there may be of your heavier smokers or they just don't, they want, they want something on the go, but like it's really on the go. They seem to go towards convection vaporizers. But what we found, what convection vaporizers is, they're kind of big. They've been big overall because it's very difficult to drive heat to that heater continuously, um, and not drain the battery pretty fast. So, uh, you find that all of them are a little bit bigger, you know, then your average portable vaporizer. So we've chosen conduction as our method for our vaporizers currently. Your listeners are getting a lot of information about, um, the science of this and what to look for.

Kannaboomers (40:45)

I'm wondering, do you see the industry as it matures, developing sort of a certification process that users can look at and go, okay, that's got the good housekeeping seal. Do you see that kind of possibility emerging?

John: (41:05)

We do see it, uh, to a degree. I believe that it will be like anything else, FDA certified or USDA or you know, it'll be a word, a letter, natural, organic. It will be a label. And we hope that, you know, at, at, at our echelon of things, we would hope that it would be, this certification carries certain weight. It means something, you know, we'd like to think that we're at some point are going to drive this to come to fruition because we just believe in it so much. Uh, whether or not I see it being the defining line of the cannabis industry or the way that people understand or byproducts and cannabis, I, I think we're far away from it right now. We're still struggling with is this organic cannabis or not? Is this extraction lab certified on all levels with all product. It's, we're getting there and I think with devices because they're so foreign, we're having this conversation and it's a good conversation but it hasn't been had enough to people to grasp onto that and then what those levels of certification might mean, you know, overall for them.

Kannaboomers: (42:07)

Yeah. It's a buyer beware kind of scenario right now. I think from my perspective at least we want to help educate people about the importance of materials and, and think about, you mentioned that the PCB board, which most of us goes right over our head, but how close are the electronics to the oven? You could be subjecting yourself to this off-gassing so really just getting the word out that you, you want to look closely at your device before you invest in it.

John: (42:33)

Totally. Yes. And um, you know, there's plenty of really low cost ones to, you know, experiment with, you know, we've, we've found, because we are at a higher price point that people usually graduate to our product. It's like we're at that next level and beginners kind of stumbled through a few products or a Low low level ones to get to. Okay, now that I know what I'm doing, what's the better, what's, what's the best out there for me? And that's when we start to come involved. But we're trying to actually get down lower into it and say like the micro we put out the micro is our latest vaporizer we put out, it's a totally for the micro-doser it's getting, you know it gets good love and it gets good slack also because it looks like it's big brother IQ. The IQ is like your bells and whistles.

John: (43:15)

It has precision. Tamp, it has the app that you can connect to. It has all this, you know, really good stuff that we've thought about, but we wanted to make something for the people that are more on the go. We encountered tons of artists and yoga teachers and business professionals, parents, people that are like, I don't need this 10 minute session. I don't need this big bowl. I maybe hit my vaporizer once a day and it's to turn down or it's to change my mood that after work or something. And so we said, okay, this is a great little product that we can give it to. It's a lot lower in costs. It has all of the purity elements that we put into the IQ. So it's still very safe and very well recommended by us. But it starts, we'll, we're going to start leveling down into the price points because we want to be attainable to the beginner and we want to be even that person's first vape.

John: (44:02)

Um, you know, and still have our Ferrari at the top. You know, if you really want to go and have the performance and the drive and the speed and you know, all the things that are going to fulfill your, uh, your next level of that understanding because we do, it's a, it's a learning curve. And last thing I want is somebody to be very intimidated by our products at the top end because we want to really, um still continue to spread education and start getting into the mindset of people to help them better understand what they're, what they're doing and their experience with cannabis. Yeah.

Kannaboomers (44:20)

Maybe a little shift here, but can we talk about grinding and why that's important as opposed to just stuffing a whole flower into the chamber?

John: (44:40)

Yeah. Uh, it's definitely important to grind in certain ways. I think you grind for the results, right?

John: (44:46)

Uh, when I grew up, it was like you just kind of, you know, material or not hip few, well, I'll just use some street term, a nugget in your hand, but in my hand, grind it up a little bit, throw it in my pipe and we're good to go. Um, what I've noticed and that experience may be older as I looked at it and going, okay, wait a second. I didn't even like, you'll find that you'll have material that's still green on the inside when you go to empty your pipe. Like, it's just like I didn't, I didn't do the best by carrying that. I initially scorched the outside surface and I didn't really embrace what the flower is giving me. So I got into grinders, you know, maybe like 10 years ago I said, I kinda, okay, I got to grind more. So bought a nice grinder.

John: (45:22)

It was very good. Titanium, you know, I still have it to this day. It's one of my favorite. And I said, um, you know, it's got to be able to open up the flower. When I open up the grinder top and I look at material, it should be open and flowery and vibrant. Looking at should have like no big chunks because I want to. The inside is what I want. I don't want, you know, everything on the outside and taking the extra time to grind. It really opens up your ability to do some even heating, some even activation across the material. What I heed people against though, now know your grinder, right? Some grinders are medium, uh, course type grinds, and some grinders will grind it down to a fine powder. Um, I would say when you're using vaporizers, you don't want the fine powder stuff.

John: (46:04)

That stuff is, it's toxic for vaporizers and not in the like the bad way. Like health wise, more like it just the life of your vaporizers is going to diminish fast because the smaller the materials, the more it gets into crevices in places that it wouldn't have gotten to before. Um, you know, our, our oven has a some holes at the bottom to carry the vapor through and if you have a really fine grind, you're going to be sucking a lot of those, uh, grinds through those holes. Uh, so there's, there's that problem. The other problem is that because conduction vaporizers work really the best if you pack them, if they have full, like at least close to 360 heating, most of it gets pretty hot. You want pack wall. The wall is a way it conduction works is the more surface area that's covered from the heater all the way through the material and back.

John: (46:50)

Uh, the better radiating heat you're going to get. So if you grind by hand, you're leaving air pockets in between. So a lot of those air pockets, it's going to cool the heat. It's not going to, it's not going to carry the heat through. So there's, there's that problem. Um, when you do a hand grinder and we do fine grind the other way around, if you try to pack it, it, you've, you've, uh, allowed so little space in between the material that now you're going to get air blockages, you're going basically going to stuff it and it's not gonna be able to pull air through it. So there's a happy medium, that happy medium. I say for most of you it's like a medium coarse grind, medium fine grind. If you have one of those vaporizers, sure are those grinders. Sure. But I go with like a medium course, something that opens it up, but when I stuff it down, everything's like feathery enough to where it fills the gaps and it's a nice good pack. And, uh, that was what I would recommend for most vaporizers, you know? And I think even just other smoking apparatuses, period, bongs, pipes, everything else like that, you have a hole, you don't want to use a screen. So much like I knew him back in the day or, but you used screens at the bottom of their pipes. Uh, metal screens too. Those are not the greatest. They definitely collect a lot of carbon. It's just much better to just do a medium grind and you know, a good pack and you're good to go.

Kannaboomers: (47:59)

It's kinda like making a shot of espresso. There's a lot of subtleties and nuances to, you know, packing it correctly and getting everything right.

John (48:15)

When I present. We actually bought a Breville espresso machine recently to put in our office because we wanted to, you know, we're, again, we're, we're a premium vaporizer. We're looking for the echelon of like, our company. And we were like, what better way than to start looking at other types of industries that do this very well. So we bought an espresso machine and we've been learning how to do espresso in our office. So all of us are baristas now. It's really crazy. But yeah, you learn that if the wrong grind produces a, a really crappy espresso. So you want to make sure that everything's dialed in pretty well.

Kannaboomers: (48:35)

The company started around 2011 or so, and you started in aromatherapy and the technology, as you've described it, I can imagine has evolved. Where do you see the future of vaping technology going? Um, do you think there will continue to be refinements as we, as we move into the future?

John: (48:53)

Yes, yes. I believe there will be refinements. I believe there's a few different ways. You know, as we see adoption rate still steady climbing, we see the industry being, I would say it's legalizing, right? And, and I say that like not just by legalizing, like it's becoming legal, but it's because the system and processes in which that govern and control these types of methods at the consumer level are getting better. They're learning where and how to put their business and their efforts into helping not only the consumer, but as well as making businesses thrive. Last I want to do is open the floodgates and everybody just goes bananas and we probably failed miserably and on. Not that we're not capable, but because it just allows a lot more of a spread of shotgun action versus we're going to get very laser and we're getting very specific and focused on how we're going to introduce this into the market. We learned a lot from the alcohol industry. We learned a lot from other ways that this has been applied and it's going to be step ups.

John: (49:49)

I just mean that people like it just legalize it and it's like, yes, but let's make sure that we do it to where we're setting up ourselves up for success vaporizers. Um, they're definitely going to continue to evolve. I don't believe we've stopped really making the next mechanism of how that's gonna work. I think that we're refining it better about the materials or the heating methods that we use. We may learn something, we may find out that there's lower temperatures that we don't know, or there may be water plays into it. You know, that we're going to have probably experiment with tons of different ways to drive that result of the customer. I believe we're gonna get smaller, you know, I believe we're going to get a much more somehow integrating into people's everyday lifestyle in a way because there's, um, you know, there's really amazing benefits to this and not only that, but it opens up other spectrums of people, different personality types and things that have been kind of bucketed into a way that they're being, and if you look at it, I was just reading an article this morning that was sent to me about, um, somebody that was dying, a kid that was diagnosed with autism that after two months of starting to use CBD, a high CBD THC strain tincture actually started to speak like normally like, uh, like as a regular person.

John: (51:02)

So we're like, wait, hold on. So we're filling in the gaps and what better way to do that was also the health version, which is like a vaporizer and look at the vaporizer and say, how can we continue to make this better?

John: (51:13)

It's solely low invasive that it's widely accepted across the world.

Kannaboomers: (51:18)

Essentially, we're talking about a medical device, but it's for a substance that still is not fully legal, even though it can save lives. Surreal in that way. Where can we find you online?

John: (51:30)

Absolutely. Davinci Vaporizer, we’re online, everywhere. Instagram. We have a really good following. Facebook. YouTube is where all of our videos are. I urge people to go check out our playlist. We have some really funny old ones from back in the day when you're trying to teach people how to use replaceable batteries without it, you know, exploding and stuff. So there's cool stuff there. Um, you can find us, you know, but you can start from our website, davincivaporizer.com and you'll find all of our products on our blog. And from there you can jump into our social media for everything. Social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I believe it's Davinci Vape or Davinci Vaporizer. Um, so yeah, we're definitely online, spread out everywhere. Uh, my name's John Bailey. I'm definitely on Linkedin. I'm definitely on Facebook.

Kannaboomers: (52:12)

I want to thank you for taking the time on a Sunday morning to explain all this to us because a, there's still so much education to be done and you really broke it down in ways that I think are going to be easy for our listeners to piece together. We'll be looking you up. Absolutely. Thanks, John.

Kannaboomers: (52:28)

You've been listening to, “Let's Talk About Weed” the Kannaboomers Podcast with Thomas J for more on medicinal cannabis for baby boomers. Visit us at kannaboomers.com