GOING ALL IN WITH COLIN GORDON FROM BUDDHIST BOUNCER TO PRO POKER PLAYER, TO FOUNDING ONE OF THE BIGGEST GENETICS COMPANIES IN CANNABIS by Ben Owens
C
olin Gordon is the founder and owner of Ethos Genetics, a seed company that has been making waves in the cannabis community since 2017. You may know him from popular genetics like Memberberry and Mandarin Sunset, or from his cannabis consulting business, or even from his days cleaning up on the World Poker Tour. But how did a professional poker player end up holding the reigns to one of the leading genetics brands in the scene? We sat down with Gordon earlier this year (pre COVID) to chat about his story, his days in South Florida, his take on genetics and the cannabis industry as a whole, and how he’s changing the game with the Ethos Multipass.
MEET COLIN GORDON
Gordon’s a mix of Jersey and South Florida. Hailing from Jersey before relocating to Tampa in the early ‘90s for college, Gordon started smoking cannabis at the early age of 14. He recalls smoking for about three months before kicking it due to the laziness that he experienced. He wouldn’t start smoking again until his freshman year of college. Gordon was a high school athlete with plans to play Division I sports in college, and explains that he really only cared about his classes because he knew he had to get good enough grades to play sports in college. He says that you could tell which classes he cared about based on his grades, receiving top marks if he was interested, and scraping by with C’s if he didn’t.
FROM JERSEY TO TAMPA
At University of South Florida, Gordon quickly realized that being a star athlete at a small Jersey high school didn’t quite put him into the top 20 athletes in a D1 sport, and after his first semester getting his bearings, cannabis called him out of retirement. During spring break, he began smoking again and is grateful that he did; cannabis helped Gordon reevaluate life. As he
Cherry 16 #4 adjusted to college, he realized what a sudden introduction it was to the real world, and explains that cannabis and hallucinogens helped him to reflect on what he was doing and not simply fall into the routine of his peers. As a result, he picked up the guitar. “When you smoke weed or take hallucinogens, I feel like all of a sudden you reflect and you’re like ‘What am I doing?’ and I started asking more questions of myself…I started playing music and a lot of the things that I wanted to do creatively that I never had the patience for… like playing guitar more. I was able to slow down and just kind of observe the world a little bit. I think up until that point, everything was just
go … All of a sudden, you’re just like, sit down, stare at the trees for a couple hours and think about shit. Why are you doing what you’re doing? It’s probably why I kept switching my majors after that. “ This ability to step back and assess his situation also called into question his educational pursuits. As Gordon recalls, he was “SAT smart”, but had no real interest in classes, and after a few years of taking only electives, and being asked by the college to take a semester off, he would eventually decide that college wasn’t the place for him. But what it did teach him was how to grow cannabis, and how to use that knowledge to fuel his other pursuits.
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