 Rather than focusing on any singular part of the industry, not only rather than focusing, say, on retail or consumers or on investment trends, we cast the net completely wide to capture any data we could from any source, feed it into our system and start using that to identify where both the connective tissue was within these data sets, as well as what the broader story we were seeing emerging was. We've just done what we believe to be the most comprehensive assessment of global demand for cannabis in the world today. There are over 260 million, at least semi-regular cannabis consumers around the world, who are collectively spending over $350 billion each year on cannabis. That does not include all of the medical applications and the emergent kind of therapeutic uses, nor does it include any of the industrial applications that are emerging with activation of the industrial hemp. Wow. I believe that the legalization of cannabis is going to be arguably the most consequential social change of our generation. We're now looking at over 60 countries just in a five-year window. So the pace is accelerating dramatically, and the reason why it's moving so quickly is because the science is affirming it. Cannabis is largely or increasingly being as seen as as acceptable, if not better than alcohol. That's part of the reason why companies like Constellation Brands, one of the world's largest alcohol companies, just spent $4 billion investing in a Canadian licensed operator. They see the writing on the wall. We use the public-facing reports that we release as a way to signal to the market some of the major issues that we're thinking about. So the data that we make available through Equia, which is our data platform, maybe the simple way to think about it is like Bloomberg for the cannabis industry, houses not just the reports that we produce, but the data underlying the reports. If you want to go in and explore the data yourself, you can certainly do that. Through that, we developed nine cannabis consumer archetypes, profiles of cannabis consumers that are not just defined based on what they consume and how they consume, but based on all of these other lifestyle attributes as well. We would all do well to find more joy in ourselves and spark joy in each other. And I think that seems to be one of the motifs or driving commitments that's pushing a lot of people in this space. It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We're on site at the beautiful New West Summit, the Cannabis Tech Conference. We are now going to be speaking with John Cagia. Hi, John. How's it going? Thank you so much for coming on the show. The pleasure's mine. Thank you for having me. I'm so pumped for this conversation. Those of you who don't know John's background, he's Chief Knowledge Officer at New Frontier Data, and he's one of the first analysts to focus exclusively on legal cannabis. All right, John, who are you? How did you even get interested in this field? So I'll tell you, I never in a million years thought I would be working in cannabis. I'm a professionally trained market analyst. I've got my master's degrees in business and in marketing research, and I built my career working, journey for small market research agencies that were working for very large, generally very conservative organizations, the Microsofts, IBMs, Northrop Drummers of the world. And we would work with these companies to help them kind of address and deal with, respond to major strategic operational challenges, how to build new products that are going to be serving the global marketplace. In late 2011, as we were watching the run-up to Colorado's ballot-ish initiatives, we're getting the signatures ready and trying to get the vote for legalization on the ballot, I began paying attention to it because I never thought cannabis was going to be legal in my lifetime. And just out of personal interest and information junkie, I started digging into some of the early numbers that we were seeing in Colorado around support, and it became apparent to me that there was a very good chance that this was going to pass. And that nobody was paying attention to it. And there was certainly nobody providing the kind of market research that we had been providing to, you know, these world-class organizations, the kind of market research that you find in every other sector of the economy, in what seems to be a sector of the economy that was about to emerge. So I proposed to my employers at the time that maybe this is something that we should look at. And, you know, we worked in Washington, D.C. We had many government clients that were like, yeah, not yet. So our compromise was that it becomes a personal pet project. I would report out every three to six months what we were finding, and we'd make a go-no-go decision on whether or not to enter this space. Well, fast forward four years, and every time I presented, they'd be like, oh, this is amazing. By that point, Colorado's measure had passed. Washington, D.C. had legalized. But with every presentation, they're like, this is amazing, but we're not quite ready yet. And I'm watching this market emerging. I'm watching the momentum building. My mind is being blown that this thing that I never thought had any possibility of happening is now happening. So fast forward to the summer of 2014. I'd actually just come back from an extraordinary trip to Brazil for the World Cup. And I got back to Washington in time to watch the World Cup final, and I'm trying to decide where I'm going to go and watch this game. And for some reason, I felt compelled to go to this restaurant that is not a place you would ordinarily go to watch a World Cup match. There's a lot of great soccer bars that you could have gone, but for some reason it felt like the right place to go in and watch this game. And so I'm sitting at the bar, having a cup of coffee, watching the match on the screen above the bar. And I get introduced to the woman who is sitting next to me. And as you do in Washington, I ask what she does, and she tells me she's about to start a data analytics company in the cannabis industry. That's how I met our father, Giada Guaida Carcer. And it's been nearly six years since we met. And we hit it off immediately. We spent a handful of hours that day geeking out at the bar and she's like, where have you come from? Everybody else in Washington at the time, you were talking about cannabis, people would run for the hills screaming. But there was just a clear connection there that was almost immediate. That was immediate. And as the conversation continued, as I began to understand what it was she was doing, it became clear that this was just too compelling an opportunity to pass on. A total green field market that was growing explosively, that had no meaningful data worth speaking about, and that was so well aligned with my professional interests. So I officially joined New Frontier in January 2015 and had never looked back. What an interesting trajectory. Were you also born in Kenya? I was born and raised in Kenya. I moved to the U.S. How old were you? I was 12 and a half when we moved to the U.S. So I did middle school and high school here. And then I went to the U.K. for my undergrad and graduate degrees. I moved back to Washington and it's largely called at home since. And doing data for all these other massive companies and analytics and now you saw the trend. And it's so interesting how the universe put you and New Frontier data at this World Cup final like you were going somewhere that wasn't unconventional and ended up happening. It's very interesting. So okay, now how do you guys pick? In 2014 these things are starting up, you're trying to find signal in data. It's just something even in your previous work that you were doing as an analyst. How do you find signal in data? Structuring data is something that we care a lot about. That's what we're doing. We're identifying great minds. We're sitting down with them, structuring data, sharing it with other people in a sense. But how do you pick? How do we pick who to pick? How do you pick the data? Which is most interesting to you guys. So this is where there's a science and an art to the kind of work that we do. One of the things that I learned quite early in my career and had extraordinary mentors to guide us through our early training was that it's very easy to teach the mechanics of research. It's very easy, relatively, to teach people how to crunch the numbers. And particularly now in this highly technological environment there's no shortage of solutions that can do the vast majority of the work for you in terms of just processing data. What is much more difficult to do is to explain, to understand and identify the so-what, to understand and identify the implications and tell a compelling story around it. And that's the art of research. That's the art of what we do. Why should people care? Why should people care? And how can they use this to do what they do better? In a case like cannabis, having come from an environment where our issue was actually generally we had too much data. We had too much information. Coming to cannabis, it was not just the most data-derth environment I'd ever been in. It was the most data-averse environment I've ever been in. One of the first conversations I had with a master grower, he told me that he's been growing cannabis for about 30 years in Northern California, but at the end of every cultivation cycle he'll burn all of his notes, all of his records, because he was so scared about federal intervention, about getting caught up by law enforcement that he didn't want any records of his historical practices. So coming from an environment where we're literally talking about billions of data points into one where people are writing things down in notebooks and then burning them at the end of the season was just a complete flip of the kind of environment we're in. So as a company we realized that this was not going to be a conventional environment in terms of the types of data stories that you see in other ecosystems, but that also where we saw an opportunity. And rather than focusing on any singular part of the industry, rather than focusing, say, on retail or consumers or on investment trends, we cast the nets completely wide to capture any data we could from any source. Feed it into our system and start using that to identify where both the connective tissue was within these datasets, as well as what the broader story we were seeing emerging was. And what were those connecting tissues and what is the broader story that emerged? So one is that for every market we have seen legalized, we have seen explosive consumer demand. I've been in the space for five years now and when I first started I thought I knew how much cannabis Americans consumed. I had no idea. Americans have a prodigious appetite for cannabis. And one of the interesting things about this market... How much are we talking? So the number is just on a global context. We've just done what we believe to be the most comprehensive assessment of global demand for cannabis in the world today. There are over 260 million, at least semi-regular cannabis consumers around the world who are collectively spending over $350 billion each year on cannabis. So if the current legal market is just around over $20 billion, we have barely scratched the tip of the iceberg of the addressable market that the full legalization will represent assuming it became legal globally. A trillion dollar market or more, yeah. It certainly has that potential. Because if we're talking about a $350 billion market of just regular consumption, which is largely flower and generally low quality flower in most parts of the world, that does not include all of the medical applications and the emergent kind of therapeutic uses. Nor does it include any of the industrial applications that are emerging with activation of the industrial hemp. So the long-term opportunity that this could grow into has meant that as my study of the industry has continued, I believe that the legalization of cannabis is going to be, arguably, the most consequential social change of our generation. So it could be that the industrial hemp and also the health and wellness applications of cannabis could themselves be significantly larger than the recreational use market? On the legal side, absolutely, at least initially. So first, taking the medicinal side. It has been extraordinary to see how quickly the global community has began to have this debate conversation around medical cannabis. When we first started looking at this industry, there were probably four countries around the world where there was meaningful progress or active legal programs. We're now looking at over 60 countries just in a five-year window. So the pace is accelerating dramatically and the reason why it's moving so quickly is because the science is affirming it. When the World Health Organization comes out with a statement, with a very affirmative statement about the wellness and therapeutic benefits of CBD, when the US National Academies of Sciences, through the most comprehensive assessment of all of the scientific literature around cannabis, comes out and says, yes, it does work for paying for nausea related to cancers. It does improve patient wellness outcomes. The medical community, which has so long been informed by the propaganda of the war on drugs and prohibition, is now being challenged to rethink the role that cannabis can play in improving health and wellness outcomes in our population. And so that's happening on a global basis. And even amongst skeptics, when they see the effects that it is having on their friends and their loved ones, like so many other issues, once it hits home, once it becomes a kitchen table issue, attitudes change very, very quickly. Once a family member has some sort of a health issue, and then it suddenly changes perspectives. On the industrial side, we think the transition is going to be a little bit different. So because cannabis and marijuana and hemp got prohibited at about the same time, despite the longstanding recognition that hemp was a phenomenally versatile plant, it largely got removed from our industrial economy. So for all of the innovations that have happened across the industrial economy and across virtually every other sector of the economy over the past decade, hemp has remained a largely unexplored, unstudied plant. And so the applications that we're seeing people starting to focus on now, whether it's bioplastics and companies like BMW, integrating hemp-based plastics into the interiors of their latest models, biofuels, the hemp producers equivalent of light-sweet crude for an ethanol biodiesel, textiles, the fact that Levi's have just announced their first hemp cotton blend genes. And even though it is a 70-30 cotton hemp, we anticipate within a few years it's a matter of time before we start seeing 100% hemp products that are virtually indistinguishable from cotton, everything from paper to animal feed, the spectrum of applications that construction materials, supercapacitors. With hemp? With hemp. So there's a team out of Canada about two years ago that did this study that found when you carbonize hemp, it produces a supercapacitor that can rival graphene, and graphene right now is one of the best applications that we've identified. It produces supercapacitor that can rival hemp with none of the toxicity, sorry, a supercapacitor that can rival graphene with none of the toxicity that is related to the manufacturing of graphene. This is early science still, but consider the possibility that the Teslas of the future could be running on batteries that are based on hemp-based carbon. These are applications that we're just beginning to explore. And as you see increased investment, as more countries begin to reintroduce hemp into their economies, the pace of that innovation is going to accelerate dramatically. And the substitution of hemp for many existing applications I think will grow across the economy. Man, you really showcase this as the emerging market, just straight up the emerging market. Other people argue that blockchain crypto decentralization is like the emerging market where you're like, nah, nah, nah. And they kind of go hand in hand in so many ways. And this is not to knock either blockchain or crypto, which are going to be massively disruptive in their respective ways. But I think there's a number of things that make hemp unique in where it sits in the economy, or where cannabis sits in the economy. One is just how disruptive it will be in so many different aspects of our society. So let's just take some social issues as easy considerations. Prohibition enforcement has been largely very inequitable. In the U.S., across the country on average, four times more likely to be arrested for cannabis offenses if you were black than if you were white. In Washington, D.C., you were eight times more likely to be arrested if you were black than white. In fact, we just had an event with the mayor of D.C. last week. And we ran some numbers that found black males make up 22% of Washington's population, but make up over 80% of the arrests from our offenses. There's been very significant inequity in the way prohibition has been enforced. So with legalization, the ability to remediate what has been a century of inequity alone is going to be a dramatic social impact. Because of prohibition, cannabis consumers have been driven underground. It has not, you know, 10% of Americans or just about 10% of Americans consume cannabis regularly. So it has not, prohibition has not stopped their use. It has just meant that it has become a very segregated, you know, isolated activity. The fact that we're now talking about cannabis social use spaces appearing in, on Main Street, a company called Lowell's just opened the Los Angeles' first cannabis café. It's going to be radically disruptive to our kind of notions of where a cannabis sits in our society. The medical applications, in the midst of a catastrophic opioid epidemic. When states like Illinois say that now when your doctor, when your physician issues you an opioid prescription, you automatically become eligible to participate in the medical cannabis program because they're so worried about propagating this opioid epidemic. You know, these are just kind of low-hanging fruit in terms of some of the ways cannabis is reshaping some long-standing aspects of our society. Like physicians literally being educated on their MCAT about cannabis in the endocannabinoid system. Yeah, that view. And the fact that they're not being, and they haven't been historically, the doctors who were at the vanguard of medical cannabis had to go and study this themselves because it wasn't being taught in medical school. And so all of those applications, all of those implications from policing and social governance to destigmatization and the normalization of cannabis in our society are going to be really consequential in the way we think about where a cannabis sits in our society. Pulling on that thread a bit more. Something like social use cafes where cannabis is served but alcohol is not allowed. It's just like straight up also, just ban that other one. Nope, can't bring your beer and no wine in here. There was an extraordinary paper in the British Medical Journal that answered a little while ago that showed it was the largest global study on the impact of alcohol on global public health. And in the conclusion of that report, the statement that read, Now, even the lead author would go on to say he is going to have a glass of wine with his dinner. But there's a real recognition that alcohol has had a hugely deleterious effect on public health around the world. And now you have a cohort of young adults who are coming into maturity at a time when cannabis is largely or increasingly being as seen as as acceptable, if not better than alcohol. The disruptive impact that this could have on alcohol and alcohol's place in our society is potentially going to be very, very significant and that's part of the reason why companies like Constellation Brands, one of the world's largest alcohol companies, just spent four billion dollars investing in a Canadian licensed operator. They see the writing on the wall. And so when you take all of that and then add on things like the industrial applications of hemp, in my view, the implications of cannabis as an industry I think extend well beyond what something like blockchain or crypto could do. Damn, such a good synthesis on the industry. I'm loving it. It's obvious that New Frontier has to do a lot of deep dives into all of the different profound impacts that the ascension of cannabis and hemp will have on our world and by doing so, you guys also become, you know, doing these industry analyses gives you guys unique foresight and so then companies want to talk to you and they want to know, well, where should we invest? What countries are moving forward? What are they moving forward with? Which specific aspects are they going forward with? How are Gen Z going to be stepping into their, you know, as 10-year-olds seeing cannabis be legal and also then as 20-year-olds when they have the option to consume, well, what are they going to be choosing? How are we going to be leveraging it for other spiritual ascension potentials and right now it doesn't really seem like alcohol is being used for that whatsoever. So there's so much fascinating nuance there. Do you guys end up taking the, teach us about this process. Do you guys end up taking and making industry reports and then taking those reports and then distributing them through people that subscribe to New Frontier data? Right, so we have a number of approaches by which we do our work. Because of the broad spectrum of issues across the industry that we're tracking and the data that we are ingesting from companies in the industry, from governments of the county, state, national level, international organizations because some of the partnerships we've built, we have this constant and extraordinary stream of data that's flowing across our data engines. So we use the public-facing reports that we release as a way to signal to the market some of the major issues that we're thinking about. Given how much is happening in cannabis, we feel that one of the privileges our role has given us is the ability to see what's happening next, what's coming next. And for the stakeholders who are either already in the space and kind of heads down in the work or trying to come into the space and trying to figure out where they should fit, our reports give them a chance to understand where some of the major issues that they should be paying attention to lie within this space. But there's a second aspect to our work which is the custom research that we do. So there's a lot of companies who will see something that we've talked about in a report and then engage us to do some specific analysis for them and some specific research on a critical issue that they're facing. We work with a lot of investors who are trying to understand, you know, I see this opportunity. Is this, say, category going to be as lucrative as this company that we're about to invest in claims it's going to be? What is the long-term trajectory of this market? I'll give you an example. We just completed a project with a group of Australian investors who have phenomenal experience in the agricultural sector but have never been in cannabis before. They were looking at a investment, a fairly substantial investment in a company that makes cannabis nutrients. And the question was, how big is this market going to be and what sort of potential capture opportunity could this company take of that market? We did all of that analysis and that ultimately involved the investment thesis and ultimately the investment decision. We've worked with companies who are looking at some of these emerging state markets. State like Florida is about to have an adult use ballot initiative proposed for 2020. For the investors who are looking at a large market that has a very strong likelihood of passing, early tests suggest that a ballot will introduce the day that there's a good likelihood it could pass. Investors are looking at that market and it's going to be a lucrative one and they're wondering how large is opportunity specifically going to be and what are some of the key dynamics we should be looking out for as we try to navigate that investment. Similarly on a global scale, we're seeing this explosion in interest in CBD and companies are now wondering how does the global CBD supply chain work and how do we get involved? If we have the ability to set up operations anywhere in the world, which countries should we be looking at and what sort of assets should we be investing in to ensure that we're not planning for next year, we're planning five years from now, for a market five years from now. There's a lot of public facing reports going out but then there's also all these incoming inquiries. They're really, they're querying your knowledge, chief knowledge officer, they're querying your knowledge so that they can gain the insights and so then you work with companies, organizations individually as well based on what they want to know. That's right. So the data that we make available through Equia which is our data platform and maybe the simple way to think about it is like Bloomberg for the cannabis industry. It houses not just the reports that we produce but the data underlying the reports. If you want to go in and kind of explore the data yourself you can certainly do that. And so there's the ability to kind of go through the self-service model of just taking the content that's relevant to you and kind of diving into our content stream and capitalizing on that. And then for the stakeholders who are now grappling with a very specific issue to engage us to do a much more customized and nuanced analysis for them. You mentioned this earlier that you guys have so much data that is coming in. I mean we could talk about that but you actually said that that's not as challenging now as actually talking about the stories of the why that data matters after it does get structured. And so tell us about how you guys can take up like a Pixar or like a Disney role regarding storytelling about the profundity of the data and why it should matter to the world. That's a great question and a really important one based on where we are right now as a cannabis industry. And I'll use the example of the cannabis consumer which is where we think one of the greatest opportunities for cannabis is beginning to emerge. So pre legalization the cannabis consumer was a monolith. You either cannabis consumer or you weren't. Post legalization we bifurcated the cannabis consumers into either a medical consumer or a recreational consumer. But as we're looking at the space to me that just didn't feel right. From all of the consumers we were speaking to that duality, that simple duality just was not reflective of the nuanced ways in which consumers were interfacing and integrating cannabis into their lives and lifestyles. So in late 2018 we deployed what at the time was the largest cannabis consumer survey that had ever been done. Nationally which was based in the US nationally national scope including fully recreational medical and unregulated markets. And the question was we're trying to understand who is the cannabis consumer. Based on this very very large survey I mean it took our respondents nearly 30 minutes to complete so we spent a lot of time not just asking about their cannabis usage habits their cannabis experiences but other things about their lives and lifestyles. And what was the sample size of this survey? 4500 Wow, across the US. Across the US. So by statistical purposes more than enough data for us to do some really really elegant segmentation. 30 minutes is a big survey too. Exactly, exactly. So we took actually the questions as an interviewer I already know that you guys focusing on the questions was again one of the most important parts of all of this because then it leads you to what the answers are what the data is that you get. So I assume you guys spent a ridiculous amount of time on the questions. It was a month long, like many months long effort to build that survey right because we knew that if we got it right the applications for that data downstream would be potentially profound. Yeah, let's hear it. So once we got the data back it became clear that this idea of the medical recreational binary was just completely incorrect. And there was it was much more of a fluid continuum between kind of pure recreational consumers blending into the wellness consumer and then to the pure pharmaceutical user consumer who is treating cannabis like any other pharmaceutical drug. Interesting. Recreational blending with wellness blending with replacement in a pharmaceutical. And just totally spectrum style between like that style. Okay, very cool. But there was a layer deeper than that which is we took nearly 200 data points out of that survey and used it to create consumer clusters. We basically said take these 200 data points and let the algorithm identify the groups that have greater affinity with them. And through that we developed nine cannabis consumer archetypes. Profiles of cannabis consumers that are not just defined based on what they consume and how they consume but based on all of these other lifestyle attributes as well that inform the usage habits and inform their attitudes. Cannabis consumer archetypes. Precisely. Wow. And the archetypes fell across it was nine archetypes. Three that fell across the highest using groups three that fell across the moderate using groups three that fell across the lowest using groups. But as we explain these archetypes and I'll perhaps give you a couple of examples, we have the traditional lifestyles. People who use cannabis very, very regularly but are much more likely to be flower only smokers. So these are people who have integrated cannabis into virtually everything. They use it to get up and go they use it to wind down at the end of the day. You know, they are they are kind of let's call them joint-a-day consumers kind of daily habitual consumers but they are almost flower only, flower exclusive consumers. They're much less likely to consume any types of products. Contrast that against the modern lifestyles who have a very similar usage profile but have completely embraced the new value added products. So these are consumers They're like tic-tac, the one two milligram tic-tac. Absolutely. So they're, you know, not just using rapes and edibles and tinctures whereas they still consume flower but much more load balanced on these other types of products and because they're using these other types of products they're also much more likely to use these products in much more diversified ways. It's like the artisanal user of the they're like which good brand of this do you purchase of the cannabis? And it's the idea that maybe in the morning I'll use a CBD vape for one thing and then before I go to the gym in the afternoon I'll use a kind of activating sativa after I'm done working out I'll apply a CBD lotion on my sore muscles and then before I go to bed I'll have an indica to help me sleep and help me stay asleep longer and so it's extraordinary what the advent of these new product forms has done for the way cannabis is being used not just because they allow for a lot more discretion you can't smoke a joint in a restaurant or a bar without being quickly escorted out or even at a dinner party without people freaking out but you know to pop a little tic-tac at the party that's right you could take a little edible or you could pull out a vape and which some vapes are so odorless now you could be consuming and you wouldn't be able to tell tell well these archetypes are so interesting and then there's the ones like we interviewed Kristen Price and Sarah Baker as well who are literally going through some of the most rare diseases as literally teenagers and then for them to be able to take hundreds of milligrams of full spectrum hemp CBD to heal themselves and to start what the company is like so there's like that too for that was one of our archetypes the medical purists consumers who truly are using cannabis as a pharmaceutical product and there was nothing social recreational about their use very very regimented meticulous about this is just a medicinal product and so trying to pitch them a product for going out to hang out with their friends I have a quick question on the way out the last one actually the last question is the emerging market is exploding how do we make sure that the fruits of this emerging market unlike past instances of emerging markets how do these fruits become more well democratized and distributed across minority populations across vulnerable populations women people color all type of stuff just democratize the financial benefits more widely how can we ensure something this is a great and critical question because the window to do that is actually closing and it's closing quickly first there has to be a kind of conversation about some things I mentioned earlier the inequity that cannabis prohibition has had on the state of the market today on who's participating in the market and who feels that they can participate in the market today there's a lot of people who after being or recognizing that any association with cannabis could get them into deep deep trouble and that they would be targeted for it getting those people to search their mindsets to now say that they're going to enter the industry takes work takes real conversation for them to understand that this is a real legitimate opportunity and they're not going to face the challenges that the previously faced the second thing that businesses in the space can do and should do is think deeply about how their practices are either supporting these broader goals these broader goals around equity and opportunity in the space or undermining them so for example one of the biggest challenges that minorities of people of lower means have had participating in cannabis is access to capital the fact that cannabis is not banked at the federal level banks are not participating in this industry because of its illegality at the federal level has meant that much of this industry has been largely privately funded and so the people who have been able to participate most robustly are the people who have access to high net worth capital has meant that there's been a great number of extraordinary entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas who because of lack of access to capital have not been able to bring those ideas to fruition and so there needs to be a robust conversation about how some of these regulatory practices and the social environment that we're in are propagating and promulgating these issues issues like the advent of federal banking there's a build just past that was going to that's intended to address this issue of banking for cannabis businesses should help more stakeholders find access to capital in the space but I think investors also need to challenge the conventional assumptions about who can be an opportunity, a successful entrepreneur in this space because given that cannabis consumers represent the full cross section of society it is one of the true egalitarian aspects products in our economy it's important for both investors, business operators to understand that because it's a product that transcends our society it should be an industry that reflects the spectrum of society and we love asking at least this question at the end of the show what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? A joyful spirit and ironically it's something the profundity of which I hadn't understood until I came into the cannabis industry and saw people who were more passionate, committed driven, invested in their work than any other sector ever worked in I think it is a reason why despite the phenomenal challenges this industry and you talk about a sector that has headwinds coming from all directions that it has been able to grow at the pace it has that it has been able to achieve what it has because people love what they do and at a time when there's so much doom and gloom there's so much anxiety in the public I think we would all do well to find more joy in ourselves and spark joy in each other and I think that seems to be one of the driving commitments that's pushing a lot of people in this space John this has been such a fascinating episode thank you so much for coming on and teaching us it's been my pleasure, thank you for having me thank you, keep up the great work with new friends here, it's so cool your macro perspective on the emergent market is so fascinating thank you, thank you thanks everyone for tuning in we will see you soon it's a wrap great job, great job that was so fun