Sign Kentucky Banking Memorandum Of Understanding Simple

Industry sign banking kentucky memorandum of understanding simple

you know all my life i've i've heard and been taught hey go through kindergarten go through 12th grade get your bachelor's degree get your master's degree get your phd and then go out to the work world and work for 40 years get the gold watch and you'll enjoy your into retirement there's there's the american dream right yeah that's not working that's not my plan i intended that but yeah yeah kind of not working that way at this particular point [Music] welcome thank you very much for joining us everybody that's logging on i'm excited to have you darius what a great conversation you and i have had previously i'd love for you to kind of introduce yourself and talk about what you're doing where you're at um and then we'll just take it from there yeah well it's it's not a really exciting story but it is true um i'm a native of san francisco i fell into the wireless technology space about 35 years ago i helped a guy named craig mccall build the first initial wireless infrastructure here in california which was 1g compared to 5g which is where we are now ironically enough i fell in love with uh angel seed venture capital private equity as a result of being in the heart of silicon valley and as a result of that you know uh five years ago i was brave enough or silly enough uh to dive into the canon space uh head first feet first however you want to call it um helped maybe four or five um associates build cannabis funds from the ground up but five years ago walking into a vc's office or an investor's office and saying hey i'm here to talk about cannabis and i'm here to talk about investment capital was not the conversation right so we have a mutual friend uh that hooked us up and uh said it might be logical for me to come talk to you it's all good well i love it so tell me a little bit what's your journey looked like in this i know earlier going from the telcom or the dot-com space to now the cannabis space right what does that look like well it was really strange because you know i walked into a neighborhood where i grew up uh as a kid in a horrible area called east oakland and ironically enough i looked across the freeway uh and the place where al davis built the coliseum where he is now but left oakland three times and is in las vegas but it's not in las vegas because you can't play the stadium where you can't play it's all running anyway um walked into a 75 000 square foot indoor grove and i went oh my god is this what they did with the nabisco factory where my mom used to work this is unreal right yeah and those guys have gone on to become one of the largest players in all of california i won't mention their name um and i said wait a minute this is an industry now i mean people are doing this now and so um that's where i figured you know i'd start playing around with building investment phones from the ground up and again it has not been easy um because we all know anybody who's been in this industry or the hemp industry knows it's about having access to capital and then figuring out the compliance part is really tough finding this the right seed is really tough planting is really tough getting it to grow to a certain state stages to really tough but that's only one-tenth of the battle yeah right yeah so what would you say the biggest battles have been for people you know i hate to say it because we're still in this kind of confused scenario is it good for the feds is it good for the state is it good for the counties is it good for the city is it good for the soil is it good for the ozone i mean we're all asking these questions and there's always these political battles between going on between all these people um and one of the notes i wrote you was jesus christ biomass on cush.com for hemp is five dollars a pound and then in illinois it's 3500 a pound for thc where they did a billion dollars in 2020 in in sales their first year right so it's it's it's a huge question mark about where you are where you want to be if you do believe in this industry if you believe in the science and you think that it's going to work on a federal level here on a state level here on the county level here but around the world this science is doing well let's just put it that way okay so two questions before we jump into what you've seen outside of the u.s compared to now because since you and i have spoken i've used actually your term a number of times in um it's funny to me how the united states is still trying to figure out where to plant seeds or how to plant seeds and other countries are i mean they're way beyond fat right but with that being said first what about why do you feel like the cannabis industry should be treated like the mistakes in the dot com era um you know compare them i mean because once i read this this morning i immediately was like oh you're you're exactly right and a lot of the same players were having the same conversations right right i i i love to do things by you know learning from mistakes i mean come on when we were kids if mom said the oven was hot what do we do right that's the other right and what did we discover ouch it hurts right and so through from my.com days i learned that it's like the gold rush and i live in the gold rush area in california it's like the gold rush when things are good everybody flocks to a situation or an area and they think they're really excited they want to get involved but they really don't have a clue what it is and they haven't done the homework to know what the exit strategy is going to be i mean where's the roi where's the extra strategy right we're all excited great opportunity but the dot com thing taught me one thing first of all wasn't intangible it was software it wasn't anything you could touch right and then secondly uh everybody was pouring their money into it but then when they figured out that the labor could be done at one-eighth the cost offshore what happened all the labor lot left and it went to india for god's sake right um so same thing here somebody realized that it was a really profitable industry went real slow you know five years ago but i've known people in the mountains and humboldt have been doing this for 35 to 40 years on the black market so is it really a big deal uh don't know well and there's a lot of people that have been in it even in the construction space so the textile space they've been playing with these fibers and researching them in other countries for a long time you know this is something i really have a hard time with is a lot of our talent and knowledge is considered black market right and cross crossing those over from one one line of business to the next or bringing you to it's a different type of business right you went from not dare sharing anything or saving text messages you know because you're afraid you're going to be rated to now it's out in the open and you're watching people really grow where those that have been in it that really hold the sa the trade secrets are not as much right what does that look like how do we balance that and well you know all my life i've i've heard and been taught hey go through kindergarten go through 12th grade get your bachelor's degree get your master's degree get your phd and then go out to the work world and work for 40 years get the gold watch and you'll enjoy you're into retirement there's there's the american dream right yeah that's not working that's not my plan i intended that but yeah yeah kind of not working that way at this particular point so now we've got the gig economy and most of the extractors that i met they did not they do not have a bachelor's of science most of the great extractors that i met that are leaving the cannabis industry going into the hemp industry attempting to move from 1 000 square foot extraction facilities to 500 000 square foot facilities did not go to college they just really honed their experience from the ground up literally right and so now as it said in my email in 2019 we had a quarter million of acres of hemp that's a lot of biomass it's a lot of biomass what are you going to do with all that weight that's a lot of stuff right so we discovered after throwing away a whole lot of that flour stem right we're going to have to get creative on what to do with it and so um i'm not going to say i don't believe in harvard yale princeton wall street i'm not going to say that we need we need those entities those things are very important to our economy um but at the same time there are a lot of people in this industry that come from the black market side that know more about this science than anybody anywhere that i've ever met so um we need to keep our our our minds open right yeah i think you nailed it because i think it is it's when we i mean i even ran into this and i've i really haven't i don't i'm not hands-on with this right i'm the i'm the association piece and the connection and the media piece and i love putting a microphone in front of people and saying here you tell me your story i love learning about it right but as soon as i said to somebody i don't have a bank account my credibility went right right right i mean people have to understand that are not in the industry that simple things like that or marketing or insurance right exists in every other industry and every other vertical does not happen here in the campaign that's right right that's right so so so if you if you think you want to get into the business you say okay okay we're gonna we're gonna follow the normal format of what it takes to start a business we're gonna build a team we're gonna build a biz plan we're gonna do financials roi extra strategy marketing sales branding image oh we're gonna open a bank account because we need that in order to build a line of credit no it right it's it's just not the normal way so you have to be really really really creative you've got to find i did and i'm still working on it those signs those those those forms of lines of credit uh those for those forms of compliance that understand it from the ground up um the banking people the the venture capital people the all the professionals that really make it easier for you to do what you should focus focus on is growing your business and scaling your business right right well okay so speaking of scaling and growing when we take our united states compared to any other country what are you seeing in comparison you know where where are we at reality wise compared to the rest of the globe and i run into this darius from state to state right even a small grow in a state may think they're a big grow and nationally they're a little girl yeah don't know or they haven't researched it or looked or there haven't been platforms or places to go and find that information right and and so there's two sides to that oh the three sides of that i think okay a friend of mine owns 200 acres here in yolo county but he's only allowed to grow on two acres right of thc um but with that two acres he supplies four dispensaries doing seven million ebitda per right that's pretty doggone good right um and then on the other side of that scale i've got a hundred thousand square foot building in tulsa oklahoma but they're growing inside pods inside shipping pods and they did 15 million dollars last year growing inside these pods right so there's this conversation of indoor and outdoor door grow and there's also a conversation of where to move the product when it's ready and so but that takes me to my first raise in the netherlands was 400 000 square foot of automated grow and now i'm hearing about in europe they've got artificial intelligence running vertical grows really 500 000 square feet really what are we doing what are we doing um canada uh where the market is aurora just shut down five hundred thousand thousand square feet of indoor grow so it really depends on what you plan to do with the plant when it's time to harvest really um are you a niche grower are you partnering with nike making tennis shoes um are you are you selling isolated distillate to bay area you know bear group science um is this is this pharmaceutical is it biotech is it material is it hemp cream what do you want to do with the flour or the stem well that's there's in my opinion there shouldn't be a molecule that plant left after horizon you should find some place for every molecule of that plant quite honestly so well i'm hoping it'll get there how far we i mean because like you said in other countries ai is a real thing an a is i mean as much as we talk about how many jobs we can bring because as we try to approach this from a different angle of economic development and research and rural community and so forth right because really that's where my heart went back even to supply chain and labor laws as soon as hemp came yes i mean that was a solution for so much this you know and then there's this reservation well we don't want ai because it doesn't bring jobs into the market right the jobs that are created from the product after processing far outweigh the number of jobs we can create in one facility and the amount of uh product or our time to process on a 24 7 scale right with scalability with ai well that's worse for us that we can i feel like now allows potentially would allow the us to compete with other markets if we can hurry up and get bigger better facilities well there are people in my life that were born before the television was invented right um i have people in my life that are still afraid to go to the atm because they don't want to put their money in it or take it out of it so um and i'm one of those people who carried you know five pound walkie-talkie and said you talk through this thing it works i swear it's going to work and so uh society and technology are going to keep moving forward right we we are going to have autonomous pizza delivery here very soon we are we're going to get package delivered by amazon by drone right now right um but guess who has to fix those machines inside the amazon warehouse right right they're they're human beings right and so yes i know we come from a usda thought process farming community here in america i get it um but if we're going to compete with the growers down in colombia who are shipping by the ton around the world we we've got to we got to pick up the pace we've got we've got to move forward on several levels uh and that's why i said at the end of the email i said look even if we had quarter million half a million pounds grown here again in america this year we had access to all the capital we needed to to move the industry forward what would we do differently ah that's a good question what do you think what would that look like or or what do you suggest the change needs to be well you know just like the technology industry where asia and europe were kicking our butt and they still are kicking our butt on the technology side there's no reason why california is the third largest economic or fifth largest analog power in the world we go through three three trillion dollars gdp we don't have a fast train we don't have a speed trade why not leaving sacramento going to l.a and getting there in half an hour come on you just we've had fast trains in europe for years we've had four and 5g in asia and europe for years why are we the last on the totem pole uh to move forward with agtech does it make any sense um our our government and our innovators need to move forward and and you know stop letting the banks process all the money and get some of the money to the people who need it that's my opinion okay so what do you think the government needs or the usda needs in support to bridge that gap back back to our farmers or our consumers you know we talk a lot about well what do we do for the government or what are we going to change to to accommodate them what is it you think that they need on their side to really grow this and be sustainable well i again as a native of san francisco and knowing all the people up from the willy browns to the gavin newsoms to the diane feinsteins to the barber boxers right all came from san francisco are now in federal government and some of them are even invested in the cannabis space um but i hate to say it because i don't like to talk about politics religion we got to get involved we've got to get involved we've got to get our hands and feet dirty and get up there to the state level with the people that make those decisions uh the state of guelph the state of virginia is trying to figure it out right now for the first time in their lives their governor's going okay yes let's grow right but he has no clue about what's been happening in the other states that were successful or that were failures right uh the folks that have been doing it need to talk to the people that are trying to do it and let them know these are the pros and cons and this is what you should do period so that's exactly what i want to be right i want to be that let's put a microphone in front of them and find out what works and be that go-to platform where uh you know we can come back and say hey this worked for us and this didn't work and here's where we're struggling and here's a group of people that can get together and solve problems and have real discussions right yeah i'm excited about it do you mind giving a little bit of history or background um i know you mentioned at the bottom of your email george washington and a lot of times when we talk about this you know people think well this is a brand new product and it's scary and it's not all the way back to george washington right right right what are some of your favorite like ah-ha moments or key points people should listen to so it was so funny this morning when i put that into google it came back and said wikipedia is said to be in verbal out of google said george washington did not mess with cannabis he just grew him so funny but yeah it it's it's somewhat of a joke because 5 000 years before george washington got here people were using cannabis for medicinal reasons so um yeah and and and then and then it moves to in our history it moves to uh the laws that were made in 1937 you know the marijuana act uh and then the illustrious uh richard miller house nixon in the 70s did the uh the controlled substance act uh was scheduled making cannabis schedule one and then i find it the real irony now is the private prisons are traded publicly on on the nasdaq you can go buy shares now but we can also buy shares in public and cannabis traded companies as well at the same time it is the the biggest and funniest and most amusing irony i've ever seen in my life uh and the funny thing is is the industry gonna stop at this point do you think so 2021 is it for cannabis and in him what do you think no we're not stopping not even kind of in fact i think we've the pandemic gave us a leg hold on the market yeah i mean really i said this for a while as much work as as people could possibly get done while government was shut down put the industry ahead of the government that's right and maybe i shouldn't say that out loud but i mean the more traction we have and the less focus that was given to regulations before the industry had an opportunity to regulate itself and fix some of its own issues and right right what about standardization you know there's a lot of conversation about need for standardization within the industry and the industry regulating itself versus um you know the government and or iso or astm setting some of those regulations and standards what's your opinion well you know again san francisco is the the ground bed for biotech biopharma stem cell all that stuff right and so when see people say cgmp uh kind of usda regulated or organic i laugh um because bare crop science has been here for years with 70 acres growing uh doing research but here's the good news or my good news and a lot of people are not going to want to hear it but it's the truth uh the bi administration coming in kamala harris coming from san francisco and i kind of know you know what how these guys thinks and what what their plans are i've got high hopes for the future i've i've got i feel good about the next four years um because again before the five years i decided to get into it i i grew up since the 60s in san francisco what do you think i've seen right right well what do you what do you think i've seen it's it's been around right right it's not it hasn't been so football being in utah it's the totally opposite right right right on very different charges when it comes to where we stand as far as states on this right well well listen colorado started it all right denver colorado started it all right uh as far as telling the feds hey you guys what you're thinking what you're doing is ridiculous it just doesn't make any sense anymore and so you know come into the 20th century come to come with a delight and and with all the things happening with our taxes and and the cities in the counties and the states needing additional revenue what's what's more obvious i mean it's it's not killing anybody as a matter of fact it's healing some people for god's sake so you know oklahoma has done a really good job darius that's sharing their revenue that's being made from the cannabis and hemp industry and relating it back to very real topics like teachers salaries homeless care things that really hit people that are you know are on the other side of the bridge but i love i love watching that and i love talking about bridging that gap in your email this morning you mentioned that you know there's a number of different verticals or avenues that will be directly affected or impacted by hemp like covid what are some of give me some examples of how those two are related well you know again the folks in the industry know what cannabinoids are they know what terpenes are they know this is again it's kind of 5 000 year history um and you know my my dad uh battled diabetes for 35 or 40 years uh so i got to i got to witness the um three open heart surgeries two amputated legs failed kidneys failed liver glaucoma blindness all that stuff from one singular disease and what people don't seem to realize or grasp at this particular point i think hemp and cannabis and you'll see here very shortly beyond gw pharmaceuticals who got the fda approval for their medication you're going to see a lot more research done here a lot more research i mean billions of dollars putting into research here and you're going to it's going to come out eventually not right now but it's going to come out eventually that respiratory diseases car cardiology cardiology diseases uh neuro neuroscience diseases are going to be battled from the very sciences that come from the cannabinoids on the terpenes that come from this plant period um well look at look at this and i know this because i was involved in some transactions related to copenhagen around flower right and it was being prescribed in other countries with a water bomb for inflammation in the respiratory system right right and so where they've had the capability when we talk about where the us is so far behind and they've had the ability to study and research we can't ignore that right right right right stigma we have cannot be denied when there's science involved um now where we're at in the u.s and our studies are are much different than other countries right and i think that that's where we've again hurt ourselves so badly well well if if you if you kind of look at it i i think maybe in march of 2020 we heard that there was this horrible deathly virus on the table defined as covet 19. um and in a very short well too long from my liking in a very short period of time a couple of companies astrazeneca moderna and pfizer have have got fda approval to start shipping uh the vaccine correct and so if we can resolve because of a international pandemic um and quarter of a million people dead and looking at what happened with the spanish flu in 18 1920 which was a much worse pandemic than this one um we should just my advice probably take a closer look at the very science that we're trying to kill uh that could save lives that's just my opinion i don't think it's just your opinion there's a lot of people that think like that and i think that this is a this is where the fight came you know it's been eye-opening to me too where i really see a huge value to the cannabis plant or to hemp is in the fiber and what we're able to do with it outside of just the health and wellness right you come back to how our globe or our we survive we have to take care of ourselves right and that medicine piece is not forgotten it's talked about all the time in indian cultures and moving from one country to the other um you know five hundred five thousand years ago and you're used in science what about climate change how does it affect you know we've talked medicine a little bit coven what about climate change and it was like what well i hate to say it on national any national stream but i've got people in my family that have worked at the white house level at the federal level okay and they're consistently telling me you know hey let's let's plan to get to mars because this place is a wrap it's over right let's relocate uh let's let's get to the moon let's get to mars and i'm trying to telephones hey you guys our bodies our souls everything was designed for the atmosphere that we're in right now right we kind of need oxygen we need water right we kind of we kind of need the gravity that holds our bodies together it's kind of important i say some people maybe disagree but we need to save this place this this condo that we live on we need to save it um and and you know right now the water is being destroyed which covers 75 of the world and 75 of our bodies water as well but there's a lot of garbage in the water um and i i almost think that the pandemic or pandemic is a way for us to stop driving these cars which is also ruining our ecology and so what i sent you this morning is true the cultivation of of hemp takes a co2 out of the air which is something that's killing us as we speak and so there there are so many advantages scientifically it is insane uh and we should really stop thinking about the percentage of thc that's in one plant that makes you feel woozy when you inhale it through a smokeable flower that is not the only vertical in the industry for god's sake most not even close right so so stop putting images of a cannabis flower and stop putting images of cheech and chong up on every brand because it's not the future of this industry guarantee where do you think the biggest avenue is i mean where do you think maybe like what is because i think that proteins and sugars are up there and we're starting to talk about those hardly um but i am really i'm curious where do you see the biggest gold rush from them i i think i think you said it earlier um it is the industry that's going to re-stimulate this economy i mean we've we've got a few issues right now i mean you know the the guys that are you know making a million dollars or two million dollars a year as ceos these guys are at home doing zoom just like i'm doing with you right now i mean the the board room is dead i mean google has announced hey you guys if you want to stay home and do business stay home and do business right so as one of the industries as you mentioned that survived but not only just survived but it's growing exponentially as a result of kovitch cannabis is one i'm not gonna say it's it but it's definitely one right um and i think this is the swinging moment that says hey guess what cannabis is a science it's an entity it's an industry that's not going anywhere it's here and it's here to start innovation i mean we opened the doors for innovation and i kind of feel bad sometimes when people say are you getting by are you doing okay i don't know very many people that are making millions yet and hemp however i'm busy and i love having the conversation and we're moving the needle and putting the supply chain together because we have an opportunity now yeah we crawl in a hole and really we'll drown bury our dig our own holes or we have an opportunity to make massive change and i i again i go back to my passion or what i became passionate about was not even brought to light until i started looking into him right what were laws relationship labor laws to textiles is you know and during the pandemic we had this big human trafficking blow up you know and what's happening there and how can you not relate that to your one dollar t-shirt well i got i i just remembered as you were saying that i had a friend of mine in hillsborough he um he was a mechanical engineer at uc davis and he could not figure out how to get his fancy porsches from europe here without going through all the epa dot stuff and and losing the profit on the car as a result of doing so and so i just thought about it he had the cars disassembled over there shipped them over here in parts and put them back together again here really creative right yeah and so a friend of mine in las vegas has the same issue which means he owns hemp farms across the united states he's friends with most of the hymn farmers across the united states and they've been figuring out what do we do with all this biomass so he's currently focused on uh turning into the distillate and isolate and and selling it on the open market by the kilo of course right um but there's there's only one challenge um and the challenge is is that you just have to be creative uh in your thinking you have to be really creative in your thinking um about what to do with your with your farm um and with and with you know uh all the the output from your farm as well it's it's not just it's not just discipline isolate uh there's a lot of there's a lot of things that you can do um and i think you said earlier you know understanding what what is it you're trying to produce what product are you or market are you trying to feed into with your crop before right that's it right that makes or where you plant it or how much of it you plant because like you said there's you know thousands and thousands hundreds and thousands of by you know acres of cbd flour the market just isn't there anymore like it is for fiber and some of these others right right yeah um you know again the the the alternatives are are huge absolutely huge and so um you know sky's the limit uh we are we are in uh 20 20 20 21 at this point and uh you know the the industry has come a long way in the last five years for me but 10 years as as as a nation or as a whole um and i've i've got again still really good feelings about what's going to be happening here with the new administration coming in and with like i said what i see going on in canada what i see going on in australia what i see going on in latin america and what i'm dealing with in in africa at this particular point and so um there's no reason why every other country in the world is moving so rapidly in regard to this this science and and this this uh inventory and and we're we're being like held back by our own government it just doesn't make any sense to me do you think that there will be change now that the usda is putting money and the government is starting to put grants out i mean because really i think there has to be public private partnerships available right now in order to grow right right you think we're going to see some big growth not only in the r d side but yeah manufacturing processing right the us right yeah and and so um again the the um manufacturing facilities that that that i've seen across you know the united states um have been trying to handle or trying to make partnerships on the tolling side with with with the extractors but the only issue is there's not enough extractors to handle that kind of biomass and they're not willing to uh and they're not willing to make um uh our handle the kind of kind of biomass that's that's coming through coming from the growers themselves and so um you know yep the the situ like i said before i think it's time to focus on more more niche industries um uh that uh uh that focus on specific areas of need that's out there uh that make absolute sense uh for the future of the industry because you know again um coming into the industry early and trying to do you know a thousand acres of grow like a friend of mine did in montana um and he did it at the wrong time of the season and guess what they froze before they got a chance to be harvested right um and so you have to understand everything about the industry before you choose the strain why are you choo ing that strain before you plant it and whether or not what kind of growth source are you using is it indoor is it outdoors it's hydro is it is it clay and all those things have to be considered for you to think that you're going to be successful as far as roi in the industry you got to think about think the whole gamut the whole season oh and and and the atmosphere where are you are you in humboldt county are you next to the ocean how high is the elevation how low how much humidity what time of the year right because humboldt is not like nebraska nebraska is not like kentucky kentucky's not like north carolina and north carolina is sure not like florida exactly all different right exactly well i think that that's been something to realize too as a consumer the standardization you know how how do you standardize a crop that changes so drastically not only in the agriculture side but in the product side right i interviewed somebody the other day that great it gave a great example when you take a two by four and you cut your two by four in half now you have two pieces of wood it doesn't structurally change that piece of wood right when you take a piece of uh wood substitute that's been made from hemp and you cut it in half now those pieces have changed right and those things you know down to like you said the sops are the standards of how things are grown or manufactured or processed change very much and this is where i go back to you know i really give credit to those that have been in the industry longer than 2018 or 2014 because they've gotten their hands dirty right you know they they really are our wealth of knowledge um and expertise yeah well here in here in california you know and across the nation if your home was built before a certain time uh there's there's just asbestos in it and then when i was a kid you know these homes were built with things called plywood which is basically a bunch of wood that's glued together for god's sake and now we have this thing called a housing shortage here in california um and and we all we all know what hemp crete is as well right we all know what prodigal board is as well and so why in the holy heck uh is uh 500 square feet in san francisco cost a million dollars but the the the minimum wage just reached 15 dollars an hour not sustainable yeah not sustainable well especially when products like you said are made with particleboard and i go back to relating you know when the pandemic happened i wanted to buy a camp trailer no trailers are made so poorly anymore i'm not talking poorly about anybody but i was very taken back on the quality even down to the cabinets you know right yeah compared to when we were right so when you talk about you know uh if the farmers can grow what they had grown and if they had access to capital right right what do you think they would do and why from the mistakes they've already made well again i don't know what they would do but this is what i would do i don't know what they would do but this is what i would do okay uh first of all i i'd find the best team i possibly could that had been there done that that had successfully not questioned mark successfully done an exit strategy in the industry worth a lot of money that's what i would do number one number two i would write a solid business plan and i don't mean something some template i got off the internet for 19.95 invest in people who know how to write business plans private placement memorandums and have taken companies public that's number two this is not a mom and pop friends fool and family kind of situation anymore you have to get serious period um and in that business plan i would make sure absolutely absolutely sure without a shadow of a doubt you've got a good attorney in there a good legal team that understands the space that understands intellectual property and then move on to your branding and image you have to have a website you got to have an app not kidding you've got to find out your marketing and sales strategy because in that strategy you're going to figure out what you're going to do with the plant when it comes on the ground and then you've got to have financial projections three five seven your projections that if you send it to merrill lynch the dumbest guy there will be able to understand exactly what you're trying to accomplish and in those projections you're gonna have a proven roi nobody wants to talk to you in this industry unless you can tell them what the roi is for god's sake oh when you're all done what's your exit strategy what you're going to do you going public you going private you stay private you're going to sell your mom going to give your grandkids what you're gonna do right all this has to be dialed in spelled out make absolute sense because if it doesn't i the people that i met from bank of america securities the people i'm talking to on wall street that have done 500 million dollars in transit 500 million dollars in transactions in the space they don't care they're not going to listen to you you said a few things you know this is when we get from a hobby to a real business right and we're moving where price margins are smaller and smaller profit margins are getting smaller and smaller and smaller and into the commodity space right it's more and more competitive and you've got to button up your act if you're going to play the game right and compete well you know my grandmother came from texas in 1945 and worked on ships at the shipyard for world war ii i come from hard working people i get it right there's nothing wrong with hard work as a matter of fact i don't think if i defined a garden tool to my son he wouldn't understand what i was saying he would say dad i'm busy with my video game don't bother me with that card about minecraft right getting guys and girls uh that have been in the black market in the mountains growing cannabis for 30 years have put their kids through college with this and tell them to come to wall street because we're going to write a business plan and raise capital it's hard it's tough i get it i get it and those that can do it though are are growing they're making it and it's where you bridge that gap and you're able to bring i want to say the real business into the cannabis business right previous existing business in the cannabis business that's right um yeah it's it's fascinating to me and it's been something fun to watch yeah i really had a question and i don't know if you have any in input on this but can the hemp industry aid in getting the thcv concentrate isolate into the market or is that a cannabinoid explo exclusive to traditional mmj well you you know what the farm bill said i mean we know what it said right and everybody's running around going oh my god i stopped you is that him or is that thc can i put you in jail right um and so you know and everybody says if it's above .03 it's hot or you you have to just expo dispose of it but but here's the difference and they say garbage in garbage out so you cannot say you had something tested on the flower level go through extraction process we don't know which extraction process you used and then at the end when the crude comes out you have to test it again because it's going to be totally different than what it went in as a power correct so so as far as legality is concerned we always get stuck on that number point zero three right so we don't care if it if you don't get caught at point zero three before it goes in and then you don't get caught at point zero three as it comes out and but staying compliant i think would be the number one issue right because you you don't want to get in trouble that that's that's what i would say when i say that that's i mean being in utah that's what we're facing or talking about a lot and dealing with a lot you know they're very strict about that and it's rolled over now into the processing side right and i take a plant that's .028 pre pre-extraction to extraction i'm automatically over and so i'm with you i think that it goes back to what's the profile of your flower or your plant and you're extracting and how how uh consistent is it right right and and the thing is is now the feds are starting to literally go around to these farms um and catch people breaking the rules and as a result of breaking the rules they're giving them fines and those fines are ending up putting people out of business for god's sake right so you know you all you have to plan for all contingencies mold bugs the fda you've got you've got to plan for all contingencies or what's going to happen between the time you drop that seed it comes to fruition time to cure and then what are you going to do are you going to extract are you going to wholesale are you going to turn into a material that's on your own internal brand because you're vertically integrated and you're going to put your own brand on the market and even if you do box something up because i remember in 1978 i went to the pier in san francisco i bought a yellow box it was just yellow box and guess what was inside a pet rock wow somebody was a marketing genius i'll tell you [Laughter] marketing yeah i had to have it though because i had my own pet rock so vertically integrated has its challenges too but you'd be really brave to be a farmer you'd have to be a niche farmer and have a really special product and made a really special brand if you're going to push it out to the market on your own recognizes a lot of guts lots of money for sure well and again that's that boutique i think there will be a place just like craft wines and craft beers right there's boutique groves that i think will exist but again this goes back to our relationships and understanding what are you doing with that product before you're putting it out on the market right yeah so look at canada i mean canada had the big guys aurora up there just oh my god it's federally legal we're going to take over the world kind of thing but they just shut down a 500 thousand square foot grow up there so we finally realized including oregon if you put too much product out in the market what's it going to do to the value of the product it's going to shoot it down right but the boutique growers up there in canada the niche growers up to canada are doing very well because they decided to focus on a specific corner of the industry they made it they're the best at what they do and people love their brands period and i think there's a place for both of those right but we talk when we talk big opportunities you know we talked about proteins and sugars and what about batteries and graphene what are you seeing in the u.s are people i mean are you seeing the use of well all i can say is oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god um because again i'm from the wireless industry and again what's the biggest problem we have with smartphones and laptops yeah my battery dies power right and what are we going to do with 6 billion devices around the world running a 5g what's going to be the problem right right now so biden has already you know reached out to uc berkeley and picked a power girl from here and he's going to be focused on energy energy and energy energy and what is energy it is power so if anybody can perfect that for real i mean for real for you that's that's huge that is absolutely huge well that's what what's not being talked about right yeah everybody again now is starting to talk about the textiles and the clothes and the construction material but when somebody says uh what can be made out of hemp minerals always look around anything you see for the most part is made out of hemp and that's no exact or can be made out of hemp and it's no exaggeration yes and and literally i mean kids i mean think about it nike just nike just said they've got him tennis shoes it's not a joke um there are car there are cars some people don't know the ford's first car was not gas it was an electric car number one number two um the tires that are made on a car the food that's fed to your cattle the um there's even a car out now where the car is made of him the engine's made of him and guess what else the fuel comes from him so any industry you could think of that that drove america's economy from the beginning uh from petroleum to tobacco um are things that are related to him so hemp plant for sure you can smoke it and you can drive it there you go the newspaper the all of our articles everything right right well i sure am glad and blessed to have you on i appreciate you taking your time with me today um it's what else how do people get in touch with you if they want to reach out or if they want if they have questions what do you what are you looking for and how can people get involved well here's the bottom line where i am or what i want to do when i grow up period um i'm still trying to figure mine out i don't know yet but for the last 30 years like i said i fell in love with the angel c venture capital in innovations and entrepreneurs i just love it i just love it um and in the last five years it's been cannabis focus which people told me five years ago don't do it don't do it oh my god it's a mistake now it's five years later i don't think it was a mistake and so helping some other people that came from wall street build some funds where they were only interested profit profit profit profit profit how much money can we make we're going to make billions of dollars in the exit strategy well i'm putting together my own fund at this point i've got it's built i'm going to launch it and it will be focused on social impact it will be focused on what they call opportunity zones which are dilapidated areas across the united states and it will be focused on cannabis and hemp merchant acquisitions that i'm in in the process of right now in countries like australia canada south america africa and europe and here in the united states um and i think with the new administration coming in we've got high hopes um to see if we can make it happen but uh if there's any yeah if there's anything you need from cultivation to extraction to manufacturing distribution delivery retail across the united states and you're confused on how to do it let's talk i mean i've been here for a while yeah well i'd also love to have you involved i said this many times on our association we meet on january i think it's the 15th i should probably look before i say that out loud but we do a monthly meeting it's an awesome opportunity to get to know people to really build relationships and connections we have committee groups that are how to accomplish some of these each committee is based on they they meet depending on their tasks or projects working on from construction textile education safety sops um things like that and so i'd love to have you involved and i'd really love to invite any of your prospects or clients as well um my goal again was to build a platform where we can connect and build relationships and highlight those that are doing it right so thank you very much for joining me and participating i'm excited i'm i'm really proud of what you're doing mandy and if you're in uh utah doing this you really have a lot of guts i'll tell you i gotta give it to you you know it's been it was eye-opening to me all i had to do was wear a t-shirt that said hashtag got cbd right it's as much as it's this you know faux pas nobody wants to talk about it out loud yeah otherwise we have to change our air quality in utah is one of the worst in the nation and it's horrible because we sit in this valley yeah mountains and so our air quality is rotten rural rural farmers that really we could benefit from yep anyways so yeah and i'm actually from wyoming so like the montana wyoming utah yeah yeah what i'm passionate about yeah well i drove through wyoming coming back from illinois and boy is the most one of the most beautiful air quality states i've ever been through in my life but it was just a 10 minute drive through but it was reality yeah as long as you don't hit it during the winter when all the semis are blown over on the road yes well think about it chicago illinois if you don't want to talk about winners and dirty trucks oh my god it's all good thanks again mindy thank you darius i appreciate you we'll be in touch thank you okay chee s