Steve DeAngelo Talks Smuggling Weed And Why Legalization Still Isn’t Working In Jerry Chu’s New Podcast Video

The first episode of Jerry Chu’s new long-form video podcast, produced with En Volá and distributed through High Times’ YouTube channel, opens with Steve DeAngelo on legacy cannabis, corporate drift, hemp wars and the legalization fight he says the industry still hasn’t finished.

A new cannabis interview series just landed, and its first move was a smart one: hand the mic to Steve DeAngelo and let him go straight at the fault lines still splitting the industry apart.

The debut episode of Jerry Chu and Blimburn founder Sergio Martínez’s new long-form podcast video, now live on the High Times YouTube channel in collaboration with En Volá and Blimburn Seeds, is built around DeAngelo, one of the most recognizable veterans of the modern cannabis movement, and it does not waste time warming up. Early in the conversation, he talks openly about moving large amounts of weed from Mexico across the United States in the underground era, then pivots into a broader argument about what legalization got right, what it got wrong and why the legal market still has not delivered on the vision many activists fought for. The result is less a standard founder interview than a full-on diagnosis of where cannabis lost its way.

That makes for a strong opening episode, especially because Chu does not treat DeAngelo like a museum piece. He pushes him into the hard stuff: the legacy market, corporate cannabis, hemp, California’s failures and the infighting that has fractured what used to feel like a more unified movement. DeAngelo’s answer, in essence, is that legalization is not finished, and maybe never really got the structure it needed in the first place. He does not say the industry went in the wrong direction so much as he says it still has not figured out how to do it right.

That tension sits at the center of the episode. DeAngelo argues that the industry spent years moving together, then started turning inward, defending commercial turf instead of fighting for broader cannabis freedom. He describes a three-way split between licensed cannabis, hemp and the legacy market, and says the resulting “civil war” has drained resources, confused lawmakers and opened the door to fresh attacks from prohibitionist forces. His bigger point is not just that the market is messy. It is that the movement stopped acting like a movement.

He is also blunt about what happened when money started flooding in. At one point, DeAngelo says the industry began inviting in people who had a relationship with dollars, not with the plant, and suggests many of the most powerful executives in cannabis today do not actually consume it. That critique lands especially hard coming from someone who helped build Harborside and co-founded Arcview, then watched the sector grow into something far more corporate, fragmented and defensive than the culture that created it.

And yes, the episode has the kind of moments people will clip. DeAngelo recounts years of smuggling, talks about traveling into risky cultivation regions abroad and jokes that he should have become “the Anthony Bourdain of weed.” But the conversation is most interesting when it stays with the bigger stakes. He argues that in California, legal dispensary weed often costs more and delivers less than legacy product, that many serious consumers still buy outside the regulated system and that legal cannabis has become burdened by taxes and rules that make it difficult for smaller operators to survive. Whether or not readers agree with every detail, the episode is full of the kind of frank criticism that the sanitized version of the legal industry usually avoids.

That is also what makes this launch feel bigger than a one-off branded content play. According to En Volá’s landing page, the podcast is produced in collaboration with Blimburn Seeds (BBG Projects), En Volá and Jerry Chu, and is meant to feature “the biggest names shaping the global cannabis industry,” from breeders and scientists to entrepreneurs and cultural figures. En Volá describes the project as a space that blends journalism, culture and business insight, with distribution across Spotify, YouTube and En Volá’s digital network.

The page also makes clear that this is designed as a global play, not just a U.S. industry show. Jerry Chu is positioned as a host who connects travel, food, lifestyle and cannabis culture, while the broader series aims to reach audiences from California to Barcelona to Bogotá and beyond. The announced first-season guests include Josh Kesselman, Sisters of the Valley, Shelley Rogers Johnson and Tim Neff, alongside DeAngelo, with more names expected throughout the season.

That wider ambition matters, because cannabis media has no shortage of podcasts, but not all of them know how to feel alive. Too many are really just executive chats with soft lighting. This one, at least out of the gate, has a sharper instinct: start with someone who has lived through enough versions of cannabis history to say something uncomfortable about the present.

And DeAngelo does.

He talks about the federal hemp crackdown, the disconnect between legal operators and the legacy market, the cost of trying to legislate competitors out of existence and the need to reunify around something bigger than market share. He argues for one integrated cannabis market with common-sense regulation, and he says the industry should be spending less money fighting itself and more money removing cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act altogether. In a media environment that often confuses access with insight, that is at least a real point of view.

The first episode has the storytelling hooks: smuggling, travel, activism, old-school movement energy. But what gives it weight is the argument underneath it. Jerry Chu’s new podcast does not open with a victory lap. It opens with Steve DeAngelo saying the cannabis world got distracted, got divided and still has work to do.

That is a pretty solid way to begin.

Photo: Courtesy of En Volá / Blimburn Podcast