Grasslands Agency
September 16, 2024
This week on The Weedsmith, a meditation about modern cannabis thought leadership, associate producer of the Emerald Cup Taylor Blake talks about following in her father’s footsteps. With an inspiration so strong, she wants to continue Tim Blake’s legacy— founder of the Emerald Cup. The Weedsmith runs Wednesdays on Grasslands LinkedIn and Instagram pages.
Ricardo Baca:
You are listening to The Weedsmith, a show about modern cannabis leadership. Today I am thankful to be sitting across from Taylor Blake.
Taylor, I’m hoping you can tell me about somebody who is in the industry whose leadership you’ve witnessed but also whose leadership you respect.
Taylor Blake:
It’s funny, because I know we just talked about this and you told me that you were gonna ask me this question, and the first person that came to my mind was, of course, my dad, Tim Blake, the founder of the Emerald Cup.
And then I realized, “Is that too much nepotism? Am I saying ‘My dad’ and have to come up with a different answer?" I think that the reason why the Emerald Cup is so successful is because of him.
He’s been so consistent in persevering against every challenge that you could possibly imagine. It’s tough, because of course, he’s my dad, so we have our own little struggles at times but in the general approach to it, he’s so selfless that there’s times when he puts everybody else first and he wants to make sure everybody else is happy and we want to make him proud.
That’s one of the reasons why I came on full time. I really wanted to continue his legacy and really make him super-proud, and he's been a life-long cannabis activist. He's been in cannabis since he was 15 years old. He's gone to jail for cannabis.
I think he's seen the whole spectrum, and so I think that, because that's kind of the energy he brings, along with his ethos of really wanting to support outdoor organic cannabis, he would be my answer.