Jeremy Rivera sits down with Jeremy Norrie of The Sky Island (theskyisland.com).
Jeremy Norrie is a documentary journalist with a deep, dangerous history in cannabis — a magazine writer, multiple Cannabis Cup winner, early dabbing proponent (he won a cup for the first commercially available dabbing tool), and founder of the dab-cleaning brand Rig Rags. He’s since made 50+ documentaries, most recently one about how cannabis legalization has systematically cut out “95% or more” of the original participants who built the industry, replacing hemp freedom fighters and medical healers with taxes, guardrails, and an incoming FDA-approved regime. The conversation ranges from the Delta-8/hemp loophole and regulatory whiplash to the “race to the bottom” of unregulated streaming platforms and social-media algorithms that pay filmmakers pennies per hour and reward “dumb crap” over serious work. Host Jeremy Rivera repeatedly maps Norrie’s frustrations onto his own SEO world via the “black box effect,” and the two dig into Norrie’s parallel career documenting strange phenomena — UFOs, astral projection, lucid dreaming — and what it means to be a truth-seeker who holds credible space for unbelievable stories.
A deep, dangerous cannabis résumé
Norrie wrote for a cannabis magazine, represented numerous products, and won multiple Cannabis Cups — including one for the first dabbing tool made available for sale, making him an early proponent of dabbing. He ran competitions and events, and founded Rig Rags, an alternative to stickers or handkerchiefs used for cleaning dabbing tools. He’s also “been arrested, home invaded, robbed” — the whole gambit — chronicled in his memoir *Jack Moves*.
The legalization arc that erased the pioneers
His most recent documentary traces cannabis from the original hemp freedom fighters (legalizing on textile and industrial uses), to the medical side that “eclipsed” them and turned everyone into medical activists, to the moment governments saw the tax and revenue potential. Once money entered, the rules changed continuously. He believes we’re “on the precipice” of the government eliminating everything advocates fought for and replacing it with an FDA-approved model — and that legalization already cut out 95%+ of the original participants.
“It’s cut out, let’s say 95 % or more of the people that originally were participating in the industry that got it to where it is now.”
Jeremy Norrie
The negative billionaire
In his film, an original dispensary owner explains that for years the city refused her tax money and wanted nothing to do with cannabis businesses. Then the city reversed course, decided it wanted the revenue, and hit her with back taxes for every year she’d operated — she “woke up to being a negative billionaire.”
Cannabis vs. alcohol and the money behind enforcement
Norrie argues that when governments don’t want cannabis money, it’s because they’re getting more money from the interests enforcing cannabis laws — police and legal systems. Alcohol is “destructively more dangerous,” yet every cannabis product needs a safety cap while alcohol doesn’t. The industry gets singled out and demonized while worse things get lumped in.
The CBD loophole that split the industry
The CBD pitch was “so your grandma can go to 7-Eleven and get CBD” — non-intoxicating, progressive laws for hemp products. But operators figured out how to synthesize hemp into intoxicating products, manipulated the laws to sell them, and stopped caring about grandma’s CBD — “now we just sell our vape pens in 7-Eleven.” Meanwhile licensed weed businesses followed every rule and paid every tax. The result: cannabis people now fight cannabis laws, and the industry is full of “carpet bag opportunists” who’ll take the money while “Jimmy’s going to lose his whole life.”
Strange phenomena as his biggest audience
Norrie has made 50+ documentaries on all topics; the ones doing the biggest numbers are what he calls “strange phenomenon.” He’s part of the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance, attends UFO conventions, and worked alongside Nick Pope at Contact in the Desert. He’s heard it all — a woman impregnated by an alien whose baby was removed, people who talk to dogs and cats, a dolphin delivering a message about frequency, mantis aliens, Pleiadians, angels. As a journalist he pushes back and tries to give each story credibility from all perspectives.
Crossover as evidence
The thing that gets to him is when unrelated sources describe the same phenomenon. A couple explained remote viewing and astral projection as something all humans can learn; separately, a yogi master (not a UFO person) described real levitation as the soul rising out of the body — echoing near-death and psychedelic experiences. When independent accounts overlap, “this might not just be a made-up story. Something is happening, but what is happening?”
Nobody wants the debunk
His friend produces The Y-Files on YouTube — the best debunkers he’s seen. The analytics show millions watch the believer story, but the moment the host asks “but is it true?”, everyone turns it off. It’s a cliffhanger nobody wants resolved. Same with the recent documentary showing the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage being faked — many enthusiasts who haven’t even seen it keep trying to debunk the debunk on Facebook.
The streaming race to the bottom
Norrie’s competition is no longer other documentaries — it’s “five minute YouTube clips made by an autistic child,” doom-scrolling, AI porn, and a billion new AI-enabled moviemakers. Streaming platforms flipped the risk onto creators: they used to buy and lose money on flops; now creators earn only if a project succeeds and platforms just delete failures. Amazon cut his pay five times in two years — from 14 cents an hour to a maximum of 4 cents, with almost everything landing at 1 cent an hour. YouTube arbitrarily throttles anything cannabis-adjacent (even a trade show with no products), while a 3.5-million-view cannabis project sits up elsewhere.
The black box and being incentivized to make garbage
Platforms are unregulated AI systems that even their operators don’t understand — the human gatekeeper you could once ask “what are the guardrails?” is gone. You can do everything right and fail, everything wrong and win; releasing a movie feels like gambling. The perverse incentive is clear: his hard, important, Netflix-quality documentaries “bombed,” while a one-camera-angle interview of a sweating guy with barely intelligible English got “crushing numbers.” So he’s “being incentivized to make dumb crap.”
Privacy surrender and AI’s future
Having gone from cannabis outlaw (everything was evidence) to letting platforms “follow me around everywhere,” Norrie describes giving apps total access — the TikTok example of reaching into any computer in your household — because opting out leaves you “handicapped” against competitors who grant every permission. He wants to make an AI movie and foresees a future where AI replaces streaming entirely: why go to Netflix when AI can make a movie starring you, your friends, and Pamela Anderson as your girlfriend? Still, he says he’s “motivated by my morality as a creator” and resists using AI to make clips of his own work — for now. —
“She woke up to being a negative billionaire.”
Jeremy Norrie