Len May: Cannabis, Your DNA, and Personalized Wellness

Len May says healthcare is really sick care: a cookie-cutter, insurance-reimbursed system that treats the symptom in a 15-minute visit and never asks what caused it. He is the CEO and co-founder of EndoDNA, a genetics-first decision-support platform for functional and integrative practitioners with 11 patents behind it, and a former California dispensary owner who got into genetics after watching two people react differently to the same varietal. His background is on the EndoDNA about page.

The method: read the DNA first, layer on bloodwork (a moment in time) and epigenetic markers, build a protocol across three levers (pharmaceutical, supplements, lifestyle), then close the loop with patient-reported outcomes plus what has been methylated or un-methylated, tuned over time by an LLM grounded on Anthropic's health model with EndoDNA's own guardrails.

Jeremy's full recap, with the endocannabinoid explainer and the grandma-at-chemo case written out, is at Len May: Cannabis, Your DNA, and Personalized Wellness.

In this episode

• Genes as a circuit breaker. Only 20 to 30 percent of the switches are on at birth. Food, environmental exposure and stress neurochemistry flip the rest.
• The stress-to-elbow-pain chain: a near miss floods you with cortisol, a genetic predisposition breaks down your own anandamide too fast, the immune system overreacts, and the doctor treats the elbow.
• Why a room of doctors went silent at Len's talk and then texted him questions for half an hour, and the LLM EndoDNA built so a practitioner can interrogate the genome in eighth-grade language on the EndoDNA platform.
• The endocannabinoid system, discovered in 1992, has nothing to do with smoking weed. Anandamide is Sanskrit for bliss. THC has a narrow therapeutic window, and today's 70 percent THC products are completely unnecessary.
• Addiction genetics: alcohol, opioid and amphetamine dependence genes plus impulsivity genes are a formula for disaster. Cannabis is not physically addictive, and sugar is probably more addictive than caffeine than cannabis.
• Grandma at chemo: a poor metabolizer on a high-THC gummy hallucinated and warned everyone off the devil's lettuce. Sublingual delivery, less THC, more CBD and linalool turned her into a walking referral. The full case is in his book Making Cannabis Personal.
• The tequila test. Nobody calls the tequila company after a rough night. Adults are accountable for the dose.
• Regulation: no federal testing standards, none at all for CBD, and a plea for federal quality control, prescribable tinctures and pharma collaboration without a ten-year FDA wait.
• Len's third book, Jack of All Trades, Master of Some, on ADHD and polymathy, and his show Everything is Personal. He posts as @lenmaydna on Instagram.

"Your DNA is your life's GPS. It shows you where your potential potholes and where your traffic jams are in your own road, so by understanding this you can take specific actions to avoid those potholes." - Len May

"It's the most regulated unregulated industry that we have." - Len May

Related on Unscripted Cannabis: Mark Gillilan of Kyoto Botanicals on THC-free CBD, the founder Jeremy brings up on the regulation question, Becca Williams on the difference between relief and healing, and Brad Poulos on how Canada legalized cannabis.

Unscripted Cannabis is hosted by Just J and Jeremy Rivera. This conversation was Jeremy's. More episodes and articles at unscriptedcannabis.com.