ADHD advice and a Black-owned cannabis small business
Yahoo Finance Live’s Time For Change looks back at ‘How to ADHD’ creator & host Jessica McCabe discussing tips with managing ADHD and how Gorilla RX Wellness Company became a model for Black-owned cannabis small businesses.
Video Transcript
MARQUISE FRANCIS: Welcome to « A Time for Change, » presented by Citi. I’m Marquise Francis. As 2021 comes to a close and we reflect on some of the biggest changes we’ve seen in corporate America undergo over the last 12 months on this program, We’ve covered some of the biggest stories from the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin to the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and its aftermath, and so much more.
Week after week, we’ve taken a deep dive into some of the biggest issues impacting the world of finance and beyond. One that doesn’t necessarily get the headlines but impacts nearly 3% of all US adults is ADHD or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Earlier this year we spoke to a woman who not only has ADHD, but she turned it into a booming business in a career about educating people about the condition on her YouTube channel how to ADHD. Jessica McCabe shared her journey with us and how she’s trying to help others. Take a listen.
JESSICA MCCABE: I have had ADHD and known I’ve had ADHD since I was a kid. I was diagnosed when I was 12, but I didn’t really understand it. So I kept struggling with a lot of things and I knew that I had trouble focusing and I knew my medication helped with that, but I was still having a lot of trouble with life in other areas and I kept failing. I kept failing and I kept putting so much effort into everything and feeling like I was falling farther and farther behind my peers and I kept hearing this potential word following me around.
You have so much potential. You have so much potential. Why aren’t you reaching your potential? Why aren’t you– why aren’t you just doing this? Why can’t you just do this? You should be able to do this. And I was so frustrated at some point that I just stopped doing everything I was trying to do and I decided, you know what? At 31 years old I was broke, divorced, living at home with my mom. My career was going nowhere and I went, you know what? Let me figure this out.
I know I have ADHD. Maybe there’s more to it than that. And so I went about learning about my ADHD and learning strategies that might be able to help me and everything that I learned I put somewhere where I knew I could find it again, which at the time was YouTube. I was that disorganized that was the one thing I knew that I could find again, so I put my story on YouTube.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: So now you’ve turned your ADHD into a career on YouTube with Patreon. Not a lot of people can do that. What advice do you have for other people in your situation, those who’ve been diagnosed with ADHD or another neurodiverse condition? Should they make their diagnosis public, especially to a potential employer?
JESSICA MCCABE: Whether or not somebody decides to make their diagnosis public is a really personal decision I think, and it depends on a lot of factors. I do think that talking about our challenges is really important and not trying to hide the fact that we’re struggling, but there are times where the people around you– maybe you’re in a job where it’s not safe. There are still employers that it’s not safe to talk about your ADHD at work because you’re going to get passed over for promotions, people are going to make assumptions about your capabilities.
There’s still a lot of stigma around it. And so sometimes it doesn’t make sense, but I think personally if you’re in a position where you can talk about your ADHD, it’s a good idea to talk about your ADHD. If you’re in a position where you’re secure at work, it’s a really good thing because the problem is if people only bring up their ADHD when they’re about to get fired because they’re not performing well and they haven’t gotten the supports they need, that creates a lot more stigma and it creates more shame around it.
Because maybe nobody speaks about their ADHD at work and so everybody’s pretending, everybody’s trying to be neurotypical, trying to be normal at work and nobody’s really getting their needs met. And if you’re in a position where you’re safe and you’re stable and you know that your job is secure and your boss is happy with you, talking about your ADHD helps that boss understand ADHD so that other employees can also speak up about theirs. It makes it safer for everybody.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Good point. How important is it for folks with ADHD to choose the right career? I mean, I think it’s important for everyone, but what is sort of the unique challenges they face when they’re thinking about their path forward and career choice?
JESSICA MCCABE: I think it’s really critical that people with ADHD choose a career that works for them, that works for their brain. The difference between being a complete failure and getting fired from a volunteer position at a yoga studio for me and being the CEO of a company and a successful YouTuber has just been choosing the right career. The things that my brain naturally does, the things I’m naturally good at, my creativity and my passion and my curiosity, the same thing that I get paid for now is what I got fired for back at that yoga studio.
I got fired from that position because I was on the internet all the time because I was curious. In between folding laundry and doing those things I was just like, well, there’s nothing to do. I’ll go on the internet and like look up answers to things I’m curious about. I get paid for that now. I got fired for it then. That’s the level of difference it makes.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Yeah. Find how you can play to your strengths for sure. I want to talk a little bit about your success with social media. Your TedTalk, I know, has more than three million views. That’s gone viral. You have almost a million subscribers on YouTube. Lots of– tens of millions of people have seen your videos. You’ve sort of become this go to source or the face of ADHD for so many people. Does that ever become overwhelming for you?
JESSICA MCCABE: It’s a huge responsibility. I started this channel to help me and maybe a few other people that already knew that they had ADHD and maybe also needed some strategies. I had no idea the impact it would have. I had no idea how many people would watch my channel and realize that maybe there is a reason they’d been struggling their entire life and nobody ever caught it.
And there’s so much misinformation about ADHD out there that I feel an incredible amount of responsibility and an honor. It’s a privilege to be able to do this, but it is so important to me to make sure that I’m putting out good information because I know how many people are relying on it now. I’m terrified and I’m so grateful that I got to do this.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Jessica, how have you seen the conversation around ADHD change or shift over the past decade or so? I mean, you were talking earlier about there is still some stigma, but so many more people are now seeing it as a superpower some people are calling it. How has that dynamic changed over the past decade?
JESSICA MCCABE: I think as we’re understanding ADHD better, we are evolving our understanding to the complexities of it. I think for a long time we thought that it was kids getting distracted, not having the ability to focus and then yeah, maybe they take meds and then that helps them focus. But now we understand that it’s not– it’s not a thing that can be fixed in a brain. It’s not like, oh, that brain is deficient in some way. Let’s correct that real quick. It’s our brains are almost on an entirely different operating system. They just function differently and so there’s some advantages to that and there’s some disadvantages to that.
And yeah, some of the disadvantages are organizational challenges and difficulty focusing and being really interested in something for, like, five seconds and then being completely disinterested in it. There are a lot of challenges that come with it. But on the flip side, creativity actually comes from distraction. So a lot of people who are really, really creative are the people who aren’t going to think linearly and stay on task. They’re the ones who have brains that have shower thoughts in the middle of the day.
That’s distracting, but it’s also– it enhances our creativity. It enhances outside the box thinking and creative problem solving. It enhances that passion, that drive for one thing and then losing interest in going to something else means a lot of times we flit from job to job and what we do is we almost– like bees, like, we pollinate. We take what’s great about one job and we bring it to another job.
We take something we learn from one career and bring it to another thing and there’s just something really, really beautiful about that. I personally don’t say that my ADHD is a superpower, but I recognize that it does give me talents that are not common. It gives me strength as well as challenges.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: How would you speak directly to employers and to corporate America? I mean, we see falling under the umbrella of diversity and inclusion and equity the idea of supporting those with neurodiverse conditions. But what would you tell them with regards to employing people with ADHD?
JESSICA MCCABE: I think that employers are starting to recognize the value of neurodiversity in the workplace and a lot of companies are actually creating programs designed to attract neurodiverse talent because in today’s workplace those who are early tech adopters are really, really great employees to have those who have a lot of creativity and new ideas and drive and passion and honestly, we work really hard. There’s a lot of really strong advantages to having ADHD employees and a huge one is that we don’t get fazed in a crisis.
A lot of us– I mean COVID happened and we’re like, yeah, that tracks. Like usually it’s me doing this to myself, but now the world is doing it. Anyway, like, moving on. I feel like we’re able to thrive a lot a lot of the time in crisis and there’s so many valuable things to that. But the biggest thing I would want employers to understand is if you measure those employees, if you want that out of the box thinker, if you want that drive, that passion, all these novel ideas, but then you’re also going to expect them to get there at exactly on time and stay on task and not get distracted during meetings, you can’t have both. Right?
You take the good with the bad and recognize it that there are two sides of the same coin and there are things that you can do as an employer to accommodate the ADHD and to make it so that it flips onto the good side more often than not. Right? A lot of people with ADHD also have dyslexia. If you have somebody with dyslexia and you have them reviewing paperwork for typos, that’s not a great use of their talents. But if you put them in a situation where– a lot of times they’re more visual thinkers– where you’re putting them in charge of visuals, now you’re using them in a way that is going to be really good for them because they’ll be happy, they’ll be doing something they’re good at, and good for you as a as an organization.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: More broadly, ADHD or not, I know you’ve done some videos talking about remote work and how challenging this time has been, many of us feeling isolated, burnt out, feeling like we never truly leave the office because our home has now become the office. What’s your advice? What can you share with people who are going through that right now as they continue to work remotely?
JESSICA MCCABE: Work-life separation is really it. We talk about work-life balance, but it’s really work-life separation. And cues are huge. Whether you’re an employer or an employee, you have to understand that cues, our environment, really affects how we work. And so when you’re done working for the day, putting away the stuff that you use and making your space look visually different, whether that’s even a different mouse pad if you have the same computer. There are a lot of things that you can do in terms of that.
But also transition time is a huge one. We need transition time and we got that naturally when we were going to the office– the drive to work, the drive home from work, walking to a meeting, walking out of a meeting. And so one of the things that I’m seeing a lot of people do and I’m trying to do in my organization as well is instead of hour long meetings, recognize there’s going to be another meeting immediately after that and so make it a 50 minute meeting and that gives people 10 minutes to transition to the next meeting.
Because otherwise what happens is they go right up to that hour, then they go into the next meeting and the first 10 minutes that meeting, they’re not present yet. They’re still cycling through or catching the fall out from the first meeting and then they’re spending the last 50 minutes of that meeting trying to catch up on what they missed. So it’s just– it’s better for everybody if you build in that transition time.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Jessica, before we let you go, I know you have some exciting stuff coming up. You actually just inked a book deal. Tell us about that.
JESSICA MCCABE: Yeah. I’ve been wanting to write a book since I was, I think, 12 years old. I thought I would be published by 15. I’m a little late on that, but you know, I’m getting it done. Random House reached out and offered me a book deal, so I’m going to be writing « How to ADHD » the book. That’s going to be my story, a lot of stuff that I shared in the Ted Talk, and I’m trying to give people the sense– I’m trying to give people the experience that they would have had if they had watched my channel, seen my TedTalk, gotten to hang out with me in person.
And the experience that I got from going from really feeling completely disempowered and not understanding how my brain works and not having any tools and just beating myself up all the time to completely having a full understanding of how my brain works, when it works, why it doesn’t sometimes, what to do about it, what my toolbox looks like, and what challenges I’m not going to overcome realistically.
MARQUISE FRANCIS: That was Jessica McCabe, founder and host of How to ADHD on YouTube. Up next we’ll hear from a mother-daughter duo in their budding cannabis business.
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MARQUISE FRANCIS: Welcome back to « A Time for Change, » presented by Citi. Across the entire city of Los Angeles there are more than 200 licensed dispensaries and just one that’s owned by Black women. It’s called Gorilla Rx and it’s started by a mother-daughter duo, Kika Keith and Kika Howze. We have the opportunity to ask them why now was the perfect and best opportunity to start this business, and here’s what they had to say. Take a listen. So you opened your shop this year, a lot of fanfare. If you went on TikTok or Twitter for a bit every video was your shop. But the reality is that actually didn’t happen overnight, it was years in the making. Why was now the right time, Kika? Start with you.
KIKA KEITH: Well, you know, it’s funny that you said that because we often call our place The House The People Built because it was such a battle to open our doors. And as we’ve heard before in this fight that we have with the war on drugs, it still transcends as we’re looking to get licenses and it took us three years to open our doors. So it was highly celebrated and highly anticipated because we certainly did not think that it would take that long.
MARQUISE FRANCIS: Mhm. And over to the daughter. You all could have opened this dispensary in any community in LA, but you actually chose Crenshaw. Why was this specific community important for you all to have this business?
KIKA HOWZE: Yeah, definitely. Our family moved to the Crenshaw district in the early ’70s and for us, this is the area and the community that raised us and this specific community is so impactful for the Black community specifically. Just being in Los Angeles is the epicenter of so much culture, so much heart.
They call it Little Africa and for us, as the community changes, it was important for us to have a place where people could come and be a source for wellness, could be a source for joy, and most importantly, to be able to have a form of reparations for our community who was so adversely impacted by the war on drugs to have almost like a championship ring for the community and that’s what we hope to represent.
MARQUISE FRANCIS: That’s beautiful, a championship ring. We know the Lakers just won not too long ago. And just a quarter of cannabis businesses are actually owned or founded by women. It’s no coincidence, obviously. So Big Kika, what needs to happen to ensure women have access to the industry?
KIKA KEITH: Well, you know, I think education is the key. Folks don’t even know where to start from, you know? And as we look specifically as Black women and when you see these cities– and it’s happening nationally– and states that are starting these social equity programs without education, without access to capital, and we know Black folks get less than 1% of loans, of business loans, in the traditional market. And so we really have to look at both, access to capital and education to properly prepare us to run a compliant business.
MARQUISE FRANCIS: And I know you all went through LA’s social equity program meant to level the playing field. I’d love if you all could walk us through what that experience was like.
KIKA KEITH: Yeah. Well, you know, that LA opened in 2018 and we thought LA required that you have to have a property to apply. We thought that, you know, come spring of 2018– mind you we opened in 2021– that the process would open. And we saw very quickly, you know, it’s a big fight. You have these multi-state operators who want these cannabis licenses. And when you say that they exclusively go to people in the community, it is a battle to make sure that we maintain our equity, to maintain our ability to manage and create brands in this market, and so it has been a battle and a very political one.
Little did I know, and I’m a serial entrepreneur, that this would be such a political fight. And I think that’s the biggest thing that really needs to get out to the public, especially our community members who must engage in the policy process because we saw month by month the intent of the social equity program dismantled through the laws, and so that’s really critical. Any entrepreneur that wants to get into the cannabis industry must seriously take on the politics.
MARQUISE FRANCIS: And I’d love if we could get into the numbers a bit because a lot of people see opening up a marijuana dispensary, there’s over $20 billion industry, and yet it actually costs a lot to get your own marijuana strain, to open up a business, the licenses. I know you all spent so much money in just having a physical space for so long until your license was approved, so what are the numbers looking like to actually get into the marijuana industry?
KIKA KEITH: Oh, yeah. That’s the part people need to talk about. You know, in LA in particular– and I’d say it’s a much higher market– but the cannabis real estate tax, what they charge you, they quadruple your rent. So I was looking at paying– I was paying $12,000 a month on an empty property for three years. So when you look at that side of things, when you look at the licensing fees that it costs, it is exorbitant.
And remember, to qualify for the social equity program, one of the qualifications is that you’re low income. And so I always say, you know, this thing seemed to be designed to fail because how do you expect those of us that come from the community that were most harmed by the war on drugs be able to put up those amount of dollars?
MARQUISE FRANCIS: And I’m no math wizard, but $12,000 every month for three years, that’s a lot of money. And so you definitely need a lot of money to get in and to stay into this. And Kika, I want to turn to you. My colleague mentioned fewer than 10% of US adults said marijuana should not be legal, but in 1969 12% supported it. So I know you all have three generations of women in your family who are part of this business and who are all for it. So I’m curious, how has the evolution of marijuana been in your family and what are you all seeing from the older generation to a younger generation, the evolution of marijuana in your family?
KIKA HOWZE: Yeah. So we come from a very strong rooted family. My grandmother, who was a Black Panther and also a medicine woman for our community, created a beverage by the name of Gorilla Life, which was the first to market chlorophyll water and it was distributed by my mom in Whole Foods across California. And for us, that was really the beginning of engaging plants and medicine to be able to bring wellness to our community.
And so we took that name and it was what became Gorilla Rx and it was something that was a part of our family for so many generations and brought healing, and that’s what we hope to be able to do for our community as well through cannabis. We have a wide range of people who come in from our elders to the cannabis connoisseurs, the influencers, but also the community that surrounds us.
And to be able to educate not just based off of what we know from smoking the plant, but also what are the topical wellness for pain medication and the bath salts and you know, all of those different remedies and methods? It really takes us back to where the plant came from as a healing source, and so that on its own brings so much destigmatization within our community that really just allows for things to flourish in the way that they should.
MARQUISE FRANCIS: Yeah. And going back to the inception of why you all put this business in Crenshaw for the community by the community, you are also building a training center next door to help other people through the social equity process, which, honestly, is amazing and super selfless on your end. Why do you feel like this was an important move for you all, Big Kika?
KIKA KEITH: Because we won’t be successful if it’s just us that crosses the finish line. Right? We understand the historical implications of this time, of getting Black and Brown people in the cannabis industry, and we cannot rely on the government to provide that education and information. We can’t rely on the investors to provide that education and information, and so we must rely on ourselves. I believe in self-determination, and so that’s what we did to get to this point. You know?
We had to fight the city and the way that we fought the city is we educated community members, we go into the neighborhood councils, we go into the block clubs, and they will become our grassroots lobbyists. And so the same thing we see, that is our obligation. This would not be a successful model if we would not have a training center where the workforce is developed because the city of LA has a social equity workers mandate where they have to hire a certain amount of social equity workers.
Which means your ex-felons are on government assistance, but who’s training them? And so we hope to fill that void. We know we will fill that void and work hand in hand taking on the McDonald’s University model where we create a way and a system and we teach the POS systems and the software and prepare people either for the workforce or to be entrepreneurs.
MARQUISE FRANCIS: You just heard from Kika Keith and Kika Howze, owners of LA based Gorilla Rx. Up next, some of my final thoughts.
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MARQUISE FRANCIS: Welcome back to « A Time for Change, » presented by Citi. 2021 has been a year marked by all kinds of change in the world of business, finance, politics, and beyond. And if you’re like me, sports, the NBA, MLB, and NFL. But here at Yahoo Finance and specifically here on this program, our mission is to bring the viewers a different perspective on those often overlooked stories. We look forward to continuing to do that in 2022 and beyond.
So thank you for sticking with us in 2021, and we promise to give you more, more, more and bigger, bigger, bigger in 2022. From your friends at Yahoo Finance and everyone here at Yahoo, we want to wish you and your loved ones a happy and safe holiday season and a prosperous 2022. Thank you and have a great rest of the week.