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https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/karmakoalapodcast/episodes/2026-05-30T01_59_20-07_00
Great conversation with Bart who worked for MJ Biz as a journalist when the floodgates opened and yes it was the wild west of cannabis for a while.
Bart captures the essence of that time and the people involved in what was then, the nascent cannabis industry.
We talk about why he wrote the book, what he and his characters learnt, what he thinks now looking back at that time.
Of the book, reviewers frequently compare Schaneman’s evocative, earth-toned style to authors like Joan Didion and John Steinbeck, so he’s doing pretty well there !
As they say in the publishing world here’s the blurb
Denver, 2019: After one of their marijuana dispensaries is robbed, Taylor Hobson and Danielle Garcia hatch a plan to make back the money. When that ends in disaster, the two friends agree to allow their sales manager to implement aggressive and quasi-legal sales practices. Soon, their reputation as the go-to place to load up on marijuana beyond the legal limit spirals out of control.
Meanwhile, Henry Kaufman is back from a multiple-year stint in Asia. As he attempts to adjust to the reverse culture shock of returning to America, he bounces around, looking for a decent job. He asks his old friends for work at one of their dispensaries, and they agree to hire him as a budtender. He finally has the material to write the investigative journalism piece to make his name as a writer, but at what cost?
Buy at Amazon, if you must
Schaneman’s writing has always been descriptive without being meandering or wordy. He does a fine job capturing the scene and describing environments and personalities. The Pot Job takes a while to develop the main plot—things only start moving about halfway through. Much of the first part of the book is looking at the wonderful drudgery of being twenty-somethings in a big city: working jobs you don’t love, drinking, hooking up, and—in Denver in 2019 (when the story takes place)—using a lot of weed. There’s a pleasure in witnessing the lives of people trying to find their place in the world and in seeing it both fail (for some characters in the book) and succeed (for others).
https://razorcake.org/pot-job-the-by-bart-schaneman-236-pgs/
When a start-up cannabis store in Denver is robbed, the owners round up a crew to track down their product. Operating in the contemporary gray area of legal weed, the shop owners have little choice but to take matters into their own hands. A longtime friend to the owners is Henry, an out of work journalist who, after returning to Colorado from a stint in South Korea, currently lugs kegs at a brewery, but takes a better paying job as a budtender—and he smells a story. The Pot Job is a modern western that combines the cannabis industry with the ennui of a not fully committed ex-at returning to the US, full of casual lawlessness and page turning-action. Schaneman’s narrative of Henry as the western hero is a refreshing impulse toward introspection.
