Theron Rodriguez

Before this

I spent thirty years in concert production, running events of up to thirty thousand people. In March 2020 large-crowd events were the first thing in the country to shut down, and they stayed shut for a very long time. Whole Earth Gifts opened that June.

What I actually do

Choosing what goes on the shelf is front-loaded work. Which brands earn a place here, what their lab results say, how they operate, whether they hold up over years. That gets decided carefully and then it holds, with current third-party results required to stay. It is not what my week looks like.

My week looks like customers.

I try to answer the phone every time it rings, and to be the one who answers every email. I take all of the free kratom consultation calls myself and pick up as many live chats as I can get to.

I built the systems that get orders out on time and deliver exactly what the customer expects. If anything goes off the rails, I’m the one who fixes it. I manage the website alongside the web development team and the marketing team, I keep the education platform current and growing, and I keep us inside the compliance guidelines. Whatever time is left goes back into the education platform. More on how the company runs is on About Whole Earth Gifts.

What I built

The Kratom Guide. The Responsible Kratom Use library. The printable toolkits. Kratom University, the course built from both.

Not just words. A structure.

AI has been a valuable assistant in making sense of everything in my head. I have never been the wordsmith I wanted to be, and it’s been remarkable at more than grammar and punctuation. It gets the words in the right order. The thinking, the sourcing, the decisions about what belongs and what does not, all of that is mine, and every word was reviewed and approved by me before it published. I would not have been able to build this without it, and I am not ashamed to say so. Count how many words are on this website and you’ll understand why.

None of the educational resources on this website require an account, a purchase, or an email address. Read the whole library, take the whole course, download every worksheet, and buy your kratom from somebody else. That’s a legitimate way to use this site and it always will be. The products are what pay for the education, not the price of it.

If you do take the course, it pays you. Finishing Kratom University earns 2,000 points, which redeems for $20 of credit, which you can turn around and spend on product. Free kratom and a free education, zero out of pocket.

What I am not

I am not a doctor, a scientist, a pharmacologist or a botanist. I have no medical or laboratory background, and there’s no qualification in this field to hold, because none exists.

Where the honest answer is that nobody knows yet, this site says so, which happens more often than this industry likes to admit.

I do not tell customers what to take or how much, and nobody here does. As much as we would love to hand you the answer, we cannot, and neither can anyone else. What we can do is give you the tools to work it out for yourself: what actually separates one product from another, what to ask a physician, how to read a label and a lab report, and how to be careful with a botanical that carries real risks. This is a complicated market wrapped around a plant that is more complicated than the market is, and walking people through it is the entire job.

Reaching me

theron@wholeearthgifts.com reaches me directly.

support@wholeearthgifts.com is the customer service inbox and I try to answer all of it myself. The live chat is the same, as much of it as I can get to.

The phone number in the footer reaches the store. I answer it when I am free, and when I am not, ask for me and someone will come find me. I’m on the premises through business hours, and more often than not well before we open and well after we close.