It's a very large room. And just as when I was in law school in this room, we always sat at the back. Not that I was in this room. Elizabeth will point out, I think this is all new. I came to law school before the fire. Everything at Dell Housing Law School was defined by before the fire and after the fire. And this was all constructed after the fire. Now, I think some of the people in the room are in the cannabis module that we start after Hugo's talk. No? Some of you are. Good. Great. Because you're all supposed to be here. And my name is Ann McClelland, I'm a chancellor of Dell Housing University. But I am also in the public policy group at the law firm at Bennett Jones. And my colleague, Darrell Dester, who is co-chairing, I guess, this intensive module in cannabis and the law. And many of you probably know Chelsea. And Chelsea, actually, is the brains behind the whole operation and has been working with Darrell and me and putting together the course outline and the materials. So thank you very much, Chelsea, for that. And today, we're really lucky because we have, kicking this intensive module off, someone who has been in the cannabis business longer than all the legal cannabis business. There were a lot of people in this country in the illegal side much longer than Hugo. But on the legal side of the cannabis business, Hugo Alts is absolutely one of the very earliest people to see both the potential, and this started with medicinal, of course, but to see the potential of this industry, but also to see where lawyers fit and the opportunities for lawyers in this space and for law firms. And I first got to know Hugo because we were both at the law firm at Bennett Jones. And in fact, Hugo was a senior corporate commercial partner at Bennett Jones before he decided to leave with three other of our very talented lawyers at Bennett Jones. And off they went into the private sector after legalization. And Hugo first went as president and CEO of Canada's Wheaton. But Canada's Wheaton very quickly morphed into Oxley. And where, in fact, Hugo is the co-founder and CEO of Oxley. And some of you know probably something about that company. And in fact, I guess it's fair to say, well, you're probably going to talk about this, but you started primarily in financing, but now you're working through the whole value chain. And you will talk to people here a little bit about how all that happened. Hugo actually, I've got to say, played a key role in the development of this industry in so many ways. When I was asked by the government of Canada to chair the task force on the legalization of cannabis, the first thing we had to do with the law firm was, in fact, make sure that if I took on this job as task force chair, I was not interfering with actual fee-paying clients that Hugo represented in the law firm. Discovered that Canada expects me to do everything pro-lono. But Hugo actually had fee-paying clients. And we admit law firms, obviously, and have to be very careful about conflicts and that kind of thing. So Hugo was tremendous in that we figured out a way that everybody could continue to do the things they were doing and I could take up the role as chair of the task force. So I'm not sure I've ever thanked you for that, but now I'm thanking you, Hugo. Thank you because without his openness, and actually I hope seeing the prospect that somehow it was good for your clients that, in fact, this legalization project moved ahead of the way that was informed by, we hope, reasonable and sensible recommendations. Hugo's represented so many of the big companies in this space, Tweet, Canobie, Aurora, Supreme, Lyft & Combi, the Brands, Tokyo Smoke. One of those is opening just down the street from Bennett Jones and Epidest. After leaves by Snoop and then industry associations, the Cannabis Council of Canada, patient access groups, Canadians for Fair Access to Medical Marijuana, Cannabis RX, Canadian Cannabis Clinics. He's also the co-founder of Hope for Health and that's the world's first registered charity focused on providing access to medical cannabis and the advancement of knowledge relating to medical cannabis. And of course, Canada first moved her advantage on the medicinal side, ICE Federal Minister of Health in 2001 when we started the medicinal stream and Hugo's going to tell a little bit about what's his first involvement in this whole space that he is one of the people now, one of the most imaginative and creative innovators in this space, leading away in terms of what this is going to look like for the future. So unfortunately, Hugo did not go to Dallas Law School. He went to Western. No, we're going to U of T even worse. Don't hold it against me. You took my joke, don't hold it against me. I didn't go to U of T. Even worse, he went to U of T. Anyway, I just, you, okay, I get it. No, I don't, we're going to have U of T, we don't like queens in your Dallas. Anyway, all that to say, U of T's a very good law school and Hugo is a graduate of U of T and he got his undergraduate degree at Carlton University in Ottawa. So all that to say that we're really lucky to have Hugo with us today because he truly deserves the word pioneer in the cannabis space. Over to you Hugo. Thanks so much Ann. Right here. Good. Well, it's hard to, it's always, I've had the pleasure of speaking within on panels or following Ann and it's never an easy task. So my name's Hugo Alves. I'm here, I was a lawyer on Bay Street for 17 years and most of that time at Bennett Jones in Toronto and that is where I met Ann. Very fortunate to have Ann as my colleague and I think as much as she likes to say, hey, really needed to work with Hugo to figure out whether I could co-chair the task force. The honest truth of it is myself and the other people who really ran that business at Bennett Jones did everything we could to encourage Ann to take on the role very naively on our part. Like we thought it'd be great. Ann's gonna chair this task force. We're gonna have the inside scoop on everything and what it actually turned into was don't talk to Ann. Don't email Ann. None of your clients can talk or email Ann. You're getting zero access to her while the task force is ongoing and we knew the importance of Ann's work on that task force so we were happy to comply in the strictest way possible. In fact, I think during that entire time I had one communication with Ann which was through our colleague Eddie Goldenberg where I had said, hey, Eddie, there's other people, other lawyers that are getting invited to these industry task force round tables and I'm looking like a bit of, kind of like a second fiddle here. I'm not getting an invite. And I remember Eddie came into my office and Eddie is, he's a fantastic person, not super tall. Eddie's not super tall. So I was sitting in my chair and like we're looking eye to eye and Eddie looks at me goes, you really don't understand much how the world works here, do you? And I said, what do you mean? He goes, look, you're getting no access to Ann and but after the task force report is submitted, that's when you get all the benefit because you have access to Ann, you can bring your clients to meet her and Ann was very gracious with her time afterwards to help me sort of get my client's exposure to Ann and what the task force really meant for the future. And I'm happy to say that on the one year anniversary of legalization just passed, I think the task force did an incredible job and I think Ann, I conveyed that to you when the report came out and I first read it. And I think the federal government has done a great job in terms of supporting the recommendations that the task force made because I remember when the task, when the report came out and we'll talk a little bit later on the presentation about how my legal background has kind of influenced the path that Oxley's taken from inception to where we are today. But I remember looking at that task force report which we used quite almost like a roadmap in terms of where regulation could go forward and thinking, I don't know if we're gonna get this, this seems like quite an advanced position, one that may be from a policy or a political perspective might be a step too far but in fact, we were pleasantly surprised when the government implemented almost all of the recommendations. I'm very fortunate to have Ann as a colleague, she's been tremendous help in my career and I thank her and thank you guys for having me here today. So as Ann said, I didn't go to Dow, I went to U of T but please don't hold that against me. Since 2017, I have been at Oxley which is a public cannabis company that I co-founded with my then client Chuck Rafichi who was the founder of Tweed that went on to become Canopy. So Chuck was actually supposed to be the person talking to you today and when Ann said, hey, Chuck couldn't make it, he sends his regrets by the way, can you step in? I said, well, it's Chuck that bagged out and it's Ann asking me so I 100% would be delighted to stand in and I'm happy to be here. So Ann told me I was free to ramble on for whatever I wanted to talk about. So what I thought might be of interest to you is I'm just gonna give you a brief overview of how I got into cannabis law and then a couple of lessons that I learned along the way that might benefit you and then how my legal background has really helped shape Oxley and then I'll just open up the floor and you guys can feel free to ask about whatever you want from regulatory to the business of law to the business of cannabis. Happy to answer any questions. So I think the first thing is really I became a lawyer right at the genesis of the really formative cannabis law in the country. So I'm a 99 grad and then in 2000 you had RV Parker which really said, hey, that was that constitutional section seven argument about, oh, I should say, even though Chuck's not here, I can assure you I know more about the law than Chuck does so you at least get that benefit. So that was a section seven case that really said if there's this conflicting priority of freedom of the person and freedom of your liberty and having to go out and break the law to access cannabis if you've been prescribed it was really not constitutionally valid. So created a mandate for the government to then pass regulation of how cannabis access would be passed. So 2000, I'm a bright bushy tailed article student at that point at Heenan Blakey, 2001, the government introduces the Medical Marijuana Access Regulations, the MMAR. I'm a first year associate now so I'm like pretty hot at this point in time, right? I also grew up in the East end of Hamilton which is usually where you grow up not that instructive here, it is informative. I don't know if any of you know where Hamilton, Ontario is but it is the steel town in the East end. Yeah, it's a very blue collar working class part of the city. And so growing up, cannabis was something that was around us. And what happened when the MMAR came into force and I'm a first year associate at a law firm started getting a lot of calls from high school friends going, hey man, POTS legal. I need you to help me fill in this form so I can get my license and we can start growing legally. All right, sounds cool. So it started this, I would say six month period where I had like my legal job and then I was helping my high school friends fill out 16 page forms after they'd gone to get their diagnosis and then the confirmation of diagnosis. And I quickly realized, yeah, like this is not what I went to school for. Filling out forms for your buddies like that's that don't pay you fees. Something told me that wasn't really what I just spent seven years getting a law degree for. So I said, hey guys, like, this is great. I helped my friends and then I went about doing Bay Street Law and paying my dues and grinding hours and doing all those good things, learning. And it was fantastic. I loved my time doing that. It was like looking back on it's super hard work but it's exciting. You're actually putting into practice what you learned about theoretically in school. You are working with tremendous people. I think that's one of the things that I was just telling and I've had to adjust leaving law and going into private practice is just the uniformly high caliber of person that you deal with at a law firm. In terms from a work ethic perspective, from an intellectual perspective, from a motivational perspective, it really was something that you take for granted and once you leave you kind of realize so that really was a special work environment. So when about becoming a lawyer, became a partner in 2007, along the way I had some tremendous mentors. One in particular, which again I think is informative to the story, was a gentleman named Gray Taylor who was a 30 year partner at Davies Ward in Beck. The sort of like the hotshot boutique client for a transactional practice perspective in Canada. And Gray had come to Bennett Jones very late in his career, at almost that retirement age. And I thought, well, here's another old guy that was coming to our firm that's just kind of here to see out the rest of his career but actually is not why he came at all. He came to our firm because he at that point in time in sort of the early 2000s, there was something going on called the Kyoto Protocol. And Gray is a passionate advocate for sustainability and for combating climate change and he wanted to build a practice around climate change. You know, at this point Canada was a signatory, I was gonna have the second largest compliance obligation in the world, second only to the EU. And he wanted to build a practice around it and I think what Davies had told him was, you know what, that's not the type of work we do here, we just do transactions, so we're not really supportive of that. So he came to Bennett Jones and enlisted me to help him very early on in that practice and I got to watch him take a regulatory change and build a business around it. And I had lots of good lessons, some things like lessons that I thought, well, this really worked. And some things that I thought, ah, this didn't work so well, but they were lessons all the same. And things like having to figure out what two parties were trying to do from a commercial perspective, like what's the deal here? And then figure out how to bring legal structure around it where there are no precedents. There's no instructive document that they can say, here, this is what you gotta go through and just figure out if your deal fits into these provisions and if A, then B, it wasn't commoditized law. It was like, you really have to think about what you're trying to do, what the underlying regulatory regime is, and then you freehand draft. And that, I think, more than anything else that happened to me throughout my entire legal career was what enabled me to really build a strong cannabis practice.  I don't, you know what, I'll deal with the law when it's actually law. I don't have to deal with it. But here, the headline had marijuana. It had marijuana but spelled in a funny way, an H, and I'm like, well, this, I gotta check this out. So I read the abstract and I started reading the regulations and what I quickly just to kind of clue it into me was, wait a minute, the government is changing the focus of regulation from a person, right? The MMAR regulated the person, the regulated the patient. You the patient, do you have an ailment that falls within this list? You have a second opinion that says you have that ailment, fill out this form, tell me how much cannabis you need and we'll process it as the government. So they changed that focus away from the person to production and distribution. So they weren't regulating people anymore, they were regulating corporations and of course, whenever you regulate a corporation, as lawyers, we're like, well, corporations need legal services and they can afford to pay. So fantastic clients. So it started to get me thinking about, look, my entire life I've been, people ask me, why'd you get into cannabis and there's the PC answer that I give, which is, well, I'd noticed a regulatory change and I decided I wanted to build a business around cannabis and then there's like the real reason. Like I was a cannabis enthusiast or cannabis has played a role in my life growing up from an early age till present and I thought, you know what, it'd be way cooler doing work for cannabis companies and building a business around cannabis than what I was doing at the time, which was still I really enjoyed. I was one of the three partners that ran the technology media and entertainment group at our firm, which is not a bad gig, but I thought this is a chance to own something and that was one of the lessons that I learned. Like if you go into a big firm environment, like your power lies in what you own. If you own a book of business, it's your book. You know, they're your clients. You get a lot of latitude. You get a lot of resources available to you. You know, they used to have, at least when I was in law school, they'd ask you, like, are you a finder, a minder, or a grinder? Like then I started practicing and I realized like you gotta be all three to really be successful, but it's only really if you had that book of business that you felt that sort of stability of running a business that you kind of controlled. So I thought this would be a great thing to try and do and then we got a little bit lucky in that one of my mentees, Michael Lickfer, who's now effectively our chief of staff at Oxley, had done some pro bono work for a guy who was around his age and whenever you do some pro bono work, it's on your time so what you hope the person you're doing the work for, what they do is they reciprocate at some point. And they say, hey, when I can afford to pay, I will come back and you'll be my lawyer, et cetera. And this person actually did that. So they came back in and they said, I'm trying to start this marijuana company. We've put an application in. We're running into some difficulties. Can you help me? And we can pay. We've got some financing. So that client turned out to be Believe, which is a licensed producer now. And I think at that time, I was in Michael's office and I said to him, I said, why don't we just go after this? There's no one out there, because there literally was no one out there. I think there was one other lawyer that was openly practicing in cannabis that was in Ottawa, Trina Fraser. And so I said, we're experts. He goes, we're not really experts. I go, why not? Like, who knows more than we do about what's going on in these rags right now? And he kind of said, well, I don't know. That's right, that's right. No one, no one, because guarantee you we know more about these rags right now than your client does. And let's just get smart. Like, we're smart people, we're hard workers. Let's just get smart and let's go after it. And you know what? Like, that's what we did. We took a risk. I was at Bennett Jones's Calgary Energy, I think, and I'm not like a huge political person, but I think you would call it a small C conservative firm. So I knew that if I went and said, hey, Hugh, I'm thinking of, Hugh was our managing partner and really entrepreneurial, supportive guy. So, but I knew if I went and asked the question, I want to build a practice around cannabis, probably it's going to be, you really want to do that. There's risk, so we didn't ask. We just did it. And we marketed and networked aggressively. We really put ourselves out there. And we owned it. Yeah, we know the rags better than anyone else. Well, if you put that statement out there, you better own it. And Michael is a lot more of a social person than I am. I'm much more of an introvert. So having to go out and network and build a network and work for that network didn't come naturally to me, but we took the risk and we said, if we're taking the risk with our career, this thing that we've worked so hard to build, especially at my point in my career at that time where I was a partner at a firm, a senior partner, then we need to put 100% effort into it. And it really, what that led to is us working two full-time jobs. So I worked my normal shift where I was doing technology, media and entertainment law to discharge my obligations to the firm as a partner, to make sure that the sort of financial obligations that had to the firm that I was taking care of them. And Mike was doing the same thing. And then when everyone else went home, around six or seven, not that that's a normal shift at the law firm, it usually goes much later, but when things quieted down, we would turn our attention to, all right, now we've got to build our cannabis practice, whether that was networking with people every day, whether that was doing thought pieces, acting pro bono, starting industry associations and helping them. Our goal was really to build a network and to get a reputation within that network as smart, connected guys that you wanted to talk to. So slowly and surely we started to get traction. We built, and that's the reputation we built. We built a reputation as really smart guys who knew the regulations in and out, but above that, super connected guys who knew everyone in the industry and who were always willing to help people. So whether or not someone came into our office and we never said no to anyone in terms of, hey, we're in town, we'd like to meet you for a half hour, we always said yes. We would never judge a book by its cover. Someone comes into our fancy Bay Street offices, they're not looking a certain way. We didn't care. We would talk to absolutely everyone and if we could help with a connection, with some advice, we would help. You can't act pro bono for everybody because then you don't have time to discharge your financial obligations to your firm, but where we could help and where we saw opportunity, we had no hesitation. In the firm, after a while, everyone found out and they were very hugely supportive. Hugely supportive and I think part of that was we had been very responsible in terms of how we approached things. Like we weren't putting the firm's logo all over POT websites and things like that. So for us, taking a thought leadership position was really helpful, but thought leadership that client focused, not peer focused. A lot of the papers that get published by practicing lawyers are about a novel legal issue and they're more for the bar. They're more for their colleagues to go, that guy's really smart. We didn't care about that. We wanted potential clients to think we were smart. So we would write thought pieces on like, if you're applying for a license, four quick takeaways, four pitfalls you have to avoid and then we would go and bug our employment colleague and say, hey, what are like four things that you should think about and then we would write the paper for them and send it to them and never more than two pages was the absolute max. We wanted people to read these things and they started saying, well, that's cool. You're kind of trying to build a business here and so they would give us some of their time and then cannabis became a thing. Then it went from being this kind of program that the conservative government had put in but wasn't really promoting to public companies and financings and then Trudeau got elected and legalization and all of a sudden there was a ton of money. Everyone could pay and everyone wanted to do deals and a real shortage of advisors that could actually do these deals. And I remember acting for a very small company that's now public called Canmart. Well, they're not public. They're acquired by Namaste, which is public. So acting for Canmart that had a very unique business model and they wanted to do a wholesale purchase from Supreme which was at that time not my client. And Supreme had a client out lawyer in Calgary that had helped put their going public transaction together and this supply agreement, so Supreme supplying Canmart with Flower was an iron ore supply agreement with the words iron ore crossed out and cannabis put in. Like that, well, that's literally, I'd seen the precedent before and we said, okay, great, we'll start here. And now here's 10 reasons why this doesn't work and let us fix it up. And we got the deal done. We redrafted the contract and this is where that skill set that I learned with Gray of what's the underlying regulatory regime? What am I trying to accomplish? And then how do I put those two together in a way that benefits my client's interests? And John Fowler will tell the story goes, yeah, so after we did that deal, we realized how horrible this contract was for Supreme and how favorable it was for Canmart and we said, well, we need Hugo to act for us. And that's, you know, so that's how Supreme came to be our client. And so by 2017, our cannabis practice was the fastest growing practice at Bennett-Jones. It was one of the largest practices at Bennett-Jones in terms of dollars originated. And we, you know, we were by far the dominant cannabis group globally. Like if you were interested in cannabis, participating in the cannabis industry, anywhere in the world and you came through Toronto, you guaranteed you went through the Bennett-Jones office. And at one point or another, we had acted for 70% of all market participants in the Canadian cannabis industry. And then in 2017, again, with now everyone has money, everyone wants to, you know, is dreaming big, we started getting a lot of opportunities to say if we would be interested in leaving the firm and joining, you know, the private sector. And I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit, I would say, since I was a young kid. And I think, you know, that manifested itself in how we built the cannabis practice at the firm. And I'd always thought, well, that would be something fun to try, but I really liked being a lawyer. Like I really liked it. And I had now achieved kind of what, when people go into law, they're hoping to achieve.  And I had recognition, respect, rewards, you know, the law firms treat you very well when you're bringing in a lot more money than they're paying you. So you get treated really well. So it was a big risk. And I thought, well, I already took a huge risk with my career when in 2013 where I said, I wanna focus a big amount of attention on cannabis. And the result is I probably know the law around cannabis better than I've known any other sort of underlying regulatory regime. I have more profile in the cannabis industry than I've ever had in any type of industry. So I thought, if I'm not willing to take the risk and do it now, it's sort of hard to contemplate the circumstances under which you would take the risk. So I didn't wanna live with the regret. And so I said, sure, I'll join Chuck here at what was then called Cannabis Wheaton. Because I believed in what we were doing. I had a hand in putting it together. This was a client-driven initiative that then turned into us assuming sort of control of this company. Through our clients sold their business to the public company that would eventually go on to be Cannabis Wheaton. And I have to say, I haven't regretted it a day since I left. I certainly miss the law firm. I miss my colleagues there. I miss the resources, the work environment, the level at which everyone operates. But as Ann said, my three closest juniors came with me to Oxley and it's been an incredible learning experience. You really have to get up a curve very quickly when you go into a company that's under the public eye where you've got investor money and it's very easy to see how you're doing every day. I mean, we don't look at it that way. We don't look at our share price as a proxy to how we're doing, but it's there. It's there and you gotta deal with it.  I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. We had a great day. The share price didn't do great today. I'm like, we're not focused on that. We're focused on the business part. The lessons I learned along the way in my journey from being a lawyer to building a practice at the firm and then joining the private practice on industry side was, be entrepreneurial. You guys are heading into a much different environment than I was exposed to when I was starting my legal career. Clients are more demanding. They're more cost conscious. Value is what they wanna buy, not a service. And there's huge amount of competition. You really, your career is your business, it's your personal business. And you have to treat it like that. It's not a job, what you're going into. Then there's no job security. You get into it, you get out what you put in. And so I think owning something is important and being putting yourself out there in terms of saying, hey, I am gonna own this and if it fails or succeeds, I'm willing to wear that. And of course, what that forces you to do is if you're going to take a risk, there's an old adage, if it's worth the risk, it's worth the effort. And that's very true when you're dealing with your career.  It's a huge amount of time and effort. And when you get into legal practice, it'll be, you just keep stepping up. I remember being an Articling student and I was working 100 hours a week and the manager, the partner who was giving me the work said, enjoy it, it's only gonna get, it just gets harder from here on in. Not what I wanted to hear at that particular point in time, but it was very true.   So you need, if you're willing to take a risk with that, with that level of effort, then you need to work super hard. Taking a risk and just hoping it works out, never works out.  And it was very true. It'll look to the outside that you were just super lucky. My colleagues and peers who didn't go through the journey with me, they'd say, man, you're so lucky. Like, you know, cannabis became a thing. And it was like, yeah, super lucky. I know. And you agree with them, but you know that in the background, luck had very little to do with it. It was just a calculated risk that we then put a ton of effort and we were willing to live with whether it was successful or unsuccessful because we know that we put all the effort into it. So if it didn't work out, it didn't work out. It wasn't a failure. Network, like, you know, going back, I grew up in the East End of Hamilton. I think we had 13 students that graduated from my high school that did post-secondary degrees. So you're not starting from like a really high value network there. And then you've got to figure out, okay, well, what is a network? Like, how do I get people that will give me work? Because at the end of the day, that's the goal. You want to get clients to trust you enough with their work to get you to give them legal advice, business advice, and obviously execute on the deal. So start now. You start now. The people who are in your classroom get to know them. Stay in touch with them. It's so easy nowadays with all of the different social media platforms, but building a network and then really thinking about your network. I have 16,000 connections on LinkedIn. I would say like my network is probably a couple, 100 people and within there is probably 50 people that I could phone up and say, this is what I'm thinking of doing and they would write me a check. But it's those people like, you really have to think about them. When there's something that you think can benefit them, send it to them. If you meet someone and then you meet another person, you go, these two probably have something in common, connect them. So it's really building a network, thinking about your network, working hard for that network and it will work hard for you. And don't get discouraged. It doesn't happen overnight for sure, but if you put in the effort and if you actually are true to that, I'm gonna think about my network and work hard for my network. It will be reciprocated, by your network will work for you. And I guess the last thing is just have fun. You have to love what you do. I had lots of people I went to law school with that were way smarter than me. They did way better at the academic part of law school than I did. Didn't last, first year, second year, third year, eighth year, transition to other jobs. Law is a demanding profession and if you don't love what you're doing, then eventually it's gonna start to feel like work. And look, there's always bad days. Always bad days, trying days and days might be generous, right? Back to back days. But that's okay. Nothing is, even if you thought you had your dream job, that you dreamt about as a kid, guaranteed there are bad days there too. You gotta put one foot in front of the other and remember, this is a journey and so you should enjoy it. And like, even though I'm working harder now than I ever worked at the firm, it was hard for me to contemplate that when I was at the firm. I continue to have a ton of fun because I'm with people that I respect and that I like and we work together and my wife often jokes that you guys have too much fun at work because you guys are there all the time. And there's a lot of truth to that actually. So enjoy the journey and have fun. So look, now I'll say a few words about how my legal background is really influenced kind of my business journey and influenced Oxley. And I think one of the things that we've always held as a thesis at Oxley is that our regulatory acumen is a competitive advantage for us. And it really drives a lot of how we see the industry, where we see it moving to, where there's opportunity, what geographies we might look at next. Because when we started this, these Oxley, it was all people that had achieved a high level of success in whatever their industry was. So myself was at the law firm, Chuck was with Tweed, our CFO, Jeff, had already at the age of 28 founded and sold two businesses. So very successful people that took a lot of risk to do it and none of us did it with the goal of being kind of a nice business. Like we all want it to be in the conversation at the top end of the industry. So we're always looking for ways like how can we make up ground? Because regulated industry started in 2014. Our company started in 2017, late 2017. So figuring out how we can make up ground on our peer group or who we consider our peer group has always been kind of a central focus for us. And what the regulatory acumen has allowed us to do is allowed us to buy assets and emerging geographies where we knew kind of what the regulatory pathway was before it got too expensive. So an example of that would be, we went into Uruguay really early. We bought a business there for $15 million with a really class operator. And then a year later Aurora went into Uruguay and bought a business that was less developed than ours was for $200 million. It's allowed us to get rights, commercial rights in our negotiations before the people we were negotiating with figured out that these were very valuable rights. They probably could have done a lot better on the deal. So for example, we were able to, in negotiations early on for our equity stakes in retailers, to tie in shelf space rights. Like we want the top shelves, we want branding rights. And they were happy to say, yeah, whatever. Because back then the industry thought, or our view was deluding itself into thinking that the marketing and advertising prohibitions which were going to apply to cannabis would be the same as alcohol. And they made industry groups to work with ad standards to say, we can really police ourselves. But as advisors and people who had dealt a lot with the sort of the patient side of it, and the sort of medical practitioner side, we knew that, and maybe I'm putting it too strongly here, and but we knew that doctors and healthcare professionals really viewed the alcohol marketing as like a public health failure. So there's no way we're going there, right? And like we knew that also as regulatory experts we knew in terms of kind of sin product marketing and advertising spectrum, you had alcohol, hugely permissive, narcotics, which is where cannabis was at the time under the old MMPR, which is restrictive. And then you have tobacco, which is prohibitive. And we thought if we're lucky we might get narcotics, might stay the same, but likely it's gonna go tobacco. This is just such a big public policy shift for the government, they're gonna wanna take it, be careful, they're not one of the underlying objectives is keeping it out of the hands of young people. Advertising is very often targeted at like newer consumers, so we knew very unlikely that we're gonna have an open advertising regime. And of course that means that those few places under the Tobacco Act, because that's what we were looking at at the time, not the Cannabis Act, it wasn't in existence. Under the Tobacco Act, we were like, well we kinda see the exemptions there. One of them is in store at a tobacconist. So we think on these retail locations there'll be a similar exemption. So we negotiated for those rights before the retailer knew that hey, these are actually super, super valuable rights. We can get a lot of money for them. And it's also helped us, I think, fundamentally develop our forward-looking strategy because when we started this business, it wasn't Oxley. It was a company called Cannabis Wheaton, which was really, we had taken a financing model from the precious metals industry where you give people a bunch of money up front so they can build out their mind and then you take a stream, basically all of the silver produced in the mine at a set price, which is well below the price, and then you sell the silver, make the delta, and you make a profit. So we thought we were gonna be really clever and do that in the cannabis industry and it was useful because investors thought it was really clever too and gave us a bunch of money. Then what happened is we got to actually having to write the checks to the people that we'd said, if you pass due diligence, we'll finance your project. And what we found is unlike the mining industry where you have geological reports that tell you the ore is in the ground and you have sophisticated operators, cannabis is brand new. And the operators in the space at that time were early movers, which by definition, high risk, high reward, right? So these are, sorry. These are people who are visionary in a lot of ways, but in terms of that super detail-oriented focus, we didn't have a lot of confidence. And then we started seeing a lot of due diligence problems with a lot of the projects. So people would come and say, we have a dream. It's like, here's our plot of land and we've built, we're gonna build this like 10,000 square foot facility here, but then Oxley with your help or a cannabis suite with your help, we're gonna build 100,000 square feet and then we're gonna do the whole thing and it's gonna be an amazing project. And we'd say, sounds great. Let's have a look. And then part of the diligence that we would ask is, show me the analysis for the base load energy requirement to run just this 10,000 square foot and then the 100,000. And then show me a feasibility study that says there's enough power to the parcel of land to light that up, because cannabis production is quite energy intensive and you just hear kind of crickets. Or they would point to power lines going through the land saying, all the power I need right there, don't worry about it. And of course, when investors have given you a lot of money and you've got to write the checks, it's your job to worry about it. So we quickly said, this isn't gonna work and we were just failing people on due diligence out of 15 projects. I think we failed like 13 that we went to market with. So we said, you know what? We need to take a step back and sort of do what we think we do best, which is let's look at the regulatory landscape and let's try and think about now that we have a better understanding of like how much time is actually gonna elapse before we have a product to sell. Let's think of maybe there's a smarter way to do this. So we turn to the regs, we turn to the task force report, we took to what the WHO was saying, what other geographies were saying and what we found was this very persistent regulatory dialogue around cannabis consumers or cannabis patients having the right to consume cannabis in forms other than dried flower or cannabis oil. And so we thought, well, we kind of know what the task force says on edibles and extracts. And we kind of know what our timeline for our projects to come online and actually provide us with cannabis looks like. We can have a conversation today. This is to give you some timeline. This was kind of spring, like this was early 2018. Early spring of 2018. We kind of know where we're going to be kind of a year from now, two years from now. We kind of know what the government's timeline is. We can have a conversation today about who the best dried flower grower is or who sells the most cannabis, right? It's not gonna be us. And for us to get there, it's gonna be very hard. But we can't have a conversation in Canada about who sells the most edibles, who sells the most topicals or who sells the most vape pens. So we thought, what if the government actually does us a huge service here and creates this sort of second starting line? And so we started telling investors, we're gonna focus on cannabis 2.0 and now that's very common terminology. But for us, what 2.0 meant is not, it's really a second starting line where we can have a horse at the gate at the same time as our peer group. And other people might show up with bigger horses but we're gonna be there. We're gonna be in the conversation. So what we started doing is quickly changing acquiring the assets and the expertise that we needed to position ourselves. So we made this shift in kind of April of 2018. May of 2018, we acquired Doscan, our big processing and manufacturing facility in PEI. And we acquired it because we knew, I think this was a client had paid us a lot of money to become experts on what a licensed dealer license gave you in terms of your regulatory flexibility and the activities you can conduct. The rest of the market had not caught up to this sort of understanding. And so we went after Doscan and we were able to get it for I think it was $38 million, which at the time people said, that's a lot of money. But we also knew kind of what was coming online, what the value of these licenses were. And our thesis was if we don't get this now, we're gonna get priced out of the market really quick. So we got Doscan. And then we started saying, well, if you're going to really develop products, cannabis products, you need a strong science team and a strong manufacturing team. So we went out, we started acquiring the scientific people that we needed to make sure that we were developing products in the right way, the way a consumer packaged goods company would. So we acquired some really top level people, including employee number six, the GW Pharmaceuticals that led their Epidolex product development pathway, Dr. Bob Chapman, who is principal scientist at the NRC in charge of cannabis and nutritional oils. And Peter Crooks, who was the CEO of Candice Smartis Kitchen, the founder and CEO of Candice Smartis Kitchen, one of Candice's top food scientists. He'd taken 1,500 products to market in five years. And so we got that expertise and we asked them, okay, here's our vision. We wanna focus on branded derivative products. What else do we need? So we got this Doscan facility, we're gonna make it beautiful and sink a lot of money into the building it out. We've got an amazing team that we're gonna empower to build teams underneath themselves to make sure that we're developing the best products and that we're creating the best brands. What else do you need? And they quickly said, well, okay, if you're really serious about developing like a wellness brand and eventually, you know, we have a plan to transition to what we call 3.0, but for another day. If you're really serious about that, then what you need is you need some, you need more clinical support. You need a deeper clinical bench because otherwise you're, you know, getting access to throughput at a contract research organization to do the sort of substantiation work and to give you the credibility with regulators if you're really going after these kind of natural health products or what the regulators now call cannabis health products, then you need, like that'll be a big tool for you. So we went out and two months later, we identified KGK Science, which was Canada's oldest contract research organization focused exclusively on nutraceuticals and natural health products. And we acquired them to sort of bring that clinical bench strength to DOSCAN. And so the idea is we have our scientists at DOSCAN who formulate a product. And that's a very involved process with validated methodologies, et cetera. And then we push it over to KGK Science that does clinical work to test safety and efficacy and quality. So, you know, if you buy a topical and it's got the DOSCAN logo on it, you're gonna know that there's been pharmaconetic studies done to actually measure kind of what's the absorption rate of the cannabis through the dermis and kind of how much do you absorb? What is the actual bioavailability of the product? So we transitioned really quickly and it was all because of the fact that we were regulatory experts. We were able to take very informed guesses on where the regulation was likely to go and understand kind of how to leverage that knowledge into an advantage relative to our peers by getting in earlier, getting assets of the cheaper costs and again, getting valuable commercial rights. And so at Oxley, we have our legal team is five people in house, but in terms of how many lawyers we have working at the firm, it is 10 in total, all in senior positions, right? So ranging from myself as CEO all the way down to kind of a regulatory social, but our head of IR is a former lawyer. Our head of product strategy is a former lawyer. And people often think that it's just because I'm a former lawyer that, I kind of have a predisposition to lawyers and it's actually, I admit, I do have some bias. I think, like I said before, I think if you can get through law school and you can survive at a law firm, it really says something in terms about the level that you operate at as a professional. But the reason why I think a legal background is so tailor made for the cannabis industry, especially right now is first and foremost, it's a highly regulated industry. And by highly regulated, I mean highly regulated. So I was just at a health candidate inspection in Kentville, Nova Scotia at our Robinson's facility and the inspectors come and they do the annual inspection and they're there to make sure that you are following your standard operating procedures when you actually operate. And I remember they said, well, you guys wash these scissors. Of course, of course we wash the scissors because if you don't wash them, they get the resin buildup and then they don't work as well. Like what's your standard operating procedure for washing the scissors? And please show me your sanitation records for washing the scissors. And so our quality assurance guy went and pulled out and they have records that they said, I washed 200 pairs of trimming shears on this day and here's how I wash them and here's the record. So it's highly regulated. And then it's highly dynamic. So the regulations don't stay the same. They're constantly changing. We always said cannabis is a political issue. Governments not so much worried about the market, whether the consumer has everything. They are worried about policy objectives. And the quicker you understand the cannabis, the political issue and that they're underlying policy objectives, it really helps. It's a lens that really helps bring clarity to a lot of things that otherwise you would say, well, why would they do that? Because it's not gonna be good for when I have to transport my products from A to B. Well, they did that because it either helps divert from the black market, keep it out of the hands of young children. So there is that sort of dynamic aspect to it, which means that having regulatory acumen allows you to sort of shift quicker. You can see where the change is. You understand how that ties into the rest of the regulations and then therefore how that's gonna impact the way you've structured your organization and the way you need to change it. There are no precedents, zero. So in terms of how people are interacting with each other, it will slowly change. In cannabis, we've adopted a lot of the sort of nomenclature almost from the oil industry.  But there are really no precedents in terms of how transactions get structured. And what that means is you really become, having that regulatory acumen allows you to use your knowledge of the regulations both as a shield and as a sword. You can make concessions and contractual negotiations that really don't matter because the regulations provide you with that shield. And likewise, as the example I gave in terms of negotiating branding rights in store is you know what's gonna have value and what doesn't where the opportunity is and you can actually negotiate for those things against a counterparty that maybe doesn't have as good a knowledge of the value there. And then everything's new. So because everything's new, analysis, your ability to look at something analytically and problem solve, which is I think anyone that's in law school has that ability and operates at a high level, just writing the LSAT to get in here like sort of makes you flex those muscles. So I find people that have a legal background in the cannabis industry are really good at solving problems and then working on the solution. They're not looking for an easy solution and they're not gonna give up if the solution isn't readily apparent. Like you find a way to work within the regulations but accomplish the commercial goal whereas other people that don't have that tool set it's either well we're not gonna do it or let's just do it and then we'll ask for forgiveness later. Neither of those approaches are optimal. So that's kind of why I think from an industry perspective, you're getting a law degree. It is very different practice of law than the study of law but I think now the cannabis industry does create a lot of opportunities for law students and law graduates to participate in an emerging industry and if this is really, there's no analog for what we're doing in any part of our industrial history, right? There was prohibition when it came to alcohol but it was short lived, wasn't really here.  So it's a political experiment, a social experiment, a market experiment and it's super exciting to be a part of. So that's, I'll open up the floor. That's really my story and I'm happy to answer any questions. I don't know if you can answer this, it's about medical. Sorry. I say I don't know if you can answer this, it's about medical marijuana. My daughter has MS and she was using Nabilon until Tiva just cut off the supply to Nova Scotia for a few months and she has a lot of pain so and then it happened within another month for, I mean, it was crazy and I don't know what Health Canada's doing about that. Anyway, she started drawing marijuana and now she's pretty much, you know, she's reached a standard that pretty much manages her pain. My son has a dog with movement issues, really old dog and he's discovered the same percentage of his CBD that's in my daughter's medical marijuana but the difference is in price. It's about a quarter of the price of the medical marijuana. So I don't know if you can answer that but can you tell me what we get from medical marijuana and if it is at all wise to move to the cheaper? Yeah, so I would say whatever your son's dog's taking that's an illegal product. It's an illegal product? Those are not legally permitted. No, no, he gets it from a licensed producer. Yes. Okay, so basically they're ordering cannabis oil from a licensed producer that's made for humans but giving it to the dog and one producer is more than the other. One producer is more than the other. What's the quarter of the price? That part I'm not understanding. Well, he gets, I don't know how much it is but it's $20 and it's in the same amount that my daughter gets for me. Yeah, it might be the same amount in Mila. So generally speaking, we call it active pharmaceutical ingredient like API but generally speaking it's priced on a per milligram basis. So that price differential is being driven by how many milligrams of CBD are in the thing because 2,500 milligrams are gonna be twice as expensive is 1,250 but they can fit into the same bottle with the same amount of liquid because all cannabis oil is or CBD oil is distillate so it's the molecular form of CBD after you extract the plant mixed with MCT oil, medium chain triglyceride of some sort like coconut oil and then you consume it. So the level of dilution is up to the manufacturer. So prices, it will be on the label. So what you have to look at is percentage. So you'll see a percentage for example that says 25 milligrams per milliliter. So that's where the price differentiation is being driven by. Now in terms of like medical access, so I am a huge advocate and supporter of medical access and I actually think one of the challenges that we have ahead of us as Canadians is ensuring that we preserve the medical access system even in light of the recreational because if I'm being a cynic I don't think that's what the federal government is hoping. What the Atlantic is saying? I don't think that's what their hope is. I think the hope is to have one system, right?  The problem with that thesis is that you don't have a lot of protections with your employer, with your insurer, et cetera for being a recreational consumer of anything. So if I'm a patient and cannabis helps me I want to access it as a patient because then my employer has a duty to accommodate. My insurer has eventually hopefully an obligation to reimburse me. I'm able to write off the taxes on my... Yeah, no it doesn't now because there's no DIN number. So there's been court cases as to why medical cannabis is not tax exempt but the medical cannabis system where you register directly with a licensed producer will always be cheaper than the recreational cannabis system because there's no middleman, right? There's no middleman, right? So the way that the supply chain works for cannabis is from a medical perspective you can get a prescription for medical cannabis. You can go to my Colab website, register. Supply is different than regulatory system, right? Supply is not a regulatory issue. Supply is an industry issue. But that's like Tiva letting go of the Nabilone, which... But that's again, like if Tiva let that go there's a business reason behind it and they obviously preference the business reason. Yeah, that's possible. Yeah, that's possible. But it was, they were making $1,500 just from my daughter's perspective. So I don't know how many people in Canada are using, we're using, are using Nabilone but they're making a lot of money. Yeah, look, I can't speak to what Tiva or the pharmaceutical industry is doing. I can only speak to cannabis. That was a critical moment when we decided to start. And I think that's really like you hear that story over and over and over again. I think for me as a medical advocate I helped start Canadians for fair access to medical marijuana as a co-founder of Hope for Health which is a charity just to allow medical patients who can't afford access to get access to the medical system. I think from that perspective, I think it's important to maintain the medical system. It's important to educate patients. And one of the things that I find most exciting is we're really now going to find out what cannabis can do as a health product, right? It's all anecdotal, like people who you hear lots of stories about it help my child or help my mother, help me, et cetera but from that it doesn't have the same buy-in from the medical community because there's no peer-reviewed studies and they don't teach it in medical school but that's because it has been a narcotic, a controlled substance to date and so you can't get funding, research funding. There's no commerce driving it, right? So I'm gonna do lots of studies, pharmaconetics studies, clinical trials, all sorts of studies to find out what my products actually do to the human being consuming them. I'm doing it from a profit motive perspective, right? Because I think if I do this work and I put the best product on the market, you'll wanna buy it. But that doesn't change the value of the work being done from an advancement of science perspective. Whether the motive is completely altruistic, whether there's a profit motive behind it, the research is still being done. So the next five years, what are you gonna see the most advancement? It's gonna be the R&D and the science and figuring out what this plant actually does and I think with that, hopefully we'll also come recognition from whether it's regulatory authorities or private insurers that, hey, you know what, this is a better lower cost method of treatment so let's cover it, right? Because that is, for example, when the young man who started Canadians for Fair Access to Medical Marijuana, a very inspirational kid, his name's Jonathan Zayed and he came from a very well-to-do family, had these, I forget the name of it, but it's just constant migraines, constant migraines. His family flew him all over the world for treatment. Nothing worked. He started consuming cannabis and he had relief. He was able to manage his symptoms. So he started this organization, started being a real advocate for medical cannabis. He was able to convince the University of Waterloo, convince their insurer that rather than pay for opioids, rather than pay for expensive pharmaceuticals, you should pay for my cannabis because it actually works. It's a lower cost alternative. And so I think since 2016, don't hold me to that, the University of Waterloo, their student insurance plan covers medical cannabis for all their students. So it's only when we advance science, you know, when doctors going through medical school, understand dosages better and what this plant actually does that I think we will progress and eventually there will be a din or an NPN number issued for a cannabis product that will result in third-party coverage. For third-party coverage? Yes. We'll let's talk after offline. There's supposed to be a growing disorder. It's the outer end or west wall where someone were down there in an old cleric home, like comic's plant that has been refurged. Do you know if that's... No, I have no idea. When I was a lawyer, it was my business to really know where every project was, where who were the protagonists there and to get to know now that I might actually, like I'm laser focused on my business and so what happens around I have a much less of an idea. And you go, your projects are where? So we took again early, early bets in Atlantic Canada. So we have a big dose cam which is our science facility, our product manufacturing facility. That is in Charlottetown, PEI. We have a project that we jointly own with a group of Newfoundland families called Atlantic Cultivation. And that is in St. John's and we have five retail licenses in Newfoundland. And then we own Robinson's Cannabis which is an indoor facility in Kentville, Nova Scotia. And then we have an outdoor, a large outdoor project on 156 acres that is just outside of Wolfville in Grand Prix. And then we have a small microgro in Sackville. So we have a project in every Atlantic province but in terms of the one you were mentioning, I'm not familiar with it. So in terms of licensing, are they fueling licensing and regularization of these companies from a mean counter perspective? Or are they actually getting samples from them running through gas chromatographs in terms of if they have what they should have or shouldn't have or how do they... Yeah, so the government doesn't get very involved in your business plan, right? So from a licensing perspective, the way it'll work and there's been, that too has changed dramatically over the course from inception to now. The government, well, you fill out an application. It's a very involved application that you fill out. So the days like I remember the first application we sent in was maybe this thick and then by the end, they're like volumes. And then the idea is that you're responsible for following the insurance compliance.  You have to convince the government that you're compliant and the inspectors will show up and say, how do you comply with this section? And you better have an answer or else they're gonna say, well, we'll see you when you have an answer. And now what the government has done because the strategy when I started advising in this space was if you wanted to get a license, right? These things are there, there's a lot of capital investment required. If you wanted to get a license, go work through the regulatory process, get the license or get the, what they would call a confirmation of readiness saying whenever you're ready for us to come and inspect, let us know and we'll come and then start building. The idea being that the value of your company was higher once you had that confirmation of readiness than before. Because before you're just a guy with a PowerPoint saying, I have a dream. But once you actually have the government saying, yeah, everything you've told us makes sense. Now let us know when you wanna come to inspect. You can actually put a valuation on that and raise some capital. Problem was, and I think the government's statistic was something really absurd, like 90%. 90% of the people that got there, then turned out they were never able to build the facility. They couldn't raise the capital. So the government says, well, wait a minute, I've just spent a ton of resources and time reviewing this application, going back and forth with you, figuring out exactly what your floor plan means and how you comply and now you've got nothing. So they put a new requirement in that says before you can ask them to come and inspect, you need a fully built facility. So the level of risk that they've put on the producer has even gone up another level. Because now you have to put together the application and then you have to put your money in and build before they're gonna come and take a look at it. And then once they come and take a look at it, you've gotta comply. And of course, what's developed around that system is service providers, people who are security experts, who are experts in record keeping and tracking, legal advisors, et cetera. Like you need a team around you to have a successful application. They've created a second system to encourage kind of more, say, grassroots participation.  But I'm just looking, look, I don't need a massive business. I just wanna have a nice business where I support myself and my family and we do really well, but it's manageable. So they have something called a micro licensing section where there's a lot, like the rigor that they apply the regulations is it's not looser, it's just you're never gonna be interacting with a client. Like the idea of a micro licenses, it's only 2,000 square feet of canopy.  So that's a much smaller facility, but still enough where you can make a really good income. But those micro cultivators can only sell then to a company like Oxley, which takes on the additional regulatory burden of like if there's anything wrong with that cannabis when it goes out to the public, you know, the government's gonna come and knock on Oxley's door, not the micro cultivator's door. It was a question about research, you talked about the amount of research that's going to be required, it's already happening. But I just was interested in getting your view on the extent to which you, your industry would see themselves, or maybe you're doing it already partnering with the academy, or is it more going to be announced research? No, there is actually, so there is a ton of partnership with academia and keep in mind. Some of that is both cost-driven, some of it's regulatory-driven, so at the beginning of the industry, the only places you could find that had a licensed dealer license that lets you perform activities with cannabis were places like Jonathan Page's lab at the University of Saskatchewan and then at UBC. So you have to partner with someone. If you wanted to do research, you had to find one of these licenses. So there was some regulatory issues that took companies into the academic, sort of with academic partners. And then there was also prestige, right? You've got researchers either at a specific institution that have a name or the institution itself, so you wanted a way to say, look, we're partnering with the University of so-and-so to research A, B, and C. I think that's going to continue and in fact, I think you'll see an uptick in that activity. Of course, when you partner with a university, there are a lot of additional issues around speed. Like, we're not moving at academic pace. Like, we have to move very, very fast. So speed, IP ownership starts to become an issue. Like, what happens if this IP gets commercialized, who owns it, what does it mean? And in cannabis, IP issues are actually quite complicated because early movers like GW Pharmaceuticals really papered the IP universe really well. So doing freedom to operate analysis within patents to see where you can actually take product development gets quite complicated. But it's really kind of speed and then IP ownerships where, like the approach we've taken at a CRO, we will still partner with universities. In fact, KGK itself is an offshoot of Western Ontario. So we'll still partner with universities. In a lot of the emerging jurisdictions, that is an approach to get you connected also into the sort of the community that's looking at cannabis and taking the same sort of approach. So I think there's lots of great opportunity for academic institutions to partner with cannabis companies. And the IP issues are easier to get around. It's usually the speed that is harder issue to address. There's a question here and one up here. Let's start at the back. You've had your hand up for a while. Go ahead. First I just wanted to know that it's really refreshing and appreciated to hear a professional successful person actually have to describe themselves as a cannabis enthusiast. You'd be surprised how, I mean I'm sure you would be surprised that doesn't happen very often. And then my question is, as a first year law student who is interested in working at the intersection of law and cannabis, it's still obviously a very new industry and there's no sort of clear path of how to get there. So do you have any advice or a base that person could position themselves where they should be for reaching the end of this issue? Yeah, look I think it's really alone the same lessons I learned in my own way. Even though you're a first year law student, let's not, getting to where you are is very difficult. And so you have a lot to offer. So I would say if you're interested, just get involved. Nova Scotia's got a really good community around cannabis so go to the events, put yourself out there, introduce yourself. And then there's lots of companies that would love to have you as an intern or as a summer student, it's such a where you're gonna get some, they're not gonna lean on you as a lawyer or at least if that's what they wanna do, maybe kind of give it a second thought because probably they're trying to cut corners in other areas as well, but just to have you involved and to give you exposure. I remember we had a, we had another very superstar student at Bennett Jones named Matt Sanders and we asked him to intern for us for the summer because he worked with our group and he did and he was tremendous value. He did nothing legal. What he did was shepherd our Colab Saskatchewan license, retail license through, like we got awarded a license in a lottery but then there's a ton of administrative stuff you have to do gathering information, providing business plans, providing timeline analysis for when you're gonna build.  Like Matt's been doing such an amazing job. So don't sell yourself short. Like you have a toolkit and you have skills that most people who are in the industry don't and it's just put yourself out there, get involved and ask for things, right? You don't ask, not gonna get and you'll be surprised how many times you ask for something that you thought, I don't know if they're gonna go for it where people are very accommodating, right? Everyone wants, like the biggest, the biggest, one of the biggest challenges we have at our business, getting enough top talent. We just can't get it fast enough. Just really smart people who are enthusiastic and passionate about what they're doing. Let's take one more question and then wrap everything up. It's just where you come in at a cost and you see the publicity called the regulation and the person who has to come in and you do the scissors and do more cutting. You know what I'm thinking? It goes to the unit cost of production and to break the influence. When it was first made in the company, a lot of investors ran to the best and then again. And then most of the time we see the financial results of the stock prices for the marijuana companies, their barrels are already pointing down. And then when you read the press, you find that we didn't have enough supply of it so no one's gonna make any money. Now you find that we might have too much supply.  And I'm not a lawyer so a lot of the regulations will apparently be countered. So I'm just sitting there, moving in my seat and thinking of unit costs, your competition, the black market, and how do you really deal with that? Like when you think of your book as a consumer, like I wanna use marijuana, I'm thinking, gee, am I gonna pay those high prices of all your scissor cutting, all these team of lawyers we have working there, all those costs going into the unit cost of a puffer or a gunner or whatever. And the thing about the black market, you could buy, as a consumer, if I could buy seeds, quality seeds, no problem.  The way that you can even make the oil, there's no real product or technology on that, but there'll be people that can build a better buggy before they're ever gonna come up and it'll end up being more of a do-it-yourself kind of industry. How do you see those sorts of threats or where is the opportunity with them? Yeah, so look, I think first and foremost, if you wanna grow your own cannabis and you wanna extract your own oil, make your own goods, like I don't see that as a threat at all, I encourage you to do it. I grow cannabis myself too, it's a fantastic little hobby. Got my mom growing it too, I'm saying, you know, mom, you got an amazing green thumb, what can you do with this plant? You're allowed to grow your own tomatoes, your own cucumbers, the fact of the matter is most consumers don't, because it's available at a good price with standardized quality whenever you want it. So I'm going to, like there's a lot in your question, so let me try and unpack it a little bit. In terms of the commodification of price, so the black market producer doesn't have to worry about SOPs for cleaning scissors and providing records, so there's no compliance cost to that. At the bottom end of the market, you know, by all means, I really don't care, I don't play at that part of the market, right? I play in the derivative products part of the market, where it is very difficult for the black market guy to make standardized capsules, or to make, you know, edibles at scale, et cetera. Yeah, but does your consumer really? Well, let me finish, right?  No alcohol, okay, let me try something else. How about you ever taking a prescription medication? Okay, so what if you could, I was on the street corner, let's just take anything, ibuprofen.  Or you're gonna go to the pharmacy and buy the ibuprofen that's got, you know, exactly how many milligrams of ibuprofen in each tablet, produced under GMP conditions, got all the information, if there's a problem, you can go to your pharmacist, say, hey, I bought this here, and it's not working or there's a defect. Because what I found, you know, and as I said, I was a cannabis enthusiast, so in terms of the black market, been around it until there was a regulated market, didn't participate in it, you know, had other ambitions in life, but what was the turning point for me in terms of going from consuming an unregulated product to a regulated product, where I found that my mind shifted was, after I consumed the regulated product, I got really, really used to, in fact, expected the information that came with it, right? The certificate of analysis that underlies that says this is this many milligrams of THC. This is when it was packed, right? Whereas you don't get that in the black market, so. You can always send it over as a label. You can, but that's, so have you ever sent out, have you ever sent out a batch of cannabis for testing? Okay, well it doesn't require one gram or half a gram, it requires 100 grams plus, and it costs $2,000 to run the tests on it. So if you wanna talk unit cost, there's no way your unit cost a black market that's tested, and that has information, can match my unit. How do you set the quality? Oh, I'm not, listen, I'm not here to scare anyone, because I'm not a prohibitionist. So for me it's just a tip, it's just like I asked you a question to begin with, I didn't try and scare you about the black market ibuprofen, I just asked you a simple question. Given, are you willing to pay for information? And if as a consumer, you are, you will always preference a regulated product to an unregulated product, because the unregulated product does not come with information. To that no question, but in terms of unit cost, like even the cost that you ask in your certificate of analysis and your unit costs on that market are huge. Nobody's making any money right now from investing in marijuana. Yeah, look, I'm not here to talk about the investor perspective, I would just say this. No, no, but this is moving into the point where it's becoming more regulated, more regulated like milk, and we're bringing in like the marijuana and marketing board. Yeah, there is, there is. That's called cannabis health products, and they're regulated. You sort of look at five, 10 years down the road, like I think we're really going to be here. We're going to have a few people and it's going to be so regulated, like remember we had the... I hate to interrupt, but we've got a time to watch it. Sorry. It's all right, I'm going to continue the conversation online. No problem. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thanks, Robert.


Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Christopher Appelstone. He's our European Editor and Analyst and of course you're the founder of Halgarn & Company. How are you today? Good, thank you. Christopher, would you like to start with just kind of an analysis of where we are in the gold market presently? The gold market is waiting for interest rate signals and generally thinks the interest rate is going up, so they're not like the gold market. Okay, so now we have a lot of people anticipating a gold rush or a gold bull market this fall. What are your thoughts on this? The suspective is taken. I don't really take gold to plunge, but I don't really take it to be rush either. It's probably just going to doodle around between 1150 and 1250 for the rest of the year. So Christopher, you recently put out a research report, Halgarn & Company, with a buy recommendation on sage gold. Can you tell us why this one may move a lot more aggressively than say the overall gold market? It's the three things, production, production, production. I mean as the gold price sags or goes mushy, it's really forced to investors that the ones to go with are the ones who are going to be in production or who are in production. And sage golds won't give me one of those. And anybody who thinks it's okay to just drill, drill, drill is mistaken. I mean it's all about production and sage are dedicated to that. And of course, one metal that you are hot for right now is vanadium. Can you talk to us a little bit about vanadium and what we should be looking at as investors? I think investors have suddenly realized that vanadium is the new lithium. Last year, lithium has run, pulled back. It will come back again, but it's not necessarily tied with the list of all the boats in the lithium space again. The people will be much more selected. So now they're now looking at the issue of mass storage devices. Where can you store the energy, the green energy that you're taking out of solar panels and out of wind turbines when the sun's not out or the wind's not blowing. And the place it is in mass storage devices like vanadium redox factories. And lithium does nothing for that type of mass storage. You really only have, at the moment, the vanadium alternative and that's turning people's focus back on to metal because really it's not being looked at very much in the last five to six years. It's been sort of ignored and now it's getting shrunk again. So what about cobalt or manganese, for instance, with regards to the batteries? Well, cobalt is a must-have for lithium-ion batteries at the moment. It doesn't look like it's going anywhere. It's going to be still required there. It's not going to be superseded. For that type of battery, it's a must-have. Manganese is an alternative to some other metals in the battery space. Well, how many factories are not going to retool now for different battery types to lithium-ion? They get drunk with that as long as they don't have a problem to supply. So far, there's no crunch in supply. If there is one, they might rethink. But for the moment, most of them are tooling up lithium-ion type batteries. So for all of you investor intel members that are out there would love to know what you think about gold, monadium, cobalt, and of course manganese. And Christopher, next week, we want to know more about zinc and what's happening there. Thank you. Thanks.


Now, staying in Duluth, the Jacks are returning to play in the consolation game against Inaka. Nick Revring for Inaka takes the shot and misses at first, but Alex Heinrich is there for the put-back. Inaka up 1-0 on the Jacks. Jack's trying to find a rhythm. Joe Leitner down the ice and hits his shot, his shot hits the post, Inaka stays ahead by a hair and eventually takes the match by a score of 4-1 over the Jacks. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.