{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Uptown Voices","title":"From the Corner to the Counter: Vladimir Bautista on Building Happy Munkey, Legalizing the Legacy Market & Keeping Dyckman Real","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4538,"description":"What does it take to go from selling weed on the corner of 139th and Broadway — dodging arrests, feeding your family, and building a street-level business empire — to running what Forbes called 'the Studio 54 of Cannabis' and opening a legal dispensary on Dyckman Street in the exact location where Dyckman Electronics stood for forty years?For Vladimir Bautista, co-founder of Happy Munkey, the answer is equal parts hustle, healing, heart, and community — and in this episode, he holds nothing back.Led Black and Octavio Blanco sit down with Vladimir for an hour-long conversation that takes us from the Dominican Bronx of the 1980s to the Forbes pages to the Dyckman Projects senior center, where Vlad once gave a presentation in Spanish on CBD to an audience of elders who used to think cannabis was the devil. The story of Happy Munkey — from a monthly gathering at 38th Street, to a seven-days-a-week cultural institution, to the Van Gogh Immersive Experience, to the Museum of Sex on Fifth Avenue, to two dispensaries in Dyckman and Brooklyn — is the story of what happens when legacy market expertise, deep community roots, and sheer refusal to quit come together at exactly the right historical moment.Vladimir speaks with rare candor about imposter syndrome in the legal market, the $35,000-a-month green tax on his Dyckman lease, driving cash to the IRS, competing with unregulated corner spots, going personally to every informal weed operator in the neighborhood before opening and asking for their blessing — and getting it. He talks about speaking at Yale, Columbia, and the biggest cannabis conference in Las Vegas, standing next to corporate executives on stage with a GED, and representing not just himself but the 40,000 people still sitting in federal prison for cannabis while companies go public on the NYSE.He also gets personal — about his single mother, growing up in one of the most cocaine-saturated blocks in Harlem, finding his lane at 16 years old, and the healing...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/0aW1dchdn1nlJBOFlV6zCjAReq1CNZaj0Q2QiSi4iKU/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9iOGE1/MGFhYWQ5YzFkNmU1/Mzc5ZTZjNzQ4ZDIw/NTM4ZS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}