The Hotbox with Dustin Hoxworth isn’t your polished PR interview. It’s me getting stoned and asking people the questions they probably aren’t ready for. These aren’t cold reads or copy-paste Q&As; I sit with my guests, usually multiple times, and I’ve likely met them in person, which gives me a window to learn who they really are before I ever send the questions. By the time the words hit the page, it’s smoke-thick honesty, not surface-level bullshit. These are cannabis conversations that showcase the voices, stories, and truths that won’t show up in the boardroom.
The Hotbox with Nohtal Partansky
This week in The Hotbox, we sit down with Nohtal Partansky, a former NASA aerospace engineer turned cannabis automation trailblazer. As co-founder and CEO of Sorting Robotics, Nohtal is helping to rewire the very backbone of cannabis production with machines that coat, sort, infuse, and package product with cold precision and relentless consistency.
What began as a post-NASA experiment has become one of the most disruptive forces in cannabis manufacturing, reshaping labor, economics, and the pace of innovation across the industry.
We’re diving into the friction and the future: how automation might liberate human creativity or replace it, how politics and regulation will either throttle or supercharge the machine age of cannabis, and what a fully automated cannabis world might mean for workers, equity, and the plant itself.
This isn’t the future. This is now.
Before co-founding Sorting Robotics, Nohtal Partansky engineered systems for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including the MOXIE project that produced oxygen on Mars. In 2018, he left aerospace to launch a robotics company with co-founder Cassio Santos Jr. After early success in computer vision–powered sorting tech, they pivoted fully into cannabis automation.
Sorting Robotics has since released a suite of machines: Stardust (automated infused pre-roll coating system), Jiko (automated infused pre-roll injection system), Omni (automated vape cartridge filler), and others using robotics, sensors, and computer vision to eliminate labor bottlenecks. The company has raised millions to scale its tech and bring automation to cannabis operations large and small.
Where others see a stoner’s pastime, Nohtal sees a precision-manufacturing revolution.
The Hotbox Q&A: 5 Questions with Nohtal Partansky
From Mars to Cannabis
You helped build tech to make oxygen on Mars. What principles from your time at NASA have carried over into building cannabis automation, and what have you had to completely unlearn to survive in this industry?
I’ve carried with me a ruthlessly logical mindset to solve the biggest problems in cannabis. NASA is filled with really smart people, and the only way to get anything done is to have the best idea and be able to articulate it so everyone understands. That skill has been invaluable in cannabis, because there is no template here. The products are new, the processes are new, and in many cases, even the business models are new. With nothing to copy, the only guide you have is cold, hard logic.
While I never truly unlearn anything, the habit I’ve had to move away from is assuming that confidence equals competence. This industry has shifted from the shadows into the spotlight of popular opinion, and with that shift comes a flood of people, some of them bad actors, who use confidence to mask the fact that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Even worse, they use confidence to enrich themselves at your expense.
I’m a scientist, which means I follow the scientific method. This is the same process that led to penicillin, rockets, and the OLED screen you’re probably reading this on. One byproduct of this mindset is that I’m generally skeptical about everything and never fully confident until I’ve proven it to myself and those around me. Once proven, however, I become extremely confident, and that was the culture I grew up in. Among scientists, if someone was confident, it was usually well-earned and worthy of respect.
In cannabis, it’s different. There are a lot of ‘pseudo-scientists’ who are extremely confident without the evidence to back it up. Whether it’s a grower, extractor, wholesaler, store owner, ancillary provider, legacy operator, or new recreational operator, there are plenty of confident voices, and plenty of them have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. These days, when I find someone who does know what they’re doing, I keep them close and try to learn everything I can from them. I’d estimate that about 30% of the industry not only knows what they’re doing but can prove it. Another 30% are still learning and are humble about the process. The rest? They probably won’t survive the next ten years.
The Human Tradeoff
Automation promises efficiency, but it can erase jobs. How do you push back on that narrative, and how is your technology reshaping the lives of people on the production floor? What responsibility, if any, do innovators like you carry to the workers your machine may displace?
This industry is in a job shortage, so my machines fill that gap. I don’t know any of my customers who have adopted my machines and then laid off their workers. Usually, it enables them to reassign those workers to higher value tasks and thus allows the customer to scale larger.
I would say that people on the production floor love being upskilled. The number of people that I talk to who say, “I would rather work on this machine than do what I was doing before,” is probably too large to count. Ideally, a production floor goes from a horde of people sitting at dirty tables to a group of people standing around clean, refined machines.
I wouldn’t say my machines are displacing anyone yet. However, I do think in the next 10 – 20 years, there will be 10,000x more robotic systems all over the world. At that point, I am a full believer in taxing all automation companies and using that money to provide a Universal Basic Income. I am an avid advocate of UBI, and I have been since college. I think we should give everyone the choice whether they want to stay at home and play Call of Duty with their friends or go out in the world and push humanity forward. Forcing someone to do a job they are not passionate about is a byproduct of civilization that I hope the next generation will not have to face.
Power and Inequity
Automation tends to accelerate consolidation and lock out smaller players. How can craft cultivators and equity-owned brands survive in a future dominated by robotics, and what would it take to democratize access to this technology?
I think that is a narrow view of how free markets work. Yes, automation gives you accelerated economies of scale and allows those who exploit it to have an unfair advantage over those who don’t. However, that is assuming those who don’t have automation choose to fight in the same arena as those who do. This would be a tactical error. That’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight. When you don’t have the same tools, you need to resegment the market and fight in an arena where you have the advantage. Using the previous analogy, if someone has a gun, you don’t run away; you get up close and stab them. If you run away, you’re easy pickings.
All that being said, our machines and other robotic systems in cannabis are actually pretty cheap compared to most industrial equipment. Most machines used by other industries are worth millions of dollars, while our machines are cheaper than a BMW 4 Series. Considering that a car is a depreciating asset and not one that actually generates more money for you, I think all of our machines are relatively cheap, especially when you compare it to other aspects of a business like employees, legal, insurance, or raw goods like flower.
Political Shockwaves
If federal legalization or rescheduling hits, how do you see policy, labor law, and regulation affecting automation’s trajectory, and could it trigger an all-out technological arms race in cannabis manufacturing?
Oh boy, that would be pretty good for me! But honestly, I don’t think it would be immediate. Even if tomorrow Trump signed an executive order to legalize all cannabis and hemp, the industry wouldn’t flip overnight. Rules would still need to be written, most likely coming from the FDA, and those rules take time to implement. Maybe FDA oversight will create considerable pressure for higher cleanliness standards, which usually pushes industries toward more automation, but that remains to be seen. Beyond that, it’s hard to see how federal reform alone would dramatically change the demand for automation right away.
Where I do think federal reform would have a major impact is in capital markets. If operators had access to fluid credit and proper insurance, cannabis companies could finally function like traditional businesses. That would free up capital, and I could see that driving more automation, because many operators already want to automate; they’ve just been preoccupied by the unique pressures of this industry.
The Endgame
Fast-forward ten years: What does a fully automated cannabis production line look like, and what’s left of the culture, craft, and human artistry of cannabis when machines can do it all?
The best way to describe it is a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Flower and packaging go in one side, and pallets of dispensary-ready products come out the other. Look at craft beer, the beverage industry, or the makeup industry; the craft and culture are all still there, but now they exist alongside immense scale. Craft breweries have all the love and artisanal touch their owners want to deliver to customers… and then there’s Coors Light. I don’t see why cannabis won’t follow a similar pattern.
Nohtal Partansky stands at the point where cold precision meets living culture. He is pushing cannabis into the machine age while the industry struggles to decide what should be automated, and what must remain human. The future of cannabis isn’t just about who grows it. It’s about who builds the machines that decide how it’s made.
