Hey everyone, today I'm going to talk about public coin statistical zero-knowledge batteryification against malicious verifiers. It is a joint work with Ron Rottenblum and Prashan Vasudevan. So as you all probably know, zero-knowledge proofs are an amazing idea. A zero-knowledge proof lets a prover to convince a verifier of the validity of some statement without repeating any additional information. In this talk, we focus on statistical zero knowledge for which both the zero-knowledge and the soundness are information theoretic. So a protocol is statistical zero-knowledge if it has the usual completeness and soundness properties where the soundness is also against an unbounded prover. And the zero-knowledge requirement is that for every poly-time verifier there exists a poly-time simulator such that the output of the simulator on some yes instance is distributed really closely to the distribution of the messages being sent by the prover and the verifier. Now let's say that the verifier wants to check that k different statements are all true, meaning to accept if all the statements are yes instances and to reject if at least one of the instances is no instance. The naive solution is just to perform the basic protocol k times one time for each instance. Let's say that verifying one instance takes m communication bits. So the naive solution will take m times k communication bits. The question is if we can do better. So let's discuss few prior works. So using the ip equals p space theorem we can actually show batching for every problem in ip however with inefficient prover. The line of work of Rottenbloom, Rottenbloom and Rheingold show batching for up which is a surplus of np with communication of poly-m low k where m is the written length. The special property about this protocol is that the prover is efficient and there is also another line of works showing batching with computational soundness however some under crypto assumptions and with really small communication complexity. So our main question is suppose that some problem is in azk can we verify that k instances are all yes instances in zero knowledge and with no trivial communication. We think it is a natural problem and it can also be used for batch verification of signatures and public keys. In previous work with Ronin Proshant and also with Guy Rottenbloom and Adam Silphon we showed that every problem that is in nizk is a non-sverifier sdk batch verification protocol with k plus poly-m communication. However it was left open if we can get a protocol also again malicious verifier. So our main result is that every problem in nizk has a public coin statistical zero knowledge batch verification protocol with k plus poly-m communication. So we improved the previous result in two ways. The first we show a protocol that is also against malicious verifier and secondly we show the protocol that is public coin. Let's recall the non-interactive statistical zero knowledge model. So in this model we have a CRS a shared uniform string that both the prover and the verifier gets at the beginning of the protocol. Then the prover based on this CRS and on the yes instance generates a proof and pi and send it to the verifier and then verify based on this proof and the CRS and the instance decides if to accept or to reject. So we showed our result in two steps. In the first step we showed the public or non-sverifier statistical zero knowledge batch verification protocol which is also nice in some particular sense we will soon discuss. In the second step we show that for every such nice protocol there is a efficient transformation from public coin on this verifier statistical zero knowledge to public coin statistical zero knowledge. So let's start with the warm-up. The input is length preserving circuits. The yes cases are circuits that define permutation and the no cases would be circuits that are far from being permutation in the sense that every image has at least two pre-images. So the way we think about k instances of this problem is as a composition. So let's go over the public coins on this verifier statistical zero knowledge batching protocol. First the verifier samples some yk and sends it to the prover. Then the prover calculates some x1 such that the composition of the circuits on this x1 equals to this yk and sends this x1 to the verifier. The verifier checks that indeed this yk is the output of the composition of the circuits on x1 and accepts or rejects accordingly. So let's consider the yes cases all the circuits are permutations and permutations are invertible. So because permutation is not invertible this x1 must be exist and the prover can send it. For zero knowledge consider the simulator that first sample x1 and then compute the composition of the circuits on this x1. Since all the circuits are permutations this yk is distributed uniformly as in the real interaction between the honest verifier and the prover and therefore we get the zero knowledge. So let's continue to the no cases. In this case let's consider the last no instance. So let's assume ci is the last no instance meaning that ci plus 1 to ck are all yes instances and therefore permutations. Okay so since the circuit ck is a permutation and yk is uniform then xk is also uniform. We can continue with argument from ck down to ci plus 1 and therefore yi is also uniform. But now let's take a closer look at the circuit ci which is a no instance. Since it's a no instance every image in ci has at least two pre-images. That means that the image size of ci is of size at most 2 to the n minus 1 and the probability that yi has no pre-images is at least half. In this case it doesn't matter which x1 the prover would say it just won't yield this yi since it doesn't have pre-images in the circuit ci and therefore the verifier would reject. So now let's consider the approximate injectivity problem. So in this problem the input is a circuit from input size n to output size m and we think of m as the poly of n. So for the yes cases all the delta fraction of the inputs are mapped injectively by c. So for the 1 minus delta fraction of the input they are mapped injectively and for the delta fraction we can't really tell anything and it may also be the case where all the inputs in the delta fraction are mapped to the same image and for the no cases at most delta fraction of the inputs are mapped injectively. So for the 1 minus delta fraction of the inputs we know they are not mapped injectively meaning every pre-image has at least one other pre-image that is mapped to the same image and for the delta fraction again we can't tell anything. It was shown that this problem is actually n i is the k hard and therefore it is enough for us to show a public coin statistical zero knowledge protocol for this problem. For the simplicity of this talk we focus on the case where delta equals zero and it is not known to be n i is the k hard but it captures most of our main ideas so our goal is actually to distinguish circuits that are injective from those which every image has at least two pre-images. The difficulty here compared to our example is that the output size is not the same as the input size and therefore we cannot directly compose. So we solve it by using a hash function that would map the ci's output size which is of size m to the next circuit input which is of size n. Notice that we have to hash the last circuit too. So if this function was perfectly injective on the set of images of each circuit to the next circuit input we were actually be done but it seems hard to construct this kind of function. So at the moment we think of g as a random function although we cannot really afford it by an eventual protocol so we'll have to de-randomize it. However we have few issues with this approach. First let's consider a yes instance meaning all the circuits are yes instances they are injective and let's take a look at the last circuit ck. So ck maps xk to yk which is then mapped to xk plus 1 by g. Now let's take a look at the image size of ck although ck has output size of m it has an image size of only 2 to the n since it's input sizes of size n and the ck is injective and the point here is that we don't really care about the instances that are not in the image of ck. So we don't care about the instances of 0 1 to m that are not in the image of ck and the reason for that is that they are not relevant for us they have no pre-images under ck and they cannot be used by the prover in this protocol. So with this in mind let's think of g. g actually here hashes 2 to the n instances relevant instances 2 to the n output instances and in this case a constant fraction of the output instances has no pre-image under g and therefore if the prover select one of these instances it doesn't have pre-image under g and therefore the verify won't be able to be satisfied and would reject. So also let's take a look at this error is actually being accumulated across those k circuits and we cannot afford that so we don't have actually completeness here. Know that we cannot afford amplifying it in the sense of communication complexity and also in the sense of zero knowledge. So the solution for that is to add short auxiliary input to g. So we add some auxiliary input of a size polylogarithmic and then the g actually now would map the y's and in addition there is some z i. Okay so as I said auxiliary input is of size polylogarithmic and this auxiliary input actually guarantees to us that each xi has roughly the same number of pre-images and this fact would also help us in the next analysis. So this was the first issue now let's see another issue. What's happened here that constant fraction of the xi also have more than one pre-image under g more than one relevant pre-image under g. So what's the issues here? Since a constant fraction of the xi's has more than one pre-images let's assume that the first circuit is a no-circuit and the rest of the circuits are yes circuits. So when we are coming to analyze the first circuit there are many many x2's that are consistent with the protocol meaning there is a pass from them to the eventual xk plus one. So in this case it's really easy for the prover although it is a no case since there are many x2's to choose from the prover can with high probability find some x1 that will be mapped to yi that then will be mapped to x2 just because it has many options to choose from. So this thing is even worse when we add the auxiliary input we just talked about. So our solution for that would be to use interaction. This interaction would ensure us that when we process yes circuits in every iteration there is a unique xi that is consistent with the protocol. So we do this commitment with pairwise independent hash functions. So let's see what happens when we process the first no instance from the right. Let's say it's the ci circuit the first no instance from the right. So when you get to the round i we can actually assume that the xi plus one is uniquely determined. So let's see how we can use it. So let's see differences between the yes circuits and the no circuits. For ci it is a yes circuits meaning injective. Every image is exactly one pre-image so the image size of ci is 2 to the n. However when let's say ci is a no instance every image is at least two pre-images so the image of ci is at most 2 to the n minus 1. So now let's combine the auxiliary input which is of size d. So if we have a yes circuit for each xi plus one we have about 2 to the d pairs yi zi such that first of all g of yi zi is mapped to this xi plus one and also the yi is in the image of ci. However for the no instances since the image is smaller we have about 2 to the d minus one such pairs. So now we can use a set lower bound to distinguish between the yes cases and the no cases and that's what we are doing. Now let's go back for the adding interaction part. So some of you might have noticed but we have a subtle issue here and the issue is that the indeed the prover commits to an xi in each round but she has the freedom to choose on which xi she commits to and therefore the prover can choose xi which would benefit her in the upcoming no circuits and therefore we cannot assume that the xi's are random. So in this talk we ignore this issue but please feel free to contact me if you're curious about the way we eventually solved it. This concludes our public coin on the Sverifier statistical zero knowledge protocol. However we still need to transform it to a protocol against malicious verifier so let's do it. Goldreich, Sahay and Wadhan show the transformation from public coin on Sverifier SDK protocol to public coin SDK protocol but this transformation is too expensive for us in terms of communication overhead. So we modify this transformation to reduce this communication overhead. This communication overhead actually was originated by amplification of the underlying protocol k times to decrease the soundness. So our transformation is actually applicable only if the protocol has the property of round by round soundness introduced by Kanati et al. So we indeed show that our on Sverifier SDK batching protocol has this round by round property. Okay so let's summarize this talk. In this talk we showed the basic ideas used to show our theorem that every problem in NISDK has a public coin SDK batch verification protocol with k plus poly and communication. We have some open problems that we thought of. First batch verification for all SDK not only for the subclass NISDK. Second a polylogarithmic dependence on k. Next a constant number of rounds. Our protocol has k iterations so it can be interesting to find a protocol that only takes constant number of rounds. And lastly an efficient prover. So there is this work that showed that for some subset of SDK there is a protocol with an efficient prover. However we cannot really use this protocol because it has a polynomial overhead so we won't have this communication if you use this protocol. Okay so that that's it. Thank you everyone who listened and if you have any question please feel free to contact me.


Hello, welcome back on my YouTube channel, in this video we're going to do a simple flood analysis. I'll start with adding OpenStreetMap from the browser panel to have some context, and I use the Locator bar to locate a city, in this example I'll use RotterDem. Zoom in to the area that you want to study. Now I'm going to install a quick OSM plugin, which I will use to download buildings from OpenStreetMap. Click this icon, and in the quick OSM dialog type for key building. Leave values as it is, so it will search for all buildings in the canvas extent. Expand the Advanced section, and make sure you only have multi-polygons selected in the right column, so we will only download building footprint polygons. Click Run Query. After it downloads all the buildings, close the dialog, and check the result. In the lower right of the screen I see that the on-the-fly reprojection is the Pseudo Mercator, while I want to work in the Dutch projection. So here I've changed the projection of the project, the on-the-fly reprojection, to the one of the Netherlands. Next I want to export the buildings to a geopackage using the correct projection. So select the geopackage, give it a layer name, and I changed the CRS to the one for the Netherlands, so the buildings will be reprojected from Pseudo Mercator to this projection. Click OK. Let's remove the temporary buildings layer, because we are going to continue with our geopackage building layer. The next step is to download the digital terrain model and the digital surface model of this study area. For this I will use the PDoc Services plugin. With the PDoc Services plugin you can get access to many open datasets for the Netherlands. After installation click the PDoc Services plugin icon, and there you see the list of layers that are available. AHN is the Dutch elevation model, and here you need the WCS layers for the digital surface model and the digital terrain model. Click one of the layers, and click standard to add it to the layers panel. This will take a bit because it's a large dataset. Now repeat this for the digital terrain model. If you choose boven it will arrive at the top, and if you click on there at the bottom of your layers panel. Here I choose boven because I want it at the top. This is a 50 cm elevation model available in the raster format so we can further process it. Let's clip the DTM and the DSM, and I use export, and I save it to this file name DTM RotterDem and then make sure that I use the map canvas extent so I clip the whole DTM to the map canvas extent and then I click OK. It will download all the pixels now. Remove the original layer and repeat the procedure for the DSM. Click write, use export save as, use the file name, take the extent from the map canvas extent and click OK. Let's have a look at the layers, open the layer styling panel, and remove the DSM, and what's always nice to visualize is using the hill shade, so I'll hide the layers that are below, and here you see that with the DTM the building footprints have been filtered out of the elevation model. So there we have the terrain, and with the DSM we can do the same, we visualize it with the hill shade, and there we see also the difference that with the DSM the buildings are present, also all the natural features like trees, but we need to interpolate our DTM if we want all the surface levels that are also below the buildings. So I'll use the fill no data tool from GDAL. With that tool you can interpolate no data values, which are called voids. So use the DTM as an input and change the maximum distance to 100 in this case, so we have a search distance that is enough to contain other pixels to base the interpolation on. So this distance is in pixels, and our pixel size is 0.5 meters. We don't need any advanced parameters and we save the result to dtmvoidsremoved.tif, then click run. Close the dialog, go to the layer styling panel and visualize the result as a hill shade, and compare it then with the original one, and here we see that most of the voids have been filled. Let's remove the original layer, and now we compare the DTM with the voids filled with the DSM. So here we see in the DTM that the buildings have been removed and the trees too. Now we can also have a look at the histogram. Click compute histogram, you will see here the distribution of elevations in this image, and you notice that there are several peaks. These peaks have to do with presence of dykes and polder levels that are at different heights. Now I'm going to calculate the slope to have an indication of the dykes, because the dykes should have steep slopes. I keep all the defaults here and I save the file to slope. Here we see the resulting grayscale, it looks a bit sketchy, go to the layer styling panel, there I use single-bamp pseudo-color, because it's a continuous roster, and I choose here the veritis color ramp, and this doesn't give us much contrast and a good way to increase the contrast here is to use a cumulative count, and there you see now in bright yellow the steepest features, which are our dykes. So this is a way to get more information about the structure of this polder area with dykes. We also see the tallutes of highways and other infrastructure. Next I want to extrude the buildings. Let's have a look at the layer properties and check the attributes. You can find the attributes under the information tab, and if you scroll down you see here all the fields that are available in the attribute table. There are two fields that can be used to extract the elevation, that's the height field and the building level field. However these fields are often not filled in and give an unreliable result. So in this video we're going to do it differently, we're going to use the DSM heights for giving the heights to the buildings. Go to the processing toolbox and search for zonal statistics. Double click the zonal statistics tool and make sure your input layer is the building layer and the raster layer from which we want to calculate the statistics is the DSM. Use the output column prefix of Z underscore and we are interested in the mean elevation per building footprint taken from the DSM and we will use that then as the elevation of the buildings. Save the result to the geo package and call it buildings with height. Click run. Click close after completion. I'm adding DTM void to remove under buildings with height and I hide other layers. I'm going to style the DTM now with single bump pseudo color and I'm going to save the project, save it as flats and I'm going to style the buildings with height and choose the 3D view, change it to single symbol and for extrusion I use the data defined override and I use the Z mean field that we've just used for zonal statistics and this will lift our buildings to the average elevation that was found in the DSM. Now I'm ready to use the 3D map view and here you see the extruded buildings in the landscape. In the layer styling panel you can also control the color of the buildings. Now I still need to configure that the DTM raster that is below uses the DTM elevation values and I'm increasing here the tile resolution to get some better detail. Click OK and now we can see the dykes in the landscape and the buildings and this gives us an impression of the elevation differences and the objects at the surface. The next step is to calculate the flood map. Double click on the DTM and use the less than or equal operator and type 1. So we'll select all the elevation values that are less than 1 meter and we will give that the value 1 for true and the other pixels the value 0 for false. In this way we simulate a sea level rise of 1 meters. This is the result. Let's style it to make more sense out of this and we use the pelleted unique values renderer because it's a Boolean raster. Remove the zeros and change the ones into blue so it corresponds with water. Now we see which areas in the city are flooded. You can also see which buildings have been damaged. Now I'm going to create a polygon from this flood raster and save the file to a shapefile and here's the result but it contains both the zeros and the ones. I go to the attribute table. I use select by expression and I choose dm equals 0 to select all the features that have zero so which are not flooded. Then I toggle the editing mode and I delete those features so I only have the flooded areas left over. Toggle off the editing and save the edits and also give this polygon a light blue color for water. You can here also reduce the opacity so we can see what is below. Of course we need to hide our flood raster and it's also nice to add an aerial photograph below and we use here the 8 centimeter aerial photograph and put it below. I hide some layers that were in between and there I see the flood extend over the aerial photograph. Now I would like to visualize the flood width 3D buildings in a 3D view. Instead of using the default 3D view of QGIS I'm going to use the QGIS to 3JS plugin. Hide all your layers and make sure only the OpenStreetMap layer is visible in the map canvas. Then click the icon to start the QGIS to 3JS exporter. Click the dtm void to remove layer and you will see here that the OpenStreetMap is visualized in a 3D view. You can use your mouse to navigate in the 3D view. Now go to scene and choose scene settings and there we can change a little bit the exaggeration to see better the elevation differences. So here I change it to 3 and click OK. The 3D view will render and here we see the result and now we see the dikes visible in the landscape. The next step is to go to the layer properties of the dtm and increase the resolution by increasing the resampling level and change the image width to 4096 which is the highest you can choose. Then click OK. If your computer cannot handle this you need to lower these resolutions. Here we see the result and we see much more detail here in the city and we can clearly distinguish the dikes here in the landscape. Now go to the layer properties of buildings with height and set the type from polygon to extruded. For Z coordinate use relative to dtm. For the geometry use the Z mean for the height, keep the rest as default and click OK. Now check the box to show the buildings. Now we have the buildings in 3D draped over our open street map which follows the digital terrain model. Now go to the layer properties of the flood polygon. Here also set the type to extruded. For the Z coordinate use the dn value which is 1 in this case which was true so 1 1 meter and for geometry I also use the 1 from the dn. If you use other elevations for the flood you of course need to edit the dn field with the flood height that you are using. And here is the result. We see in light blue with some opacity the flooded areas and let's maximize the screen and fly a bit through the landscape to see which areas are flooded. Of course the areas which have dikes or higher areas in general are not flooded but all the lower areas now are blue. I hope you've enjoyed this video and that this helps you to analyze floods in your own study area.


Hey njroute22.com here with another cheap wine reviews vlog This one is very interesting to me because I have overlooked it a million times It's the Franzia Dark red blend it's the Vintner select I Overlooked these because I heard anecdotally that they were they were the worst wines ever by the worst box wines And they're also the cheapest, but the other day dawned on me that There's Five liters. That's 5,000 milliliters of wine Which is a six and two-thirds bottles of wine for 1799 it comes out to less than two dollars and seventy cents per 750 milliliter Serving or bottle or whatever you want to call it So this is six and two-thirds bottles of wine and I looked at them. I think I've overlooked it in the past because I Don't know why I do that. I Gather myself. It's I don't really have gas when I go like that. I think I'm just thinking I don't know why you but I looked at these these wines these Franzia wines in the past They were all 12 and a half percent I really stay away from the 12 and a half percent, but then I looked at this one like dark red That's the latest trend is the dark red blends and all this other crap. I think that's just their way of saying Dark red blend is um, we don't know what the f this is. It just is so we're just gonna call it something We can't tell you what grapes are in it. It's like just like a roulette wheel of grapes. Hmm. I Looked at this 13 and a half percent. I'm like, well, wait a minute, you know, this might we might be onto something here or Or not or we may be in for a horrible day tomorrow I really don't care about the history of this company or how long they've been around or what their their MO is and I Don't care.   Don't don't even buy into that emotional triggering.  I ate tasting notes. I'll tell you some tasting notes and I'm done reading this Rich juicy flavors of dark fruit With the romans of red cherry and ripe plum the finish is smooth with a hint of vanilla and pepper spice Enjoy with red meats and chocolate desserts.  You ever see me going like this with a wine It doesn't mean I'm endorsing so let let I may have to rethink this thumbs up because the thumbs up is my pleasure for drinking You know, this is 32 ounce jug here drinking 12 ounces or so of it Well, I'll drink it now. Anyway, maybe I'll try without the thumb Like I said, that's uh, it's more refreshing than that a bayekka from the other day That Spanish one that was $40 at one point in time down to 10 or 11 or 12 Forget about it I'll tell you one thing about this Franzia. This isn't my this is my third Glass and I'm drinking eight of these glasses, which equal two of these bottles the size bottle What I do is I I take this 10 pounds I Take it and I fill my bottle up twice so I can measure without really relying on my memory of Filling up the the measuring cup to six and a half ounces every time I fill this up to about there And I drink this twice. That's two bottles one. This is that's a more accurate general estimation But yesterday I was drinking some other kind of wine. I forget it wasn't included in the review And then when I finished and I need one more glass, so I cracked open this Freaking roadblock of a box of wine. It's not that heavy It's just you're not used to when you're used to carrying a three liter Bottle that's 40 percent heavier. It's this weighs over 10 pounds. It's 160 ounces, I think 150 170 ounces of wine Eight pound gallon is 128 ounces. That's like almost a half. That's like 10 or 12 pounds It's amazing It's awesome to use it as a weapon Anyway, I drink some ordinary wine. That's like a hot slightly higher quality. Believe me. It wasn't really that much higher quality And I at the end of the night, I had one glass just before I went to bed Completely different league you cannot mix like a like a oak barrel Wine and then have this afterward it really didn't came in for a surprise it tasted almost like Not like wine it tastes like like a vomit. No, I'm not a vomit, but Hmm. Let's do what I'm looking for gag. It was gag inducing and because it Not because of taste per se because of the surprise I got it was a very unwind like taste however today I made an effort to To start off and only have this and It's not the most welcoming flavor the way they say, you know They knit me now Hints of this and dark It really does taste kind of like you know, it's yeasty. I don't know if that's the right word. Maybe I got a bad box I checked expiration. It's good till uh May 10th of 2019 so I have well At least six or eight months to drink it Nine months to drink it but I'll tell you this much it's more refreshing As that baica that I had the other day It's a fun wine to drink I guess The key is how do I feel after two bottles? So I'm only Three eighths of the way into into this endeavor So I'm going to kick off bottle number one and and and prepare bottle number two And I'll come back either at the end. I'm gonna try and make these shorter. They've been going on um 20 30 minutes and that's not good. So I'm going to cut this zone off Just let you know that it was it has a completely different taste. I wouldn't even worry about it. You get used to it Um, and it's not offensive Except unless you follow like a finely aged wine and then this really does taste different So that those are the key takeaways at this moment I'll come back when I'm either at or near the two bottle limit and then I'll do another video in the morning To see how I feel. All right, that's it. Hey, we're back here with our final Drinking time update for the night for the Franzia dark red blend um I have a couple anecdotes to share with you guys number one This is they say it's a 13 and a half percent alcohol wine on my eighth Glass, which is this is the last of the two bottles that I drank And I don't feel nearly as slurry if you watch any of my other videos I get really like kind of tired and slurry and they ramble and da da da da Not happening with this. So I'm questioning the alcohol content on this. I don't quite buy It Why based on simple Experimentation I've had other 13.5 like the explorer door. I did like a way back two bottles of that two seven fifties and I'm a little bit At the end I feel like I mean I'm not done with the last bottle. Maybe this is the the grand finale I'm just gonna like hit hit that fan like a pilot dog poop I don't know. Maybe it's one of those wines where it's all of a sudden like you're fine. And whoa Face pipe on the ground I don't know with that said I'm wondering if this lack of buzz is gonna either translate into a Hey, I'm gonna feel freaking fantastic tomorrow or The worst hangover. So we're gonna find out in the morning. I do my last step here, right? Never mind Remember how I told you that it tastes kind of like gamey and yeasty After you know for two three four five six seven The wine tastes just as good as as those other expensive wines that I've had This far into the game. So like it really I can't tell a difference. It's actually quite refreshing and good. I may have a ninth and tenth glass That'll ruin my day after review, but I don't care I like it. This is This may be my new friend. I don't know Say hello to my little friend What movie is that from? Godfather. All right, it's not the most refreshing Definitely not as bad as the Bayekka, which was this highly talented $40 wine reduced to 25 38 to 10 Don't don't believe the hype as they say. Who is that the public enemy? I don't think you should believe this hype either. I mean, it's I don't know if it's hyped up but For anybody who's on a budget and just wants to get a like I have wine at night or have a good buzz Profoundly the numeral uno Deal out there is this this one not that the white boxes, but the black box that says Dark red blend and you know what? I mean, I'll be honest. I didn't try the white boxes Maybe the 12 and a halfs have more of an impact than a 13 and a half that they claim I don't have a alcohol testing machine here where I can just dip a little swab into a into this Bag here and it'll tell me exactly what it is If I can squeeze this in 60 seconds, I'd be happy Why don't they have home consumer testing kits to find out the chemical composition? They claim they have them. They don't okay. I promise you they don't they have things that scan your food It's a big effing Sham it goes into a database and then it's not really actually chemically scanning your food. I promise you But they need something where you take like let's say you get a like a plate of nachos You take a representation sample like a third of it or quarter You stick it into this solution to some sort of neutral solution And it'll dissolve the the material And it'll mix it into a fluid and you can just stick something in it'll tell you exactly per Serving size and you can obviously adjust the criteria You know at one ounce six ounce eight ounce twelve ounce a pound This is 22% carbs 4% protein They have that they have it. They absolutely have it. It's not complicated. You have to just like Emulsify all the ingredients into an even base Okay, that were Every scoop is exactly the same percentage of ingredients like think of the plate of nachos again Or a hamburger with french fries That plate is comprised of like a million different like ingredients You have the bond the sesame seeds the meat the bacon the onions the mayo the Lettuce the french fries, but if you want to know what the the nutritional content of that entire That of food you got you basically stick it into his this jar With some sort of emulsifying fluid and you make it equal you make every spoon full of that food Equal to each other and then at that point you can do a chemical analysis on and say that this Entire plate and the way that the the the jar let's say it was a jar. This this was my hamburger emulsified liquefied And you say okay, this is this is a pound of material 16 ounces 454 grams And then you take a scoop and every scoop is equal at that point once you've emulsified it and Like blended it together and everything is is is pretty much equal You stick it into this machine and it says okay, this is 20 carbs 50 fat and 40 percent 30 protein Then you can that you can you can do the math at that point based on the weight of the solution Minus whatever emulsifying agent or liquid you put in it They have that already they have it already It's just not available to the public and that's why for the past five years or more These Kickstarter stupid ass campaigns. I'm sorry.   I feel horrible for the people that have shelled out millions of dollars Collectively and bought into their marketing campaign because you bought into a marketing campaign You didn't buy into the science.  I will get back this in a minute, but I have one last thing to say I went rambling.  I went 10 minutes But I think this is an important thing. Maybe I'll cut it out and make it another video two footnotes two footnotes and and These may be impactful footnotes. The first one is going to be an impactful footnote I drank two bottles of wine the equivalent. I drank 1.5 liters of franzia And I feel fine actually I feel so much more fine than I did with other two bottle test things experience So I may have another one or two glasses.  I have to do it again with really two liters I mean 1.5 liters Number two, I wanted to show you this this this valve here. See that valve This is an interesting valve almost all valves have a thumb depressor where you just press it And if you drop it, it's not going to spill wine. This is uh like a Like a sink faucet you turn it and it stays on until you turn it off That's one of the flaws of this box. Like you have to I mean, it's good Like for me when I was filling up my wine bottle, I just turn turn the knob and waited And then it was done. It was just like a faucet. That's like human nature. However There's something to be said about about action reaction. Like when you hold the the knob down You're guaranteed it's not going to move if you move your if you remove your hand This you just have to be conscious of so like I think as you get I think they might bank on the fact that people might get so drunk that they don't know how to turn the knob off And then all the wine goes away and they have to buy another box of Francia, you know, I don't know anyway I will decide if I want to remove that five minute rampage about about Chemical analysis because I'm sure they have that technology. I am sure they have that technology Without a doubt they have that technology. They wouldn't be able to put together these nutritional labels With such Accuracy if they didn't have such technology.   I am definitely going over two bottles tonight I mean, I'm just on a roll tonight. I'm rendering a video in my office I have to figure out a way to edit this this this chemical testing tirade out of the out of the video But I think I may make it to another video because it's important to know The chemistry is simple. We did it in elementary school You can mix it all together and make it almost an equal Juice just remember that and you can test that little equal juice, you know 28 grams 20.4 grams an ounce And you can figure out exactly what's in it Every chemical that's in it. You don't need a high tech device and in the fact that I've asked like like like Neuroscientists that invented target control and did all sorts of other things and they don't believe me that that's possible Means they're part of the freaking racket. I'm done. I'm done with this It will happen some brilliant guy in his garage is going to invent it He's going to be on kickstart probably in the next five years three to five years And it's going to blow the health industry out of the water. It has to happen. It will all right We'll see you Hey there, it's the day after of the Franzia box wine the cheapest wine You could possibly buy I think per glass And I have to say that I actually drank more than two bottles um Like one glass more than two bottles and I only got three hours of sleep So all those things considered I uh, I feel okay today. So that being said, I think it passes the test I'll try again a couple times. I mean I have six and two-thirds bottles there to test this out. That's it


Good afternoon. Welcome to our panel on economics of cannabis hiring and recruiting. Gretchen Galey, vice president of KCSA Strategic Communications. And we are a fully integrated communications agency that specializes in public relations and investor relations in the cannabis space, as well as FinTech and life sciences. Today, I am here with a fine panel. Next to me, I have Josh Rothman, CEO of Press Management. Next to him, Jessica Cohen, their New York director. And on the end, we have Eunice Kim, who is VP of People at Green Thumb Industries. We're just going to have a basic conversation about hiring and recruiting in the cannabis space and how that's going. Right now, if all you could just take a few minutes, tell me, I would love to know how you came into cannabis. And if you want to give a little bit more of your background, that'd be great. I guess I'll start it off. So Cresta has been around for 15 years or so now. It's been a predominantly based accounting and finance company that has done work in the public accounting, capital markets, industries for years. And when we saw the cannabis boom starting, we decided to basically make a pivot and basically go after the market as it started to emerge in the US and in Canada. This happened roughly 18 to 24 months ago, where we started utilizing our talents searching for accounting people and then placing them into the cannabis markets themselves. And it's been a very interesting wave. And we are on a massive uptick right now. And there's no shortage of people that are wanting to get into the industry. And there's no shortage, as Eunice will probably say, of demand for jobs within these cannabis companies. We'll get into all the particulars later in terms of what these clients are looking for, et cetera. But it's been incredible. So we have a staff of 18 recruiters nationwide with multiple offices. And we have dedicated cannabis specialists that have learned what these clients are looking for. Jessica is one of our cannabis dedicated recruiters that assists clients on a daily basis and was kind of just looking at the market and essentially saying, hey, we should get into cannabis. And it's been a complete success thus far. Hi, everyone. I'm Jess. I've actually been on the agency side of staffing for about 15 years. I've worked both internally and externally for companies that are split. I worked at a public accounting firm for many years. Crest is structured a little bit similarly to that. And my partner in New York City who directs with me, Rita, we were introduced to Josh by one of our business colleagues about seven months ago, eight months ago. And it just was a natural fit, kind of lifted a few of us out. We came in and he said, hey, guys, I do a lot of work in the cannabis space. I'm like, oh, cool. OK, we're from New York. We don't see a lot of that type of recruiting yet. And I think, and I think Eunice can probably talk about this too, is anytime in my career when I've been tasked with recruiting in the industry, because I am a true generalist. I handle business development, client management, and typically high level executive type of recruiting. But I've placed everyone from the janitor all the way up to the CEO throughout my tenure in every industry that you can imagine, from health care to fashion and now cannabis. I started connecting with really high level operations people. And I said, tell me what you do. What types of companies have you worked at and for? How were they structured? What types of backgrounds did you have? What made you want to get into this business? And then it kind of started making sense. Some people have horticultural backgrounds on the operation side. Some of them were just really strong, smart business people. Some of them were on the accounting and finance side. And we'll talk about, because I know Gretchen is going to ask us this question, about industries that are synergists with getting into cannabis, mostly from that corporate level and how that makes sense. So by connecting with people in all different industries, that's really how you become an expert in recruiting for those industries. And so it's been a really wild seven or eight months of just learning. I mean, I consider myself somewhat of a subject matter expert. That's constantly, though, learning every day. And my suggestion is if it's an industry you're not familiar with and you do really want to get into it, start taking yourself down rabbit holes because the industry is evolving and changing every single day from a corporate level, from a financial level, from a government level. And you really have to keep your finger to the pulse because what is happening today could possibly be changed tomorrow. So I think that's something important to think about. Hello, everyone. I am Eunice. I am the VP of People at Carintham Industries, GTI. A little bit different. I am on, first of all, I do not come from the cannabis industry, so I'm happy to share that experience with you. I am also, I oversee the overarching HR team here in our corporate office based in Chicago. So currently, I have a team of 13 employees who are stretched across the HR facets, including recruitment. We have our HRBPs and a total rewards team. And if you guys are not aware, GTI at Carintham Industries is a national consumer packaged brand. So we have our house of brands and also a retailer. We operate in about 12 states and currently have 18 retail stores open under the brand name Rise across the states.  But currently today, I think we have 680 employees. And I've been with GTI for about two years. So joined in June of 2017 as their first HR hire, not a small feat. And I believe when I joined it was about 60 employees and I think we were in three states. So just explosive growth through and through and I'm happy to share all of that with you today. Oh, my story of how I got into cannabis. It just happened, it was happenstance. So I traditionally come from a tech startup agency environment here in Chicago. So worked at a company called Centro and another company called Kaleidoscope. They're more on like the agency side in terms of like a, it's a B2B agency. So creative and ad tech. So worked in companies where the structure was very similar explosive growth, very progressive HR culture, really thinking about the employee centric experience. And I happened to be leaving Kaleidoscope and P. Cadence who's our former CEO. I'm not, that name is pretty familiar in the cannabis industry. Reached out to me on LinkedIn and said, hey, I know Centro has been the best places to work for five years in a row. I want to know your secret and you can make that change happen at a GTI, which will be a national cannabis operator or you know, evaluated billions of dollars someday. And I honestly thought it was a scam and actually had another offer for a different company and not at all this environment.  I'm not a stoner, all these people are high. I can't work here, like this is not for me. And when you get to talking, it's all about, you know, this is a blank slate. The industry is unprecedented and how would you like to be part of building an HR team where you can define all of the traditional stuff that most companies do because they just have always done them and really think about how to be an employer of choice in the cannabis industry, but just an employer of choice that just happens to be cannabis. So that was a task two years ago and still working very diligently towards that. But that's how I got started. All right, well thank you. It seems all of our panelists have alluded to and I think most of us in this room know about the booming industry. You may find it interesting that they estimate about 250,000 Americans are employed by cannabis companies currently. So my first question to you all would be, what are you looking for when you're trying to find new employees? A good question. I think that from our stance, we work with the startups to the large cannabis companies that already are publicly traded on the Canadian exchanges or have ambitions to go public in the near future. So every client is completely different that we have. They might be looking for a senior accountant or they might be looking for a CEO. So we have to rapidly change and acclimate to the environment of these particular clients. I will say that for the most part, most of our clients actually do not want people with cannabis experience. Based upon the client's trajectory, they're looking for people out of a manufacturing background, a distribution background, a pharmaceutical background. So in terms of the way we search, I think it's really important that people recognize that we're after top tier talent of C level executives for the most part across the country and for that matter across the world. People are dying to get into the space. We're being flooded by people that wanna get into the space and for the most part, our clients are looking for entrepreneurial type people. So I think the short answer to your question is, is that we're looking for people that are diverse based upon what the client is actively looking for. Eunice, from the inside perspective, what are you looking for? So I echo everything that Josh said. In just my short time at GTI, we did first start with looking at, gosh, they have to have cannabis. We opened up a couple retail stores in, is this me, I'm so sorry. And we opened up a couple of stores in Maryland and we were like, well, we gotta get the Colorado guys. Like we gotta get the people that have run the dispensary before. And we worked with an external agency, like we were just trying to get the ground under our feet. And it did work out that all three hires that we've made are great, but we've also learned that cannabis and regulations are gonna vary state by state. And you can actually teach once you have a good knowledge expert, all the things that you need to learn about running a highly regulated dispensary or in a manufacturing facility. But what you can't teach is somebody's leadership style. Their professionalism. And we've actually scaled back and I think we don't not consider employees that have cannabis experience, but we definitely don't put as much emphasis on it as we've evolved and grown. So to your point, I do think that, one thing that we look for in any hire, whether or not you have the cannabis experience or not, is do you have the functional expertise to run your job, to do your actual job? You know, I think that what we've seen a lot too is that with just the sheer growth that we've seen, the job that we might have scoped out today may not be what the job looks like when the person even signs on board. So what we've gotten better at from like the other side of the curtain is that we really need to think about who do we need today, but what do we need this person to look like to be successful in this role so they can grow with our company? And then the second piece is just being incredibly agile, flexible, change is the only thing that's constant in this industry. And when people come from traditional retail or very corporate environment, they're just not used to this amount of change and movement and reshuffling and reprioritization because the industry still is very subject to that.  But the reality of it is we kind of need people to flex, I don't wanna say down or up, but they need to be able to flex as being like the player coach. They need to be able to do the job. They need to be able to understand when we're gonna need to hire additional staff members, when we're gonna need to an expansion. And part of that is that they need to understand how the landscape of the ins and outs work because there's process improvements to be made. And, you know, but they also have to be able to flex the other way and be able to oversee and operations, manage a team, lead, talk about career development for the company. So I think that's been the hardest thing for us when people come outside from the cannabis industry is they're like, well, I set up here, I only do this.  Cause I think that's the nature of this industry right now and the way that we've specifically at GTI have hired and staffed to be pretty lean. Jess, would you say that you're seeing a number of professionals trying to come into cannabis industry who are mainstream? Who all of a sudden are like, yes, I wanna be in pot. Yeah, I think that it's twofold. We work on a lot of director level and above positions in all different types of companies, packaging, retail, manufacturing, production, distribution. And those positions look very broad, merchandising, sales, finance, a lot of finance. We're finding that a lot of people are building out their finance teams now, especially in the California market where we do a ton of work. And so, what's interesting is that the more structured retail people, it depends on the area of the country that we're in really when that happens. But if they have some kind of personal connection to the cannabis industry and they don't have to be a user, right? Maybe they had a stick relative and so they know more about it than the average Jane or Joe and they're in a state where it became newly legal and now there's things opening. Those people have a high interest and they tend to be a little bit more qualified because they are grittier. And I think to echo what Eunice and Josh said, it's a gritty type of personality that hands on, that ego-less. And then, so those are the people that are kind of really interested.  Tell me more. And so, we're educating a population of people across the country too and saying, you know, this isn't just going to the corner and getting your dime bag. Like, this is solving a problem. It's a different kind of industry, whether it's medical or adult use. There's a huge need for this space in a lot of people's lives. And it's the next dot-com boom. So, a lot of high-level executives, especially that are in like the mid to later part of their career, they're super interested to get into that because they want to be a part of something that maybe they weren't able to be a part of when the dot-com boom happened. And so, it's like half and half. It's half of the mainstream people trying to get in. And then also educating some of those mainstream people on what it's about and seeing if they have the grit to be successful. I found, I've worked in the industry for the past five years and I always run into somebody who's like, I want to be a grower. I'm like, great. What's your background? Can you grow? No, I can't grow anything. But they all want to be in there and they all want to start a PAW company. Are you running into that and what advice are you giving to people who may not, who have dreams of being in cannabis but aren't really staying in their lane? I think it's really funny.  He takes me aside and he said, hey, can you get me in? What do I have to do? And my, sorry about that. My first comment to him is always, hey, it takes a lot of money to get into the cannabis industry right now. I mean, blooded with the demand is just there and not everybody can get the license and have the capital that is needed to get into the industry. I think that one of the ways that we've been successful, Cresta is actually a brand that is integrated with one of the largest capital markets groups called LO that is specialized in the cannabis industry, raising funds for people, advisory services, helping them actually get into the cannabis industry from the ground up. And so what that enables us to do, it's not only a synergistic from the standpoint of we're passing leads back and forth, but it also gives us another service line that we can pass off to our clients and help them with debt restructuring, advisory, capital raising, I mean, things of that nature. So I mean, I think the answer to your question is simply put, we get a couple dozen requests daily for advice and consultative services on how do I just get into the industry? These aren't people that are looking for jobs necessarily, these are people who actually wanna start the business, make money, and then grow the operation they're after. What do you tell these people? I mean, it's say they do want a job in the space. Are they coming at it? I'm an accountant, I want to account for a cannabis company. Are they able to put together that that's the path they should be on? I think we have to educate them. I don't think that it's just plug and play. I think it all depends. I mean, I think Eunice is absolutely correct. I think that there's a specific type of individual that does well in the cannabis industry. Like I said from the very beginning, we have a variety of clients that want a variety of different types of candidates. But for the most part, it's the entrepreneurial for looking speaker or for looking person that can hang from an A to Z type of an atmosphere. They're being asked to do multiple things because most of these cannabis companies, at least the smaller ones, aren't established enough to have multi-leared layers of specific departments. A finance person could be asked to do a simple journal entry. At the same time, they could be asked to go in front of a capital markets person to raise millions of dollars just to fund the business going forward. So there's a lot of components that go into it. And we spend a majority of our time as consultants educating people really. On that note, I'm sure, and you mentioned this before, that you work with a number of startups. So I'm sure that you come across some inexperienced leadership teams or other ones that are looking to scale and transition as they grow. What advice are you given to those teams or how do you help to place the right people into those spots to help that business grow and thrive? I think that there's a big segment out there. You've got the well-established cannabis companies and then you've got the ones that are emerging, trying to get into it. We give them similar advice, but I think with the startups, we take it slower. They're not ready to commit massive funds to hiring talent. They wanna generally see what's out there. So we offer attempt to hire type of a service where they can test the employees, basically give them a longer runway if they need to establish an HR department, for example, or establish various leadership teams. So the startups are a completely different animal than the established, I would say, majority of the clients that we work with. I mean, Jess, would you agree on that? Yeah, and I think to echo what Eunice is saying about when they're hiring at, sorry, typically a very loud person, so to be told to speak louder is not difficult. You need someone that's gritty that can do more than just one job. You have to make sure that you're really super honest with someone that you could be called a CFO, but you might be managing the general ledger, which is typically not something that a CFO is doing, or you might be the director of people, but you are entering people into an ATS system, which is typically something that an HR coordinator or even an admin is doing, but you might not have one. So I think that when we talk to people that say I wanna get into cannabis, it's about asking them, what type of background do you come from? And I think accounting and also distribution are two easy industries to compare, because if someone is coming out of a public accounting company and they're telling me, well, oh, I worked on most of my clients for manufacturing, that's great. There's a ton of synergy for that in cannabis because a lot of these companies are manufacturing and production. If someone's on the distribution side and they're ahead of distribution, even at like an Amazon or a bigger company, and they're like, hey, I really wanna get in, depending on what types of products they are handling, if they're consumer package goods, if they're consumable products, if they're coming from an alcohol or a beverage company that is controlled substance, that's extremely synergist from a distribution and a compliance side. So kind of asking candidates about their backgrounds and then seeing how to coach them on getting in or what they then need to do if they don't have that experience, I think is really, really important, but constantly letting people know that you're not just gonna go in and be this one-trick pony. You constantly, and that's even for us on the recruiting side of it, we have to flex all the time. And if you're not flexible, that's just the nature of this industry. And to be honest, I don't really think it's ever gonna change, no matter how big the industry is. Eunice, you have over 600 employees across the country. How do you manage that kind of team? And how do you start when you have a new license in a brand new state, brand new regs? Where do you even begin? Yeah, I think for a while, it was just like all hands on deck. So everyone that was part of the initial group where we called them athletes, they can really plug into a new application. They can go on the ground and work with the local team to find real estate. They were the ones that were also at the career fair. So currently, I think we have, while there is still some ambiguity in exactly what you're gonna be doing today and exactly what you're gonna be doing tomorrow, we have looked introspectively to say, okay, all the fuss aside about this industry, where do we believe we should be as a company? How do we define our org? So the people that were hired maybe a year or two ago that were hired to lead that team, well, that's also changed. So working on a lot of change management internally to make sure that we have kind of that organizational structure and that we're hiring to the best of our abilities and setting that expectation with our candidates who are coming in. So that allows for people to have, maybe they're still a little bit more flexed, but they actually know what lane they're operating in and know where they can support. And from, and managing a team across the country, it's difficult. It's difficult because we, things are constantly changing. We're getting so big to the point where a message or a decision made in Chicago in our executive team meeting may not make it to the Danville general manager in time if it has to with wholesale. So part of how we staff and making sure we have the right leader in place is that we've already felt kind of the connection breaks, the communication breaks and making sure that we have leaders that are held accountable to the team underneath them as opposed to having everyone report into the executive team. So we've gone through a lot of evolution as a company just in these past six months and identifying, okay, we used to hire doers because they were cheap and they just wanted to get in and they were athletes. And now we have to step back and say, who do we need to lead this team? And those are difficult decisions. I mean, people, and this going back to my no ego comment of if you're gonna make it at GTI, there's always a chance that you may be hired over or, and that is the reality of it. And unfortunately, you know, this isn't, I'm not proud to say this, but we just are growing too fast to develop the people that maybe could be in that position and we don't have the resources in terms of just sheer energy to get those, to groom those people to that next level. Now, if you add that level in, so our, you know, your staffing are C-Suite, we're adding, you know, competencies at the leadership team level and really assessing who is sitting around that table, not just who's been here the longest and who knows the most. That allows us to be able to manage 600 to 1,000 to 2,000 people across the country because there is accountability for each vertical or department. From my experience, a lot of folks when they come into the cannabis space are a bit surprised by perhaps a lack of benefits or a lower salary than they're used to. How do you deal with that? How do you tell folks that take a leap of faith, go for it? Stock options. I mean, honestly, that is, there's no pun intended in that, that is it. I mean, we have companies that are doing things that are completely out of the box. I mean, I know, I'll give you an example. Jessica and I just did a placement for a very large client of ours who doesn't have benefits yet. And so the client said, listen, we want this guy bad enough, we're going to pay his out-of-pocket benefits costs in cash, him to get his own personal policy if it costs us $2,500 a month, we don't care, we're so well-funded, let's pay it to get the guy on board and his family because they're not ready with the whole benefits, the 401k, all of these kinds of things. The other side of the coin is that, I said stock options and it's true. There are massive stock plans being offered to these sweet level executives that if the companies do go public, it will be multimillionaires overnight. And so there's no shortage of companies that are doing this. And the other side of the coin is we're seeing, in our business, in accounting and finance for the last 15 years of doing this, we're placing tax partners at PWC on the lower level here, for example. In this business, what we see are similar types of individuals, high level, but what these clients are doing, especially the ones that are really well-funded, they're segmenting these with large sign-on bonuses, big cash. The deal we just did the other day was a $50,000 sign-on bonus. Walk in the door, here's your check for 50 grand, you stay for a year, the money is earned. That wasn't exactly. Yeah, I mean, sometimes we've done deals where it's more than six figures, just to get them in the door, to compensate for where your question is that they don't have a fully integrated HR department with all of these lovely benefits that everybody would wanna have. So I think that the CEOs and the board members of all these companies have to think outside the box in order to achieve, maximize, and bring on the best talent. I mean, I would say to you, Eunice, are you seeing the same thing? I mean, you guys obviously have benefits in all that stuff now, but am I on the right track here with what you guys see? Yeah, so I think we have crossed a line where now we're focused more on being fair and equitable and just making sure that we don't have millions of outliers. So we've kind of gone absolutely. There was a day and a time where we would be like, all right, we gotta get this guy in, we gotta close this year or X amount or whatever. And now we're really looking, again, introspectively, and saying, do we have the right levels? Are people paid appropriately for the job they're being asked to do today? So we've spent a lot of, me personally, with the team that I've hired to make sure that we aren't actually doing the programs that we create, the packages that we offer are scalable. And I personally, being somebody that joined in 2017, just speaking very freely, I understand that the equity is the long-term game, but also there is something to be said about putting a lot of emphasis on people coming into the industry and not taking care of the people that have already been in the industry. So a lot of what we're working on today is with the executive team, the CEO and the CFO, is how do we make sure our current team is also marketable for now what their experience is? Because now they've become more marketable in cannabis companies and may go to a job for a $50,000 sign-on bonus because they joined in 2017 when we paid them 20% below what they're making now with no 401k. So yes, we have done packages like that. We're becoming a little bit more stringent on doing that for everyone coming in and actually taking a look inside our walls and making sure we're doing that for our current employees. But equity is a big piece. There are a lot of, I'm learning as I go, as in cannabis you just can't be liquid overnight. Unfortunately with just all the barriers and you can give a mid-level manager 50,000 stack options but you also have to teach that mid-level manager what that means and how to transact. What does that mean for you? When is the, without giving tax advice, what is the taxable event and how do we make sure that we have employees that are acting smart and in the long term because that's where it is. It's not really in the short term. So that's something that is quite a challenge actually because you offer this equity plan before it's fully baked out and part of our responsibility as an employer is to make sure that people understand their total package and then continue to evolve your benefits offering with ancillary perks and 401k is hot and heavy on GTI's mind. So just being just constantly looking forward and making sure that we're making our competitive total compensation package competitive. So yeah. Are you finding that people are taking to this out of the box approach when it comes to their benefits or people standoffish from joining the industry because of it? I don't think there's any standoffish at all. I think that they're so eager to get into the industry as long as it makes sense financially and from a family perspective they're jumping at it with hoops and bounds. I mean, to give you an idea, our success rate in closing deals is like greater than 95%. It's a testament to our recruiters who know what we're looking for but I think it's also the prospective employee wants to get into the space. And so if it's a good enough offer with a good enough company that has upside abilities and potential, they're jumping at it and signing on the dotted line and starting within three days. I mean, it's like, let's go. I think it's important to remember that even on the adult use side and corporate side, cannabis is a very mission driven industry. I look at it a lot like a nonprofit organization. If you go on a nonprofit website, you'll see what their mission is and that's what drives a lot of people that are in a nonprofit industry to work at that organization. And cannabis, I find the same thing. All of our clients have very clear mission statements. Right past it on the front of their website and whether, like I said, their adult use or medical. And so I think that both of those play into a lot of people's personal missions too and when they see that, that gives them confidence that they're entering an industry that isn't just about money or the leaf or the flower or whatever. But even in the past like seven, eight months, just to talk about the benefits for a second, we've had clients where we placed someone back in December and it was like, okay, listen, we have no benefits. We're gonna pay $2,500 out of pocket. Here's a great sign on bonus. Here's your equity plan. Can you start? Here's your car allowance. And that same company now, when we are making offers to people, we have a legitimate benefits plan that we're presenting to them. And that was just from December to May of this year that one particular company has evolved. We have clients that even have been able to obtain 401K plans. It's been kind of interesting to see all that happen in such a short amount of time and then the offers changed too, right? So then some people are saying, well, why aren't I getting a $50,000 sign on bonus? And we're like, well, the compensation just evened out. So while I and my friend joined and this is what they got and I thought I was gonna get a big sign on, it's also about managing those expectations I think as the industry evolves that today we're talking about really big sign on but in like six months, those companies that are established that we're working with or even startups that are gonna be able to find more people coming out of cannabis, they might not be offering the same types of packages. They're gonna be structured differently. All of you have talked about the flexibility and the grit that you're looking for in employees. Can you be a little more specific on what types of issues they're gonna have to be flexible with? Eunice, I'll start with you. Oh, okay. All right. Um, yes, I can absolutely speak to that. Yeah, so there's, I think there has just been a lot of unknowns. So, you know, the example that I just brought up about, you know, being hired a year ago and you think you're running this massive marketing team and you know, the way that we've organized our department that that person is actually gonna be reporting into another C-suite that we've hired. So just a little, like just, first of all, just that more so goes with the ego. But for the grit, you know, we have employees that in Pennsylvania are helping our Ohio operations get off the ground and they're training the team. So we really believe in like creating knowledge experts and having and training the trainer and having those people train our teams because, you know, we always say like, we're not reinventing the wheel every time, but for a while we were. We were, it was like all over again, the same situation where like, how do we approach this? And I think part of it is like, we just didn't have the right people to own that. So we have lots of late nights where, you know, for if there's an application that we're applying for and corporate, it's kind of like all hands on deck. Like, how do you, how do you help? Even though my function is HRI, I have no idea what's going on there. Can I help bind? Can I help put packages together? Can I help copyright? Because at the end of the day, like if we win this license, it means that we all win. And Ben, our CEO always talks about winning, being not just a singular focus, but a team effort. And the bigger that you get and the more lanes you create, the less collaboration there becomes. So just hiring people that have the natural tendency to just say like, hey, how can I help? Like, I don't know what's going on. Like, how can I help? So, you know, even thinking about it, a perfect example is, and this is so small, but it's like, we have a sales associate who works in our wholesale business here in Illinois. And we have an office manager and she was staying pretty late because there was some office construction that was happening. So she was staying cause it's loud during the day and we could not have office, we could not have construction during the day, which is very unfortunate for her cause she also lives in the suburbs. So the sales associate just came up to her and was like, hey, you've been here really late and I live in the city. Like, I'm happy to come back at seven and stay till 11 so that the construction person team can finish up. He did not have to do that. He did not have to even acknowledge that that is her function. He barely is ever in the office. So, because he's always on the road, you know, going as clients, but just to see that type of personality and the person that really leans into their coworkers really is what sets the candidate apart. Like, so the employee apart. And, you know, I will say just as we've grown, there's just a lot less of that because we're just not, you know, we never say that we're a family because I think family means that there is, you know, that there is no condition, no conditional love. And, you know, we're a business. We are close. We are a team. We operate as one, but we are not family because that is to say that there is unconditional love for every single person is just not true. But when we find great people like, you know, the sales associate I was just talking about, we want to invest in him more. He has the DNA. He has the great, he has what we always say is a combination of grit and moxie. So just the ability to be, you know, just charming and kind and empathetic and that that with the grit is kind of what makes people successful. All right, this question's for all three of you. Are there any certain roles or positions that you're finding it difficult to fill in this industry? So difficult to fill. Honestly, the lower level positions corporate have been the toughest for us to fill. And that's mainly because clients that are startups have these delusions of grandeur sometimes because those are the positions where you don't typically see, you'll see the same thing with paying of benefits and that kind of thing because if a company doesn't have benefits and they wanna make things even across the boards and everything. But, you know, we're looking for, let's say a senior accountant and typically in whatever market we're looking in that person would get paid 100K or over 100K and they're like, well, I want a great person for 80 and they should want it because it's cannabis. We're like, but in certain areas across the country, that still doesn't mean anything to anyone and they're concerned about getting into a business that's so tumultuous at the moment, constantly changing, looked upon taboo in very, a lot of states still and a lot of even inside of those states, especially in non-urban areas, areas that are more suburban that maybe don't have as much exposure, they don't have a dispensary, they don't know anyone personally that subscribes either medically or adult use, doesn't mean anything to them. So I think to think that anyone is just gonna take any offer just to get into cannabis is foolish because it's just like any other industry still have to offer someone what they can comfortably continue to live on, right? Their quality of life is dependent on their paycheck and so those like lower level positions are very, very challenging for us because the clients just don't understand that they still have to meet the criteria of getting people to live within their lifestyle. The candidates are willing to be flexible. We typically don't have a hard time getting people interested. Their first question is this is what I'm earning or this is what I need to earn. Am I going to earn that? And sometimes we have to say no and are you still interested, you know? I would say that she's 100% correct. I think actually even a bigger issue is the location of where most of our clients are trying to fill these roles. I mean, without naming names of a lot of our clients because of confidentiality rules, but I mean, I've got a client that's in Northern California, not in San Francisco, about 50 miles south in the middle of nowhere where their cultivation segment is 350,000 square foot grow operation and they want their VP of finance to be located there and their entire team to be there. So it's very difficult to find a VP of finance who's got an investment banking background, manufacturing component who has moxie and wants to live in the middle of nowhere, even though there's massive upward potential. Similarly, we have things in Dayton, Ohio. I mean, that might be a little bit more easy to fill but it's not always Los Angeles or Manhattan or Chicago. So I think location is a huge, huge factor in terms of where people are setting up their overall operations. I mean, you have 18 retail locations and I don't know where they all are per se, but some of them I would imagine aren't in downtown Chicago. They are not. And so that might be a challenge for you, I would say. Yeah, yeah, location has become less of an issue for us now because I think we have a corporate brand recognition so people in the cannabis industry know GTI. So we do operate in small town Danville, Central Pennsylvania, our dispensaries are in the Harrisburg area in Erie, Pennsylvania and we've actually relocated a handful of folks to those locations because they wanna work for GTI and they know that there's going to be growth opportunities with us. I think if you're a one or two state operator, you're kinda like, well, I don't wanna live there forever whereas for us, there has been a lot of like, I'll go to Erie to get my foot in the door and I'd love to grow with your Florida operation. So we had that benefit. We have asked, said the comment about, well, they will take 80 because we're in cannabis and we know that that's not necessarily the truth and the reality of it is the hard part about just doing what we do and hiring people is that and my director of talent acquisition always says this in part of my French, but like, we don't wanna like eff with people's lives. This is a job and we don't want to sell you a false bill to get you to come over and then you hate it. So we have actually taken a very different approach and a recruitment to be extremely honest about the hours are long here in our corporate office. When I first started, I was working seven to nine and that was not uncommon. I was maybe one of the first people out the door and maybe one of the last people in the door. Those are big cultural shifts that we just wanna be very transparent about and we've grown a ton and we understand that that is not scalable and that we are gonna burn our people out, but it does, you can't change your culture and the behaviors overnight. So part of it for us is just being incredibly honest with our candidates about like, you teach them about the equity component for the comp package, but also the growth opportunity that lies ahead for our organization specifically as we continue to grow and expand. I think we have time for about one more question. So I wanna leave it on kind of a happy note since nobody wants to go to Danville. What excites you most about this industry and being a part of it? I mean, it's changing every single day and one of the reasons why I just love recruiting in general is that I get to work on a side of the desk where every day is completely different. I get to work intimately with every type of business or organization that you can imagine and act as a consultant, someone that guides and someone that makes people happy because they're like, oh my God, we just hired this amazing person through you and also help them through those challenges and those struggles. And so being involved in such a crazy growing industry has just been super exciting. What's happening today is gonna be completely different tomorrow. A job that I don't have today to talk to someone about is gonna be a job that I'm gonna have tomorrow. An executive that I may not have reached out to yesterday in two days I may be reaching out to and saying, hey, I just spoke to X, Y, and Z person. I really wanna connect them with you. Would you be open to that? So it's being a connector and a relationship builder and seeing and learning and just learning something that is ever evolving and changing. Just like it just keeps your mind going. I think for me it's, I can sum it up in about a minute. I mean, for 15 years I was bored to death most of the time dealing with accountants who have no personality at all and listening to them trying to tell me that they deserve $80,000 more to make a move. Whereas the juxtaposition here is is that in the cannabis industry these people are actually energized. They're excited, they have personality. They have a wherewithal about them that is completely different, that we actually enjoy the conversations. We meet our people sometimes face to face and we have no issues with texting them late at night or talking to them on the phone for an hour at a time. I mean, Jessica talks forever as it is but sorry, I wanted to mix that in. But I mean, there's some sort of fun to recruiting in the cannabis industry that was different in the segment lines that we had done for years. And so that to me is probably the single biggest thing that I like actually doing. And the other side of the thing is that for me telling recruiters that we want to work for Cresta that we work in the cannabis space I have people knocking on the door wanting to come on board. So it's just an exciting time for us to be able to continue and do this on a large scale. It's very simple for me. I'm an HR professional and I think I could literally go to any company, not every company but I had the luxury of going to every company but there's never this like association with I am making a difference here. And I think that's what we see in a lot of our headquarter roles is that you are to the point, the industry is changing. There's no day that's the same but also you're seeing it move in front of you. Every day there is a bill being passed. There's a state that's in discussion to go adult use or if they're already in medical or if they're not in medical then opening up a medical program. We have no shortage of demand of candidates that are interested and but for me I think it's just the passion of being surrounded by people that, I said this to Karchin and it's like there's one common thread that weaves through every single person that works at our company and that's just I've never been a part of that before and maybe if you work for a brand or if you work for a nonprofit that is true but to be able to look to the left of you with a grower and to the right of you, the SVP of accounting or the GC and be able to say like, yeah, we all have different functions and we don't really all know what each other does but we are here because we are making a movement and the industry is so unprecedented that we had this opportunity to truly be a leader and make a difference and set that precedence and kind of be a disruptor and that's pretty cool and it's not for everyone but the passion, you know, whether it's a product, the plant, the social justice component is just so very cool to see and it just is a great collection of people that not a collection but just a great group of people that we have on our team, so that's pretty cool.


In nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry, a nuclear reaction is semantically considered to be the process in which to nuclei, or else a nucleus of an atom and a subatomic particle such as a proton, neutron, or high energy electron from outside the atom, collide to produce one or more. Nucleides that are different from the nuclide S that began the process. Thus, a nuclear reaction must cause a transformation of at least one nuclide to another. If a nucleus interacts with another nucleus or particle and they then separate without changing the nature of any nuclide, the process is simply referred to as a type of nuclear scattering, rather than a nuclear reaction. In principle, the reaction can involve more than two particles colliding, but because the probability of three or more nuclei to meet at the same time at the same place is much less than for two nuclei, such an event is exceptionally rare. See triple alpha process for an example. Very close to a three-body nuclear reaction. Nuclear reaction is a term implying an induced change in a nuclide, and thus it does not apply to any type of radioactive decay which by definition is a spontaneous process. Natural nuclear reactions occur in the interaction between cosmic rays and matter, and nuclear reactions can be employed artificially to obtain nuclear energy, at an adjustable rate, on demand. Perhaps the most notable nuclear reactions are the nuclear chain reactions in fissionable materials that produce induced nuclear fission, and the various nuclear fusion reactions of light elements that power the energy production of the sun and stars.