 Hi, how you guys doing today? This is Rich here on behalf of Rich2VLive, and I'm here with a very special guest. It is Paul, the CEO of Nextleaf Solutions, Symbol Oils. How are you doing today, Paul? Doing great. Thanks for having me. Great. How are you enjoying the conference so far? You know, it's a good show. This is always for us. Obviously, we're a Vancouver-based company, so we like to have a presence at the show. For a company in the B2B space, it's always great for driving commercial relationships and seeing folks that are never so busy. You've got to see them a couple of times a year. Always great opportunities to keep growing the business and looking for new business opportunities with brands and cultivators who are looking for opportunities to outsource a difficult part of their business. Always a great show for us on the commercial side. Fantastic. Now, 2020 is starting off great with this conference. 2019 was an up-in-the-beginning and then very down-year. Now, what makes Nextleaf Solutions unique? There's like 440 companies that exist in the cannabis sector publicly. What makes you guys special? What is exactly that you do that makes you guys unique? We're a company that became the first publicly-traded company to have multiple issued patents around industrial-scale extraction and purification of cannabinoids. And it's been a company that has been very successful in acquiring and developing intellectual property around the production of standardized THC and CBD molecules. We've developed 11 issued patents over the last year and we've got a licensed processing facility 45 minutes east of Vancouver. Our business model is built on taking low-grade dried cannabis and obviously there's a lot of that in the industry. There's over 400 tons right now sitting in vaults across Canada and our business model is taking that lower-grade material, turning it into a high-purity distillate, refined oil that can then be put into products, beverages, edibles, vape pens, and really more importantly, it can actually sit in an inventory that has an oil for 10 years while a herbal form is only going to be good for six months. So as Canada is kind of slow to roll out, we're really positioned well, I think, as are other extractors here in Canada because there's a lot of material in the process and that's going to need to be turned into oil regardless of how slow the retail rolls out here in Canada, in Ontario, in these provinces that I think have been pretty slow. So for us, great time, I think, and really what makes this unique is our focus on not just our extraction business but really developing intellectual property that we think becomes very valuable as big pharma, big alcohol, big tobacco, these large players get into the space. I mean, these are companies, they don't care about farmers, right? They care about intellectual property around the standardization of CBD and THC-based products that can be sold in Canada and other markets that are federally legal. So that's really where our focus is and we think that we've done over the last three years. We've taken a very focused approach. We've been focused on kind of one part of the supply chain and we think that's how great businesses are built. Very good. Now, our community of investors is in about 60 countries and they love to learn about undervalued, under-appreciated, under-exposed companies. I think you've fallen that category. What would you tell an investor that is doing some research and interested in investing in your company? I think, first and foremost, I would say look at relative investments and look at a company's market cap and when I like to invest, I like to look for 10 baggers myself. Absolutely, we all like 10 baggers. I'll tell you, if you talked to me a year and a half ago, I would have told you that I wasn't long any cultivators and what I would have told you is that I was long on companies. We obviously weren't publicly traded at the time but guys that are in the same space as us and if you look back now over the last year, I think that's been validated by how extractors have done relative to companies that have tried to do it all but I think most importantly, when you look at a company like Canopy Growth, let's use them, they're the biggest company in the world, recently they came out and they talked about their 150 issued patents and what I would say, first and foremost, before you even unpack the value of what those patents even cover, I'd say you want to say, okay, you look at what those patents are worth on a per-patent basis relative to market cap and you look at a company like NextLeaf, we've got 11 issued patents around high throughput, extraction, purification and we think that if you value those patents on a patent for patent basis and you look at what our market cap is versus the biggest player in the space that has arguably the largest patent portfolio, we think that we're number two and that's a big focus for us because we think at the end of the day, investors that are long oils I think believe in the value of our patent portfolio and we say our commercialization of that, that part of the business is free and if you check back with us in a year, I think what you're going to see is that we've done a great job a year from now, over 2020, monetizing our IP through licensing our patents, we recently licensed two of our non-core patents, we're into revenue already, we're excited to put that out to the markets here very shortly but also we monetize our IP through extraction services, toll processing and selling molecules so I think that's the first thing I always say for guys that are looking for 10 Xs, you look at who is going to be valuable to big tobacco, big alcohol, the last company I was with was acquired by Chronos that has taken a major investment from Altria and I say this every single day, who does an Altria constellation in Imperial? I mean three of those companies have made investments in this space and I think you're going to continue to see tobacco, alcohol, pharma, big CPG and again, we really believe that IP is a core part of our strategy because we think that's how we create a billion-dollar business for shareholders as this industry evolves from what has been an illicit industry and now what is being commercialized in year two to where we think things are going to be 10 years from now, 5 years from now, as large transnational companies get into it. Absolutely. Now you guys have a relationship with Bev Canna. Can you talk a little bit about what you guys are doing with them? Bev Canna is I think a perfect example of the types of companies that we like to work with on the downstream so we kind of have an upstream, that's the farmers, the growers. They guys grow in biomass that they need to have turned into oil. The downstream is companies like Bev Canna, guys that are manufacturing edibles, beverages, products that they know how to manufacture already and they have a good understanding of consumer packaged goods. That's not what we do, we sell standardized molecules. So really, we love Bev Canna because it's molecules, THC and CBD, highly purified, come out of neck sleeves, patented, extraction distillation plant and then it powers Bev Canna's products. We think they're going to be one of the largest beverage players in Canada. We think again, that's a segment, obviously Canna, he's very focused on that because of the constellation brand's relationship and we think over the long term, we think beverage is really exciting. So for us, we've got some technology that we acquired recently that allows the onset time to be sped up from about an hour and a half to two hours for me when I take traditional kind of beverage or edible to 10 to 12 minutes. So for us, we think the value of that IP is going to be tremendously valuable moving forward to companies like Bev Canna and other beverage players that are looking for highly purified molecules that are emulsified and ready to go and be added to their beverage products. Fantastic. Now, what can investors expect for neck sleeve oils in 2020? I think what you're going to see in 2020, you're going to see a few more licensing deals where we generate royalty fees from our non-core IP but I think what we're most excited to unveil is some of our partners on the downstream product. So companies that are existing manufacturers of food products that now are bringing their infused edible line to market. We're very excited to start making those announcements and then also our program for cultivators and large-scale outdoor cannabis farmers we think that the outdoor legalization of cannabis has really changed the game and we're really excited to start announcing some of those relationships as well. You know, we think it's a great year and obviously Meti Farm Labs and Valens have both done a great job to really validate the model. I remember two years ago, the biggest LPs in the space there's no market for what you guys are setting up and we're going to do it all ourselves but I think what really labs and Valens have done is they've demonstrated there's a lot of billion-dollar companies that said this isn't as easy as buying equipment and setting it up and they're starting to focus on what they do and we think that there's a lot of value in companies that focus and again, continue to push the signs and get more efficient when it comes to what's their cost per molecule, that oil. I agree with that. I agree with that. I mean, everybody was vertically integrated, vertically integrated. Everyone wants to be vertically integrated. Everyone wants to get their hands involved in everything and why not just become an expert in one thing? Valens has shown and labs have shown and you guys are showing that if you become an, and Bev Canada too, if you become an expert in one thing you have a chance. But if you're trying to be Jack of all trades, master of none, is that not what we're seeing? An entire sector of companies that have blown through, in some cases, billions of dollars. Canopy growth is burning through 300 million a quarter. Aurora cannabis last quarter burnt through $88 million. It's crazy. And this is a scary thing too because you look at some of these balance sheets. So what's on the balance sheet? You got facilities, you know, but you got facilities that quite frankly you wouldn't build today because a company like Nextleaf, all we care about is how many THC and CBD molecules are in that biomass. You know, we'd love that biomass to be grown outdoors because it's going to be a lower cost per molecule for us. So, at the end of the day, there's a lot of these indoor cultivation facilities that quite frankly you're going to, at some point, you're going to shut off the lights because you're going to say, well, you're going to grow those outdoors in a field once per year. You're going to process that into oil. But the other thing, you know, the goodwill, the biological assets, you're going to continue to see right-downs of that. And I think in some ways that's going to overhang the sector. But the one thing that we know is that Canada is the first developed country in the world to legalize the most popular listed drug globally. And there's going to be a lot of winners over the long term. And there's going to be companies that, you know, you and I are going to be laughing, chuckling about in five years from now and saying, holy smokes. I mean, guys literally blew through billions of dollars and shut off the lights. And, you know, guys bought the assets for pennies of the dollar. And, you know, in some ways it's sad. But I also think, you know, you look at other industries, Coke and Pepsi, don't grow sugar cane and processed. And, you know, they do one thing. They, in some cases, don't even bottle. You know, they're a formulation and they're a brand. And it's going to be the same thing in this image. So let me ask you a question. You're the CEO. So if the right company came to the table and offered you X amount of dollars, would you sell this business? Listen, every single day we will do what's in the best interest of the shareholders. That's who I work for. You know, my family and I are the biggest shareholders of this company. And, you know, we got a lot of pride, our management team, our board. We got a lot of pride. We're in this to build a billion-dollar business. And we're in this to make a lot of happy shareholders. And, you know, I love this industry. We're a group that really, we've built our business on 15 years of experience in the legacy market. And we do that justice by, you know, developing IP around this experience and really scaling it. And we think that you don't have a lot of opportunities, again, to be in an industry that's, you know, has a massive global demand, you know, disruption opportunity. And, you know, for us, again, we're not looking for any exits. We're looking to build a billion-dollar business. That's why we recently put a shareholder rights plan and a poison pill in place. We looked at, you know, some of these hostile takeovers that we've seen over the last couple of years. We expect that there's going to be some hostile takeovers in 2020. We think, especially as some of these big, billion-dollar companies are going to need to backfill some of their market caps. And we think at the end of the day, you know, again, look at labs, look at balance. I mean, these guys have, with that business model, focused on biomass to oil, have surpassed guys that had a two, three, four year head start. Profitability, revenue, and economics have run it in a great business. So we think that, you know, obviously, there's going to be a lot of opportunities to do M&A transactions. But, you know, for us, we're always focused on what's in the best interest of the shareholders and how do we build a great company. Okay, great. Well, I think you're doing a great job. Thank you very much for being here today. For all of you guys that are watching, Nextly Solutions. This is Paul, the CEO. Take a look at them. Symbol is oils. And thank you very much for your time today. I wish you all the best of luck. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Have yourself a great day, and thank you guys for watching.