Donovan Crowder, 30, admits that smoking free weed was a motivation for starting his cannabis podcast.
"But then we [he and his co-host at the time] started actually getting local traction in the community, and I kind of started feeling as though we were a voice for the underground cannabis thing," he says.
Crowder's show, Too T3rpd, covers all things Missouri cannabis, including home growers, small cannabis businesses, infused dining experiences, caregivers and weed-related events such as the Mid-Mo Canna Expo. But the podcast also covers St. Louis arts and culture, with episodes about Paint Louis and PanNerdia.
Crowder's focus on the underground cannabis scene came about after he went to a homegrowers event in 2018. "That's how I started realizing you could actually do something with homegrown cannabis," he says. "You didn't necessarily have to be in the corporate industry."
Too T3rpd is Crowder's second podcast. His first, Triple Dub, lasted from 2019 to 2021. Donovan says he's always wanted to be a podcaster and saw the potential to grow a media business out of what they were doing, but his co-hosts at the time — Two Twins, a rapper and a manager — "didn't see the seriousness of doing a podcast as much as I did."
Crowder says that Two Twins wanted to help him break into the media industry more than they were interested in podcasting.
The first podcast was also focused on weed. (Crowder thinks for a good conversation you need weed, wine and water, hence the three Ws of Triple Dub.) Triple Dub also spoke in a "raw and unorthodox" way about race in the city, since Crowder and his co-hosts were from north St. Louis.
"The biggest thing I want to do is make uncomfortable conversations normalized," Crowder says. "It's what I want to do with cannabis as well. For the longest [time] it's been such a taboo thing, but I want to make it to where it's mainstream. If you're cool with somebody drinking beer, you should be cool with somebody smoking a joint."
Triple Dub ended amicably and Crowder took some time to retool before starting Too T3rpd with Ryan Fargo, who has since left the show. Now Crowder's cohost is Tyler Hawthorne, a.k.a. Some Socials T. The podcast name came during the first episode. "We were talking about terpenes, like the flavor profiles ... and it was two of us, and I was like, 'We're getting terped out — too terped on terpenes,' and it just stuck," Donovan explains.
Too T3rpd has made more than 100 episodes where they smoke, consume edibles, and talk to people about their personal journeys with cannabis and how they got into the industry. Despite his passion for cannabis, Crowder says he first started smoking just seven or eight years ago.
"I couldn't smoke at CBC because we got drug tested," Crowder says. He went to Christian Brothers College for high school. He discovered weed when he was at the University of Missouri and "got dabbed out" when he first tried it. He didn't smoke for years afterward, but friends got him back into it.
Thanks to his podcast, Crowder now even grows his own weed.
"A lot of people were trying to get me to grow since I had the podcast, and I've had access to the best growers in the state," Crowder says. He was nervous to start, because he wasn't sure he had enough knowledge. But he just did his first harvest in January.
"It turned out amazing," Crowder says. And that was largely thanks to Mr. Livingsoil, a licensed caregiver and grower whose method produces regenerative soil and fully organic product. Crowder and Mr. Livingsoil worked on a video series together about the cultivation.
"I want to let everybody know that really home cultivation is the best," Crowder says. "It's no different than buying from the grocery store versus a farmers' market."
Crowder also finally got his med card thanks to guests on his podcast.
"I was nervous about the whole thing. A lot of people think that when you sign up, you get put on a list and all these other things," Crowder says. "That's one of the things I really wanted to do, was educate people on what the laws actually were and what was going on."
Crowder also wants to branch out beyond cannabis to get more advertisers. "A lot of people still won't deal with it because it's not federally legal," Crowder says. "So it's really hard to find funding."
Still, Crowder says that his podcast gets 1,000 listeners a week, and he recently quit his job to focus on the venture full time. He collaborates with other podcasts in the cannabis space such as Joint Highpothesis, who also does a St. Louis-based cannabis podcast, and eventually wants build up a full media empire called TT3 Productions.
"I love it," Crowder says of working in media. "It's my life. I came up doing manual labor. So none of this feels like work to me."
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