 It's really exciting to be here with Peter, who, as you heard, if you didn't know Peter's background, I mean, this is a gentleman who's been a pioneer in an industry that pioneering 10 years ago, or even in 2014, was a lot more difficult than it is today. We had a chance to catch up in the green room, and one of the topics just was change in perception and how that's really, really changed the playing field. But before we get into that, I actually think it's very helpful, Peter, for the audience to hear a little bit about kind of how you started out 10 years ago. Because then I want to talk about, I mean, Metrum was one of the first real big transactions in the industry that inspired so many other operators to not only seek out major partners, but get going. So I want to hear about that. And that I really, you know, we're here to talk about slang because it's been an exciting six months for your company. So start us just a little bit in the beginning on how you got here. Yeah, so 10 years ago, Cannabis was still this super illegal product almost everywhere. You know, probably similar used to today, but it was highly stigmatized and obviously there wasn't an industry. Canada had this grow for yourself model that was the result of a series of lawsuits where people basically said if Canadians have a human right to medicine and cannabis is medicine, then it's a human right that we should be able to access cannabis. And that was a successful argument, which led to the government trying to figure out how people would access cannabis. There was an RFP, a company that became Cannamed won that RFP, which is now Aurora. But ultimately it was new. They weren't producing cannabis very successfully. So there was another lawsuit and the patient said we should be able to grow for ourselves because not only can we not afford this, but it's no good. And that was successful. So then there was this proliferation of quasi illegal if you were selling to anyone other than the three designated people you were allowed to grow for. And that created this highly distributed gray slash black market in Canada. So that, you know, fast forward to 2010, 2011, the government's trying to figure out how this should all be handled. And we had quite a conservative leader in power who wanted to just get rid of it. And the idea, his idea for getting rid of it was to commercially license a small number of producers that could be tightly regulated, carefully overseen. And that was what was going to get rid of the riffraff in his view. And so I was in tech and my co-founder Billy Levy also was in tech. And we saw this is just a really interesting cultural moment, entrepreneurial opportunity. And what the government really liked about us when we started talking to them was that we knew nothing about cannabis and we had no experience with cannabis. And in their view, if our business failed, we'd go back to tech and we wouldn't have the connections to put it in the streets. Was that critical for anybody coming into the industry at that time? Was that was that the blueprint for I've never done this before and actually largely speaking? Yes, there was a little lip service paid to a few people that were like the absolute most proper participants of the old systems. There were a couple people, but really it was lawyers and bankers and tech people, people that had no experience, which was somewhat counterintuitive, but hugely beneficial to us. So we applied, successfully won a license in those early days. And that allowed us to draw early capital. We found another group that was also early licensed and merged entities and formed a company called Metrum Health Corp. Five years ago, almost today, and time flies incredibly quickly. A few months after that, Fidelity led a financing to go public. It was the second company to go public in the space to Tweed before it was called Canopy Growth. What was Fidelity thinking? I mean, seriously, they had a lot on the line for reputation issues. When I think of Fidelity, I think of one of the more conservative financial institutions in the world. This doesn't make sense to me. Yeah, and I think we might have been their first and last check to the space, mostly because it was an underperforming investment for a couple of years. But I think what they saw was that our team was a bunch of bankers, lawyers and tech entrepreneurs. Our chairman was the former CEO of TD Dominion Securities. Another one of our board members was the commissioner of the RCMP. So that would be like the head of the FBI here. And he just left his position as the head of Interpol. So we had like the super cop, the banker, a bunch of tech kids who wouldn't hurt a fly. And then we had an auditor on our board and it just read like the exact opposite of who you'd pull at a central casting for a weed business. So that was like a lot of the folks, Bruce and Mark and the folks at Canopy. Talk about how Canopy becomes essentially a partner and ultimately your sugar daddy. But again, it's a small community. It's certainly back then it was even smaller. So how did they view you and ultimately for people that don't know the transaction? What was the strategic element of this for them? Yeah, so by 2015, Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister of Canada at the very end. And by the way, Bruce is Bruce Linton, CEO of Canopy Growth. I don't mean to be pedantic. But he is kind of like Bono or Madonna or someone who Sting, they kind of go with it. They'll go down in history when they're writing the book on legalization. He'll be kind of like the less controversial Joseph Kennedy senior and a guy who really was there at the beginning and jumped on the commercial opportunity post-prohibition. But once Justin Trudeau won, there was this sense that legalization may actually take place. We went from trading a thousand shares a day at $1.50 and no one caring to all of a sudden a bunch of volume. The stock went for a run and the first kind of wave of M&A started taking place. It was a small world. It still is a small world generally, but in cannabis, it's extremely small. So I think we've been good about not trashing anybody because you never know who you're going to wind up being partnered with, bought by hiring. How would you trash them? It happens, you know. It's interesting and not to get lost on this, but in some sense, some of the Canadian LPs that have been the most successful have been the biggest targets just because their market cap has exceeded necessarily what people perceive to be evaluation that makes sense. But some of the biggest players in Canada, in some sense, they take a lot of heat for having been pioneers and being very successful in capital markets even when their businesses haven't been as mature. It's a tricky situation and since Canada is a federally legal environment, it was able to attract certain capital that didn't have to be worried about the whole state federal issue. So Canada kind of punched above its weight capital markets wise because there was a time. So going back to our transaction, we competed, we were fierce but respectful competitors. And as we were looking at the space, ultimately a conversation led to this is a powerful combination. So we had a similar number of shares outstanding and the transaction was like 0.8 to 1 share ratio. So it almost cut canopy in half all stock. People said we were crazy. People said they were crazy for paying 430 million. But anyone who held on, that would be like a couple billion more than a few billion today because that was at like a, you know, that was a $8 share ish. So where were you after this transaction? Because again, you know, you had built your company and yet one of the great companies in cannabis history takes you out. Your, you know, what was either your role in the new entity or how did you take what had obviously been an enormous success? And really, how do we get to slang, which ultimately is also, you know, the combination of bringing a couple assets together, which we'll talk about. Yeah. So the early days of the of Metrum Health was kind of like my boot camp operationally. Yeah. Space. And that took us to the U.S. quite a bit for just kind of recon, visiting Colorado, especially in the early days. You got a sense that Canada, while it was ahead on legalization and the capital markets had a lot to learn operation operations and brands wise. We saw products go from, you know, an unbranded jar of cannabis with a little label maker saying super lemon haze to vaporizers to edibles to more sophisticated things. So we already knew that that was coming. So the interest for me was to be part of that. So after the canopy transaction, you know, on a very friendly basis, Billy and I decided to focus our efforts on the U.S. making investments personally, continuing to foster relationships that we'd formed years earlier and put all of our weight behind the next wave, which we saw as consumer packaged goods. We got our 10,000 hours kind of in that limited license vertically integrated environment, which was great, but really hard to scale. And it's really hard to be a great farmer, a great processor, a great, you know, formulator of finished goods, great marketer, great retailer. Usually people consult it to that later. And sometimes they break stuff off, as we've seen in other industries. So our view is this is going CPG. We want to be part of it. That was an early idea to and change years ago. But we jumped on that and canopy like the concept, but they couldn't put equity into the business. So we created a unique structure that allowed them to have a warrant to buy equity if the federal law allowed them to do so. Sounds like something we've heard of recently. Yeah, which was effective template for what happened with acreage. Yeah. And other LPs have quietly done similar things or they've spun out assets with convertible warrant kind of structures. Yeah. So that was early. You know, we're proud to be part of that. And ultimately, the following two years led to putting together the assets, the people that were kind of the best of the things we saw on the people we knew. So SLANG went public this January. And we were incredibly lucky that, you know, we were one of the few deals that went way above and stayed above issue, you know, decent volume. And trends have kind of come in our direction. Yeah. Not like any genius. And our part is just the timing to work really well. I mean, it's been a time when there's been enormous... Can you hear back there? I'm seeing a... You can't hear... I think I just behold this thing. Okay. Can you hear me? Well, she could turn this up quite a bit. My wife calls me boomer. So this is happening at a time when, obviously, if you think about the fourth quarter of 2018, you had all the major U.S. multistates come into market. They were RTOing, by the way. You decided to IPO. I mean, talk about that. Yeah, so most people did an RTO in Canada. Were they backed into a shell or a CPC? We did a full prospectus. And that, I think, inspired a lot of confidence in sort of the more institutional investment world. And when we were raising money, especially in New York, there was a certain reticence to be part of, like, a traditional Canadian cannabis RTO. And people were really appreciative of the fact we did a prospectus, which was a little more work at the beginning. A lot more disclosure, but cleaner. And I think was part of why it was a successful list. Yeah, I mean, if you think about that, I mean, almost every one of those multi-state operators that RTOed in the fall not only was there a market decline. That was an exogenous factor to cannabis, which certainly impacted cannabis. But it clearly was a case where the RTO was becoming a bit of a stigma. Yeah, there were a few black eyes that the Canadian markets got from different reports of transactions that went down, or a couple of years earlier. And just less transparency makes people less comfortable. Yeah. So I think that there were a lot of issues in the fall. There were macro things that affected those folks beyond their control. We waited that out. And I think over the long, long term, none of that will matter too much, because the people putting a fundamentally good business together will be successful. And I think that changed the fact that on the days the stock is up, I get no calls, and the days the stock goes down, I get 1,000 calls. And so I'd rather have more days when it's up and down operationally. All I can tell you is the S&P's down 130 basis points right now, so I'm sure cannabis is down four. Yeah. And eventually, I think you'll see maybe things go the other way, because in CPG, where we believe this all goes, Haagen-Dazs will do quite well relative to the lower quality ice cream, because it's one of the last micro luxuries you get. If times are tough, a $10 pint makes you feel pretty good for the little bit of time that you're eating it in front of Netflix. Indeed. So I think cannabis isn't going to be bulletproof in a recession, and certainly to capital markets and the fundamental business will obviously move in sometimes different directions. The long term, they'll catch up to one another. But I do think that we are all lucky to be their investors or participants or thinking about either one of those things in an industry that does have so many macro tailwinds globally. I think, and I want to get to the capital markets world because I think there's no question that a big part of the evolution of the industry has been the capital markets dynamics for better or worse. So let's get to that. And ultimately, I want to get down to the essence of slang and how you view yourself. And in a world where you've created companies, you've certainly focused on consumer products, but you've been referred to as the conglomerate of weed or a portfolio of brands. How do you think of yourself? Or for a company that really has some brands that you brought together right away, and maybe you start with the genesis of essentially the organic acquisition and Firefly and bringing together well-known brands and saying that we want to add our expertise to and take it to the next level. Yeah, so we do have a portfolio of brands. As a collection, they've done almost a few hundred million dollars with the sales of the cash register. They differentiate cash register because ultimately that's where you can tell how consumers are voting with their dollars and that's how you know where you stand. How we break out geographically, well, we do have one product or another on the THC side in 12 states and our hardware in all the states and a handful of countries. We do generate more of our business sort of west of the Mississippi where it is more competitive with Colorado and California being the biggest contributors but also the biggest contributors just tracking the biggest markets for cannabis. So as a consumer packaged goods company we've organized ourselves as such. We don't own any cultivation. We buy biomass and we process it into finished goods under our brands and our formulations and we don't own any retail either not because we think it's a bad business but... Some of your partners... Yeah, retailers are our partners so we'd be competing. So what you see typically in the grocery business or most retail is that chain stores aren't carrying other chain stores private label brands like your house brands aren't going to be carried by your competition and so by not owning retail we're in almost a few thousand retail environments and the success of those retailers is our success and vice versa. So we're not cultivators, we're not retailers we're really focused on procuring biomass making our finished goods and then wholesaling it and distributing it to and retailers and that's a model that we're able to operate under because most of our business is in those more mature markets. In a limited license early stage market you just can't do that because they require vertical integration because that's easier to regulate. Going back to Canada it was a lot easier to say okay you got five people are licensed and you each do everything from seed to sale so I can send three government officials to your facility every month which was insane but that's what they did and we can go through everything much more easily than if there were a thousand of you but once the stigma goes away people realize the sky isn't falling the data comes in, car accidents are flat opiate deaths are down and most importantly tax revenue is up and they say oh man how do we get more tax revenue well the way you get more tax revenue is license more people, break up the verticals and generally create a bigger industry and that becomes the phase where our business model really excels but even in those limited markets which you can't ignore because they're incredibly exciting like Illinois is going to be hugely exciting with the new regulation that was announced we look for partnership so we're not elbows out we think that we're the smartest and we're the only ones that are going to be able to pull this off we look for good partners and a good example of that is in Florida where we said this is too exciting of a market to ignore Florida on top of the fact that this is a large population the data is showing us they're big cannabis consumers and that's a limited license vertically integrated environment so we had a lot of conversations and ultimately the largest retailer selling the most cannabis in the state was the company we ultimately decided to work with they're called TrueLeave and the way we looked at the Florida market was we could either buy in or earn in buying in is obvious, you buy a license or you buy a company that has a license and we saw earning in as saying hey you know company X our brands we can demonstrate will bring people off the street into your stores versus the other stores you can look at Harvard Business How do you decide on a TrueLeave? Clearly they are a market leader one or two in every segment but as you assess again an earn in it's critical that you choose the right partner so what was it about TrueLeave as opposed to I don't know Vitacan or somebody else in Florida To put it really simply TrueLeave sells the most weed that makes them by far the most appealing person to us because that's our goal as well and also Kim Rivers the CEO is an incredibly smart person and really good operator and just runs that operation incredibly well At this point because of the nature of the operators I mean do you have kind of a wish list of where else you guys think you want to be finding these partners and again partner in the truest sense of the word you know Kim is somebody that stands out for people that know TrueLeave I mean it's a very well run company it's a company that's been generating and has got out of the gates early so tell me how you assess partnerships in the places you are not yet what are you looking for So on top of the metric I just gave you also have to look for people that are practical and thinking further into the future about how we can help each other we were talking in the green room with the CEO of a multi-state operator about how it is a big pie and there are going to be opportunities to win and there's no business model that I can say definitively is the business model for the short to mid term we can see in the distance how this probably breaks down and we can apply margins and basic metrics from other industry to cannabis but what point is that going to be the case so we look for people that are practical in terms of the wish list this is obviously one of the places that will be really exciting the whole Illinois is going to be a great market but again it already is if you're in the black market so you can kind of look at human behavior it tracks pretty consistently in the kind of the western world even though reported cannabis use isn't always as honest like Vermont to Alabama but I bet if you test the sewers of all of these cities the THC content and the aggregate urine for Capita is super similar I don't want to be doing it I'm just sure you have analysts for that you've gone out of your way to talk about slang as being a CPG story and I'm sure everybody who's in this room has heard cannabis industry being described as you know it's about brands brands matter good because that's the second derivative conversation that I think we were not having even 12 months ago people understand pricing power comes with brands sophistication comes with brands that truly that's how you stand out but I want third derivative so Peter how do you how do you compete where everyone who I talked to says we're building the brand how are you endeavoring to stand out from the crowd I mean it just so happens you've got some core hardware and house brands that I think have become staples of the industry and therefore they're out there but I hear everybody talking about brands all the time and that's great because that's what it's about but I want to hear how you're going to compete with all the other guys that are saying it's about brands yeah so I think there's going to be like a certain special sauce but a lot of it is just the textbook CPG playbook our head of our sales organization came from Conica Minolta where he was sort of selling the most boring product in the world the office printer and photocopier now in cannabis he's like been unleashed to sell something that people actually want but he still applies the same sales methodologies he's organized a sales team in a similar way and I think you're going to see better and better bench strength coming from the mainstream into cannabis as the stigma comes down but the brand also has to stand for something and be associated with something you know if you think about the original brand is like the hot iron you poke your livestock with it was just to to say this is my livestock this is my product there's a lot of people with brand but nothing to poke it with you know and so our brands have been in market for a long time so part of it another thing our head of sales likes to say is the best ability is availability so if your brand isn't a lot of places that's how you create subconscious relationships with people I've seen that before I've seen it in all these places I'm kind of trusting it a bit more they develop a relationship of purchasing it and they form habits and then they you know the first few trips into a dispensary starts very conversational you might be in there for 15 minutes talking to a budtender but by the hundredth time you kind of know what you want everyone's busy they just want to come and go so I think just availability is super important but then brands typically you know do have to stand for something or be associated with something you know Nike isn't just the swoosh that's how you tell a Nike but they did kind of reinvent the sneaker in the 70s innovation and I had those Air George's that you could pump up the back and they still had me jump about an inch off the ground but nonetheless yeah and Hermes is coming off of 200 years of craftsmanship it's not just an orange bag so our so what is your ethos yes so what do people know about slang so our 510 thread to be technical but our cannabis vape is one of the 510 thread 510 is just a a diameter in millimeters of the threads that you you know spin the cartridge onto the battery but it's the generic it's like the USB standard kind of thing for vape risers so lots of people have it it's almost an agreed upon form factor we were the first in market with one of those a lot of years ago it's become very competitive but you know it our brand is based on both innovating in that space and then competing successfully in that space in March we still had the number one selling 510 thread vape in Colorado after facing over 150 competitors that have come and gone over the past sort of seven years on that product and then you know on the firefly side of things we we just are launching a new dryer vape but we were one of the first with a convection dryer vaporizer which I can get into a lot of technical mumbo jumbo but basically it just allows you to capture a lot more of the flavors a lot more of the cannabinoids it's more of a connoisseur product which again prices at higher than most people are interested in paying but it's based on innovating in that space and it authentically delivers value to someone in the market that wants that so we have products that have history we have products that are differentiated Deborah has a report on sort of the vape space which you can look at fascinating report by the way which you know if you didn't know what 510 was before you're going to know what 511 512 but the bottom line is it's become first of all I mean it's a very competitive segment though so you know you're competing with not only packs but you're competing with China you're competing with I see deal flow all the time and half of them seem to have a vape element to what they're doing yeah so I mean on the supply chain we leverage China so we're not saying that we invent like the 510 cartridge that it actually goes into that's a piece of hardware we'll buy from a third party what's inside it matters you know if we all agree that this is the size of a beer can you're no longer competing on who is the cheapest best can it's more about like what's in the can and how you describe the relationship people have with what's in the can so that's how I see the 510 thread side of things going and then with packs and the proprietary battery and cartridge model there's a bit more of a technology angle there but we're starting to see even with even with the proprietary stuff packs and everybody else the sales are basically equal to the high-end formulations of the 510 category so it's going to be very competitive but what we like and you know a better model is that we've been competing like if you go again to Colorado Oregon California Washington all these places it's highly competitive so when we're looking at acquisitions we really like management teams that have succeeded in those markets because they're like you know athletes that have traded a trained altitude you bring them down to sea level and they have that extra edge because they've been just duking it out not to say that people a vape or cartridge that's been particularly successful in California which is most competitive market the largest market in the world that's the guy you want yeah from a management standpoint and I think we're all witnessing a shift in brand trends from the sort of giant monolithic top-down brands like craft and whatnot to the more regional plays just generally speaking and it'll happen with cannabis too so there's a certain regionality that people are drawn to and so you know even if you have a 510 thread vape in Colorado that's really popular and they're automatically going to be welcomed by the Washington market or the Oregon market especially the Oregon market who really does care about the local craft story at a good price so that's why in our portfolio we'll have products that technically have similar characteristics in Colorado and Washington but they address totally different markets and we don't see them as overlap and they're both doing incredibly well and you're talking about but we're certainly talking about consumer demographic targets too right so we're talking about different price points and I do want to hear about the Firefly 2 Plus because that's a Rolls Royce that's rolling off the assembly line soon but talk about that you're addressing different demographics and yes the consumer in Colorado is different than the consumer in Illinois how do you view that? so the vape category now segments pretty clearly because it's mature enough that you're starting to see these trends in the green market report very interesting exactly so since it does become at maturity almost as big as bud and it's hard to say at maturity but today if you looked at last year in California flower made up about 40% of the market pre-rolls were like 8% of that and so you're seeing you know 32% pure flower that you grind up roll up and smoke or put in a bowl smoke or cook into food whatever the case may be that's flower then if you looked at vape it was around 30% so almost neck and neck and so what you're seeing growing quickly so it might be the dominant sector and it's segmented a few ways so you actually see premium priced vaporizers both on the oil side and the hardware side you see the discount stuff you see the value stuff in the middle and we address all of those markets so the firefly on the dry herb side it is a Rolls Royce it's not going to appeal to everybody but the same people that my father in law will buy a bottle of wine he'll tell us about it for an hour and then he'll pour it through a crazy system of God knows what and there's a bunch of hissing sounds and the bottom and spins it and he really cares and knows what he's talking about in that way a lot of people I know buy boxes of wine and pour it into a Dixie cup and it's just a different buying pattern so in vape the firefly is definitely catering more to that crowd I'm guessing this group of people care about the firefly too and a dynamically heated with every inhale in a titanium shell this is the kind of stuff that I think people are paying attention to there's better most trapped components to it the temperature curve does allow you to capture all the cannabinoids along the spectrum because it's not just THC it evolves and people get more sophisticated now the CBD gets a lot of attention it's a dominant cannabinoid sort of next to THC totally different effects symbiotic in a lot of ways but there's other cannabinoids as well and they all decarboxylate at different temperatures and having a temperature ramp that allows you to capture them all as well as the terpenes that provide the flavors which also have a lot to do with the effect they volatize at different temperatures so a product like the Firefly 2 Plus helps you really get that full connoisseur experience we're also extending that who else is doing that? this sounds to me especially again in the technology behind truly heating the product to the part or the level that truly brings out the optimal impact first of all how are you testing for that and ultimately how long did it take for that product to come off the assembly line? there's a guy who left Apple to start Firefly a handful of years ago and while he will often bring up the value of the stock options he left behind leaving Apple 10 years ago he did create a beautiful and highly technically capable product and not a lot of people have created these convection dryer vapes because of that complexity and because the consumer that uses it has to be a bit more sophisticated there's a lot more competition and dryer vape on the conduction side where it heats more like an oven for a couple minutes and then you inhale it packs does an incredibly good job with that there's a handful of others and as the dryer category kind of maxes out I think you'll see that kind of not flattened but you'll have your market Rolls Royce isn't selling a million cars a year and then if you go to the end of the spectrum more to the distillate side of things we have a product that's growing like gangbusters in California but a lot of that just has to do with the fact our supply chain is tight and we're able to pull the price lever and convenience for people and a company that did that extremely well better than anybody was just acquired by Cura Leaf last week called Select a distillate based product that's a good job organized their supply chain well pounded pavement were incredibly aggressive on pricing would nearly consign product and built an awesome market share a lot of people when you start hearing about the technology behind the vaporizer I think people also mistakenly believe that this is a place that tobacco companies will come in and that there's some transference between an e-cigarette break that down talk about why you're not terribly concerned about jewel or anybody else that seems to dominate in the tobacco world right now yes so important thing you hit on is that the early cannabis vaporizers were just repurposed e-cigarettes so they all kind of ramped to 600 degrees which would be optimum for you know for nicotine but not so much for THC where even you know you'll capture all the cannabinoids at 22 degrees which is funny but it's not 420 we would have set the temperature to that it would have been funny marketing but we wouldn't have had this high quality product so the purpose built cannabis vapes there aren't many of them with big tobacco you know they've placed their bets Altria made a big investment in chronos another Canadian licensed producer from early on that went through a few ownership groups but now it's kind of Altria's bet PAX has you know from when they were PAX labs before they spun off to be jewel and then PAX labs and I think it's just a fundamentally different experience in the use case tobacco versus cannabis the only similarity is that the dominant way to consume historically has been inhaling but that's pretty much where it ends totally different effects both positive and negative although I shouldn't say they're any positive but I mean there is scientific arguments for nicotine a well-rounded you know but typically people go out to consume an entire cigarette whereas people may the ideal dynamic or at least part of what the drive vaporizer is solving and solving from a efficiency of use of product by the way some very expensive products that you don't want to really burn through too fast but sometimes people puff and wait and wait and come back in 20 minutes and you don't smoke a cigarette like that no exactly and it's more social in some ways it's also more personal in a lot of ways and yeah with the firefly mini not to keep hawking it but I will because it's my job it does lend itself to that stop and go you know it heats up in a few seconds you take your your pup you put it down hasn't destroyed the product because it hasn't heated it up like an oven and so you know that is certainly a use case that's different tobacco to cannabis so I think what we're seeing broadly speaking is you know big alcohol saw cannabis as a threat we've talked to everybody you could imagine and some of them are more candid than others about how they've been talking about cannabis and board meetings for over a decade they still don't know exactly what their move is but you know like the dust cloud and the horizon is now like a stampede you can see kind of coming right at you so a lot of people are trying to figure out where they should stand so you've seen some big alcohol partnerships with cannabis you've only really seen the one big tobacco partnership you've seen some pharma stuff so if you looked at what cannabis generally could address whether it's CBD, whether it's THC whether it's other cannabinoids you're addressing a multi-hundred billion rec market you're addressing a multi-hundred billion sleep market multi-hundred billion pain market the list goes on so that kind of also goes back to like the opportunity size for all of us and how it's not going to be like ride sharing where there's only kind of two apps I want on my phone or social media or search it is a far more open market to more participants more opportunities to win and it's not, you know, this whole cannabis fad isn't going to blow over they've been using it for thousands of years it'll be used for thousands of years into the future and there's kind of this market opportunity that's taken place due to regulatory shifts but I don't see that ending either for a long time because it's some place in the world they're still going to be very strict on cannabis for a long time it's hard to go from beheading people for it to full legalization overnight you know we're coming off a much less aggressive position in America but still it hasn't happened overnight I'm sure my parents and their friends were talking about how cannabis was going to be legal any day now you know in the 50s and 60s and that, you know didn't play out for a long time it's funny you bring up the rest of the world why don't we just go there real quick it was going to be part of my fast fire wait, logistics Deborah so are we doing Q&A or would we like to I know we have about 10 minutes okay so then I've got to move quickly let's do a little fast fire this is where I just want to ask Peter or a phrase or something Peter's going to quickly give me kind of his first thing that pops to mind doesn't have to be one word it could be anything but most interesting country in the world outside of North America there's no more cannabis right now I mean if Mexico doesn't count I would say that they are talking about legalization which is interesting I think western Europe is going to play out a lot like the US but since the EU can kind of move a little more quickly together it will do so Germany has been interesting already for us so I think western Europe is hard to pick down Germany is probably most interesting today acreage canopy deal your thoughts are great for the sector to see Canadians using their paper using their position to make bets on the US I think it's currently facing a little bit of a tussle with the fund that came out against the deal I think we'll see the confidence level people have in the deal as in terms of how closely the stocks trade to the deal price right now it doesn't seem like the confidence is huge but I think it gets done and I think that it's going to be great for everybody who's your cannabis idol it's incredibly tough there's capital markets people that have paved the way massively like Bruce there's people that have paved the way in the culture that have taken a lot of risks even the people that some people like to make fun of like the Tommy Chong's and the Cheech and Chong jokes and the list goes on but I think the D'Angelo brothers at Harberside did a huge job for the industry period never backing down so it would be incredibly hard to pick but the celebrity of the capital markets the activist crowd have all done their piece States Act safe banking time anyway you want when you hear that what does that mean to you I think States Act means liquidity to me you know the banks get comfortable the exchanges get comfortable the institutions get comfortable then there's a ton of liquidity in the space that isn't there today put your investor hat on one of those folks we know where you sit but public or private right now where should people be depends what your time horizons are and kind of like what your risk tolerance is you can invest in a public through you know financings that come out every few months usually to discount the price and with some of the bigger names you can hedge it and so if you're faster money you obviously have a lot of options in the capital markets if you have a longer term view there's some interesting privates you can play as well difficult question but as you said as a CEO but single state or multi-state operator what's the best model for us we were kind of like the original multi-state in a lot of ways because we've had products in multiple states and depending how you define operations operations in multiple states so I think what people usually talk about as they talk about vertically integrated limited license and they say MSO and then there's the competitive states we personally prefer the competitive states for a lot of reasons some of which I got into as an investor though I think the MSO is represented good momentum trade because people have kind of muscle memory and the Canadian trade was so rich when it was limited license vertically integrated and you saw a canopy go from 89 cents to 70 bucks and it has a much more similar business model to a Cresco so I think I would I'm not going to give you stock ideas but I think you can't go wrong with MSOs I agree next big strategic in the sector who's going to splash in whether it's a constellation style that may be done again in terms of the relative size to the industry or to the players itself but who's next hazard a guest? I think it's going to be one of the non-alcohol CPG's I'm not sure which but Buffett was popping off at his conference last week about how it would be a mistake for Coca-Cola to get involved in cannabis although they actually bought a company that had CBD water like a couple of years ago so he's obviously not too deep in the weeds of his investments but I think it'll be someone more like that and it'll be another big alcohol company Coca-Cola not close I'm asking they bought a company I think it was called Dirty Lemon or something and they had CBD in the product they removed the CBD this was pre-farm bill I'm not sure if they put it back in they've dabbled I'm not going to tell tales out of school I think there's going to be a lot of people doing things in CBD initially already there have been announcements I think it'll be a CPG player that is non-alcohol so someone related THC infused beverages as a market segment exciting so THC infused beverages get a ton of attention I think CBD infused beverages might be a bigger opportunity near term I can say the reality of the situation is and this is someone who has a beverage in market is that in California it was like 0.8% of the market last year it's never more than like a percent of any mature states market but you know it's getting a lot of attention huge investment and there's a bit of a gap between the reality and the possibility so we have to let data decide what we're going to put resources behind you know Vape and edibles represent more than half of the entire industry so that gets half at least of our attention so constellation isn't in this to suddenly be the corona of THC beverages I don't think so I think corona and a lot of these folks are in a lifestyle business the mood enhancement business and if someone's on the beach with a corona and a joint they want a piece of the action in both hands they're not going to make you put the joint in the corona and shake it around and drink it back that's gross I mean it's a decent ashtray when you're done I'll be been done actually probably yeah someone who's had a few too many of both but but I think that the big alcohol companies probably see this as like yeah it doesn't have to be the round peg in the square hole where the market goes the data will guide you and you can't you know force things into existence the market doesn't want hopefully they want it though eventually and we'll end with this the future the future for slang the future for the industry it's not a one word answer so I'll give you a second yeah I mean the future at the highest level is that people will be consuming more cannabis in the future than in the past as long as there isn't some massive population like Malthusian check but I think cannabis consumption is going to continue legalization I expect will continue also for so many reasons from tax revenues social justice all the way down I think in the actual business environment the models will shift more to the real world economics you'll see more the CPG focus guys the retail focus people the cultivators and all of those verticals will be compelling to different investors for different reasons so I think for slang we're going to continue running our playbook as a as a branded product focused company you'll see us making more acquisitions to develop the portfolio with a regional focus as well as a category focus and I think that for all of these companies that do a good job regardless of any sort of market ups and downs they'll be very successful you know cannabis gets compared to tech sometimes there's obviously some major differences but in the sense that they were both big big waves that took place you know you saw Amazon start before the dot-com crash and lived through it and you know be one of the most successful companies in the world they'll be cannabis companies that fail they'll be more that fail then fail that succeed people talk about the green rush they don't talk about the green flush where most of these companies aren't here but the good ones will be and they'll be bigger and better and if you're in this industry you're incredibly lucky to be part of an industry that has sort of this this secular trend of growth of cannabis consumer you're incredibly lucky that you're not going to have your life ruined by a small arrest and conviction for possession and you'll just have an availability of more product generally so I hope we see destigmatization the market will expand that's my crystal ball Peter Miller and Slang Worldwide thank you very much appreciate it