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[Music] hello friends and welcome to another episode of radio free cannabis coming to you from high in the hills of oakland california translated into 195 different languages we are the voice of the global cannabis freedom movement and i am your host steve deangelo thanks so much for sending your questions and comments and please keep them coming remember to support the companies that support this podcast harbourside homegrown liberty clothing and i'm going to introduce you to a new company right now which is hemp zoo which makes these beautiful beautiful garments 55 hemp 45 organic cotton lovely lovely t-shirt and uh and then this mask which um i'm not gonna put it on right now but it's got just this lovely clinging kind of line to it unlike all the hemp zoo stuff it feels full of life also please remember to subscribe to the podcast and let your friends know about the podcast ask them to subscribe as well as we build this global community the legalization of cannabis in canada and the subsequent opening of its public stock exchanges to cannabis companies has changed the world of cannabis forever it's brought vast quantities of capital and sophisticated corporations to a landscape that up until then had been largely occupied by small business people many of whom were graduates of the gray and underground markets the changes have been sudden for some people they've brought success and even wealth for others they've brought distress and even displacement so there's many strongly held opinions within our community about this some of us see this new explosion of commerce as the culmination of decades of work by activists as a new and powerful opportunity to influence policy and advance legalization all around the planet others see it as an invasion a corporate takeover from the people who really love cannabis the people who have sacrificed the most to carry her through the long dark years of prohibition i'm of two minds there's no doubt that the arrival of investors and corporations has helped make legislators and government officials more open to the idea of cannabis reform the suits and ties are effective when government officials hear the truth about cannabis from people who look and talk like them it's easier for them to accept it than when it comes from people who look and talk differently so cannabis reform is spreading farther and wider today than ever before and that's a great thing on the other hand many of the new investors and business people live in the same bubble of privilege as the government officials their understanding of cannabis can be limited they're often motivated primarily or exclusively by financial gain the policies they advocate are usually self-interested and they are not infrequently dismissive of connecting cannabis to any greater causes of social justice so the reform they spread is sometimes seriously flawed and that's a problem either way whether you see the mainstreaming of the cannabis industry as a positive or negative it seems destined to continue all around the globe and today we have a unique opportunity to get an inside view of the whole thing from a man who is both a lover of cannabis and a super successful canadian investor and entrepreneur paul rosen played a key role at the very beginning of the birth of the canada canadian industry he was a founder of pharmacan capital now known as the kronos group which was one of the earliest huge successes in canada since then he's been one of the most active investors in global cannabis and a trusted advisor to some of the most powerful companies paul's other cannabis adventures include tidal royalty breakwater venture capital and globalgo unlike a lot of the new suits paul has a personal relationship with the plant he's almost always ready to smoke a joint and i don't think i've ever seen him in a tie paul welcome to radio free cannabis oh it's such a privilege and a pleasure steve it's great to see you and i'm really grateful for the opportunity to talk with you today great to see you too wonderful paul what i'd like to do is is just roll back to you know your earliest engagement with the plant when did you first encounter it how old were you what did that mean to you yeah you know that expression you never forget your first time i could never forget my first time i actually got high from cannabis so i'll tell you exactly it's like sketched on my brain forever i was um 17 16 or 17 years old i just can't remember and i was in high school and quite frankly the high school i went to cannabis was and actually quite a few other recreational drugs were really pretty much ubiquitous but i had sort of avoided it and my peer group i was the holdout if you will um but i think when i was in yeah when i was in grade 12 uh i smoked for the first time and did not get high and someone had explained to me that that's not an uncommon phenomena you have to kind of break your seal the second time i smoked um and i had known like familiarity with strains and you know what what might do what but the person that kind of lit me up said this is called maui wow it's very strong and um i will never forget it uh it was unlike any cannabis experience i've had since and god knows i've had like thousands but i got like almost like psychedelically high not almost i got psychedelically high uh the next three hours i had completely departed from my ordinary state of consciousness and was immersed in this like shiny bright fresh new consciousness and i i loved it i didn't dislike it i absolutely loved it and everything i had thought about cannabis uh clearly was erroneous um and i became pretty much in short order after that uh a pretty frequent if not habitual user of the plant and i i should say you know as a pretty s serious kid i was uh i had serious academic aspirations i had you know even at that young age sort of like trying to like get serious of my future and you know cannabis was just for me a tool uh as i can explain uh that helped me in a number of ways uh become the person that i am for better or for worse i suppose so that was my first time and it really is i don't think i've ever from uh imbibing any form factor of cannabis ever quite had that you know shocking effect uh it was incredible to be honest steve so similar to to my experience i was a few years younger than you were when i first ingested cannabis and it actually did work on the first time it took a little while but it did and but it was a revelation i i you know i knew immediately after i had consumed cannabis for that first time that uh that it was something that was going to be in my life for the rest of my life and it's what set me on my course to to be an activist and you know i think back on those days and the whole milieu of cannabis that i grew up in and and and and the the views of of the greater society at large and how much it's really changed um could you draw a picture as you were moving from your teen years into being a young adult what was the general scene with cannabis in canada who was smoking it and how did people who weren't smoking it feel about people who were it wasn't it wasn't quite that taboo to be honest i i never really thought i was you know like some badass outlaw smoking pot certainly in my peer group it was near ubiquitous there wasn't much drinking but there was a lot of cannabis use and quite frankly there was a lot of other uh drug use but cannabis was pretty accepted it like at least in the bubble that i lived in and there wasn't like this sense that we got to be super careful or like you know if we got busted we're going to be screwed for the rest of our lives so you know canada first talked about legalizing adult use cannabis in the 1970s and our current prime minister's father the legendary pierre trudeau struck a like what we call a royal commission to study it was called the ladain commission and ladain became a supreme court judge in canada so it was early in the 1970s there was some political momentum around legalizing cannabis of course that did not happen for a long time but it wasn't quite like i never really felt i was doing anything that was way way outside the mainstream and i never really felt that i was um you know at risk now i should say um as i got older uh and um i don't know what it was like for you you grew up in california is that is that right steve i actually grew up in washington dc area what was your did you i never really felt that i was way out of bounds and taking a great risk for my future and that i needed at least to keep it a you know a a secret what was it like for you so the way it was for me was it really changed when i first became involved with cannabis in the early 1970s um i thought that you know i i went to the first smoking in washington dc and became involved with the movement just as it was being born and in those days we were convinced that it wasn't going to take us more than four or five years to make cannabis legal because society in general was changing and moving in positive directions but then we saw in you know with the election of ronald reagan this vast vast change and it was really terrifying um uh you know once reagan got into power and and started this cranked up drug war um there were all these commercials on tv all the time basically demonizing people like me and it was it was a really really scary period of time when we very much felt like we were being hunted basically so you know this is the difference between canada and and the us on on on cannabis policy that um i think that canada has always had a more reasonable and balanced approach even its prohibition had a significantly lighter touch than the us prohibition did yeah canada i mean it's just politically permanently to the left of america and while it's far from a perfect society we didn't you know we it was even if you got arrested for like having a quarter ounce of pot it's very unlikely you wouldn't you would ever go to jail for that um we punished other drugs much more severely so i think there was it was just while it was illegal until i think 2017 fully um it just didn't i don't think it was quite as uh politicized and uh and policed as it will and i mean i came of age around i'm a little bit younger than you but yeah the first time i got high was i think 1980-ish or so at the beginning of the reagan administration and i do remember we used to make like what we would call verbal memes on the on nancy reagan just say no we had a joke to say just how much for a quarter or just how high can you get um and so we could afford to be a little bit sort of like you know cool about it i guess now i want to say that also uh one of the things that happened to me was i was i think a smart enough kid but i was really a struggling student until i found cannabis and um i just remember this vivid uh event that happened uh i was like literally a pass fail student for about four or five years in a row and my parents were very academically oriented and they were like so concerned and they're like tutors and academic assessments and it was just just felt like frustrated i think i had uh undiagnosed add i really had trouble focusing and then um but i had i wanted to go to university and actually want to be a lawyer i knew i wanted to be a lawyer from an early stage in my life so when i started smoking cannabis my life changed my academic performance went from borderline to exceptional like really almost like that in fact we in grade 12 our high schools in all high schools uh uh went through an anonymous survey about whether you use marijuana or not or cannabis and i filled it out and you know questions like have you ever tried cannabis when did you start and what have you noticed what impact have you noticed on your studies and i i answered the this survey honestly and i indicated what i've noticed is that my marks have gone like through the roof i'm a straight a student now then i wrote a note at the end to say i'm serious i actually wrote this down because i said i you don't think you probably think i'm just goofing on you or something and i said i'm not drawing a correlation i'm answering your question but i want you to know it was important to me i wanted to know that i'm not pulling your leg here uh this is really what's happened to me um and so i always felt like we didn't have words like you know medical yet it wasn't a part of the vernacular but i was yeah i i like getting high and listening to the who at like decibel 10 of course that's a lot of fun uh driving around with our friends and being idiots but i was coming home from those kind of fun nights and then working for three hours i could focus in a way i could never focus before and you know it really improved my outcomes and that was something that no one would want to talk about and later in my career when i became a lawyer i had to keep cannabis as like my dirty little secret and i'll say that our attitudes kind of hardened in canada we had conservative governments and things started to change a little bit and as a lawyer you know i have a solemn oath to uphold the law that's part of the conditions of my license so uh even though when i first started using cannabis in high school it was pretty much not something that i felt i had to keep under wraps as i became a young adult i had to be really really discreet and cautious and i just hated that i hated that people would judge me and it would kind of make you you know if you got high i would start to get paranoid do people know i'm higher they're going to like judge me so you know it's not that simple here and uh my relationship with the plant as i became a young adult was i wish this was normalized because i don't think it's a bad thing at all i actually think it's a good thing but in so-called polite society i'm gonna be like ootray and people are gonna you know people that are on their fourth martini are gonna judge me about my choices so um you know it's complicated issue uh unlike you you know i didn't have uh the courage to become an activist even though i felt strongly that we needed reform you know you're a hero because you you became you know a singular figure in the movement to bring a more um sensible approach to the plant and i became a lawyer i was a criminal defense lawyer so i certainly was not a corporate lawyer and i was a constitutional lawyer but you know i wasn't an activist at all and i in fact the i was the opposite i was became anonymous uh which is not serving anything other than my own self-interest at the time well you know again i think that um that that there's you know a couple interesting things to drill down in there right um i've heard from so many men mostly men who talk about how cannabis really was super effective maybe the only effective thing in helping them engage with learning and helping them focus and i've just i've heard this story over and over again and it's it's it's something that we should keep in mind as we think about legalizing and regulating cannabis and make sure that we do not cut off young men who are below the age of 21 from using cannabis in this very very therapeutic way i think i was probably using cannabis therapeutically for that purpose as well paul and i i think a lot of other people are and and the other thing that really strikes me and your your your comment there is just the the power of stigma you know we can change laws the laws are pretty clear they're on the books there's a process to change them we've been quite successful in doing that but stigma is this slippery thing you it's really hard to wrap your hands around it right it's like stigma is in the phone calls that don't get returned to you or in the deals that don't get done or in the whispers that are whispered behind your back that you never ever hear about or these long awkward pauses and conversations um so it's it's it's a much more difficult thing to to get rid of i think we'll be working on it long after legalization um well canada was a leader um in in legalization and i'd like to to know now start moving to into that era right what that was like for you because you were you were right there at the at the very birth of the legal canadian industry what did what did that look like um so just to tell you there's kind of a great story about how how canada got to where it is and it's a uniquely canadian story uh and i i brushed against this first in the 1990s long before we brought in uh what's called the mmpr like our commercial licensing program canada had a medical cannabis program as a consequence of a series of uh judicial decisions appellate courts uh found favor with the argument that a class of petitioners brought that canadians had a constitutional right to access medical cannabis with the support of a licensed physician and this became the law in canada in a series of seminal decisions in the 1990s i was a constitutional lawyer in canada in fact i'm the youngest claim ever to take a case to the supreme court of canada so these cases i understood were a bedrock foundation and this is really important steve because this was not an act of our legislature this was the act of our highest court meaning that it was sacrosanct and the reasoning was that canadians have a right under our constitution called the charter rights and freedoms to something called life liberty and security of the person not unlike the american constitution which is life liberty and the pursuit of happiness court found that court several courts found that security of the person surely includes the security of your physical health and if a doctor says my patient could benefit from cannabis court says we're going to recognize that right at the time though it was then a liberal government they had no interest in starting a new industry so they responded to the constitutional challenge by granting those patients of which there were ten like a small class of patients the right to grow their own okay so we actually had if you got your you can get a sort of like a medical card you could grow your own cannabis government note knew very little about the plant and so what happened was that that program which started with just about 10 people grew to like up to close to 40 000 patients in the in the decades that followed and there was over 8 000 individual grow licenses granted and it got to the point where the program was beginning to sort of collapse under its weight in that there was not a great deal of regard for public safety health these were essentially grow ups put in residential neighborhoods i'm not judging it but law and order did not like it the fire marshals did not like it because they weren't using the best wiring for these kind of lights and there was all these rumors that these things were like going up in flames and it is an absolute fact that there was a lot of overgrowing in that program i knew individual growers that had a license and they had like 400 plants and for themselves and up to three other people so all that product was finding its way to you know people that had not registered again i'm not judging it because where else would i get my cannabis but from these kind of sources but that's the way it was and um in around 2012 now i'm going to bring you up to uh kind of the new world order of cannabis uh the then conservative government which i will tell you was avowedly hostile to cannabis like they just [ __ ] hated it straight up not any nuance to that but they understood that the old program was a disaster and they were being lobbied by their bread and butter constituents we'll call it health safety to if we're going to have to have this program which we have to have it and you can plug your nose at it can we at least make it safe for everybody because it wasn't a safe program if you will neighbors who were complaining patients uh you know weren't necessarily certain what it was they were consuming i'm not saying there was bad intentions but it wasn't really providing the highest outcome for all constituencies so when they got when i first read in our national newspaper about this new licensing which would grant commercial cultivation licenses you know that perked up my interest i was no longer a lawyer i was an entrepreneur working outside of cannabis and with a few other people we thought we just all had this unerring entrepreneurial sense that this was going to be a big a big deal and um we kind of got the jump in that we started a company called hortican inc which became farmer count which then became kronos uh without really a business plan steve just we knew that this was going to be big we were entrepreneurs as it was myself lauren guertin or michael crestel steve eisenberg and we didn't really have a plan but we we wanted to get involved and we started that company and to use a famous dorothy parker comment about the town you're in oakland there there was no there there at the time um so that was sort of how canada got to where it is right now and you know i want to talk to you a little bit i want to keep droning on uh we can talk about what happened next but um i felt comfortable then uh to attach my name to a cannabis company even though you were quite right about stigma i have another business uh which largely operates in the u.s that i was very nervous about those businesses customers finding out about my involvement in the cannabis industry and i wasn't wrong because when eventually it became widely known i had some customers say i'll never buy from you again because of what you're doing you're a drug dealer and all this kind of stuff and i was like at that point i was like on your way you know i'm at a point now where i don't need you i'm sorry you're leaving but if that's the choice goodbye yeah um i think that's a choice that all of us uh who love cannabis at one time or another have had to to make in our lives and sometimes you know very very painful uh there's a period in my life where i did not talk to my father for three years because of our disagreements about about cannabis the very first lie and really just about the only lie that i ever told my parents was was lying about cannabis because that stigma was so deep but yeah you know i i'm really interested to hear a little bit more about the about the the growth of the canadian public markets and you know the the there's just been this you know a few years ago you didn't have big huge billion dollar cannabis corporations and we do now so how did all that get built in such a small period of time yeah a lot of it was the bankers i'll be straight up uh in that regard so you had this kind of like collision between uh a group of like wide-eyed eager entrepreneurs of which i was certainly right you know right up there front row seat um and then you had the canadian investment bank community which uh for your listeners and for our audience uh canada had a pretty active uh trade in resource and mining oil and gas we have some of the you know our exchanges are really had been renowned for resource exploration oil and gas and around the time that this new mmpr program came in which was these first round of commercial licenses there was a you know a bearish market in um all of those areas that the canadian investment banks had made their made their bones on and when you walk through some of these banks canaccord and gmp and some of the other big names dundee now known as a capital during that era you know there was a lot of empty desks so along comes this new asset class that the bankers could um you know make return to kind of glory on and i will say that the bankers played an outsized role in the development of this multi-billion dollar industry and you know they were the gatekeepers in a way so in some ways i say blame canada or blame the bankers for what's happened since because uh i'm not casting aspersions on their motivation but you know these were like investment bankers so uh their motivation was largely returned on their own capital and they're on enterprise and um it took quite a while for that thesis to sort of like and like excite the public and become a big thing but it started with a handful of companies tweed now known as kennedy growth corporation pharmacan now known as the cronus group aurora cannabis afria um bedrock and canada uh nf and a few others i'm not naming all the names but these were sort of your early stage and the organogram these were your early stage companies and the kind of the deal was with the banks we'll raise you money if you go public because they need to have liquid assets to raise money and that became that sort of like partnership uh or or deal making is what led to the conditions to you know what we have now which is literally over a thousand public cannabis companies a handful of which have traded at billion dollar valuations including all the big u.s multi-state operators coming to canada to list their companies here whether it was acreage cura leaf green thumb industries ianthus true leaf harvest on and on and on so those early days in canada really this this wasn't a big deal we only had a medical program but the banks had an agenda here and a business plan to revive their flagging fortunes in the face of that resource slump and uh i don't think anyone imagined it was going to become what it what it has since become never in my wildest you know entrepreneurial dreams like don't drink without a ceiling think how big can this be uh i don't think any of us imagine or at least i didn't and i don't suffer from a lack of imagination that it was going to become as big as rapidly as it did so it was you know straight up thrilling terrifying stressful exciting it was like the full range of entrepreneurial emotions and it really is not much different right now it's still all those things um yeah so it's this is really interesting right because in canada there's there's this excitement there's wealth being generated there's these new companies that are growing up they've got vast amounts of money i mean vastly more money than anybody has ever had in the world of cannabis before and so the way this plays out in california is that this is all happening as california is moving from a very large and robust semi-regulated medical market to a very very strictly regulated adult use market and and so there was another collision between california cannabis companies and the canadian uh public markets and what what i saw happening was was just a bunch of money coming into the state and you know people who i had honestly regarded as not terribly competent operators uh who um who had questionable ethics started showing up with tons and tons of money and you know putting up all these billboard campaigns and buying shops and spending a million dollars to build the shops out and and and sending you know promotional trucks around to all of the locations of their competitors and it was it was really overwhelming and so you know what happened in many cases is that the funded companies in california were far more capable of getting licenses of securing properties of raising the funds that they needed to build those properties out and buy the equipment that they needed and and today many many many of the people certainly a majority of the growers that used to supply the legal medical cannabis market have now been driven back to the underground market and we're beginning to turn it around a little bit but there was actually a significant drop in legal cannabis sales in in california uh following legalization um the number of of growers dropped from something like ten thousand to five or six hundred and the way this manifested in the emerald triangle was you know schools are closing kids are being called home from college because their parents can't afford the tuition anymore in some cases people are selling farms that have been in their families for two or three years you go through once really prosperous towns that were full of yoga studios and health food stores and um and and there's a bunch of boarded up put it up storefronts so it's it's been um a real a real mixed blessing like i said in the introduction i've really been of of two minds uh around it so um what do you think is gonna happen going forward as other countries legalize and open their public exchanges we're already seeing that begin to happen in israel is is the role of the canadian corporations going to continue to be so important on a on an international scale or is that going to change yeah there's so much there that's um a fascinating kind of stuff we're going through here right now let me start by saying that there was you know allocation of capital did not go after a rigorous evaluation about who is the most deserving or the most qualified uh we may have raised billions of dollars we also as a canadian industry we also lost billions of dollars we you know we were a you give an entrepreneur a whack of money they're they're going to go spend it whether they're going to spend it wise or not is subject to interpretation but we can see that in canada you know pretty much every founding ceo is no longer the ceo of these companies and a lot of these are good people but there is maybe you know one type of personality to take to take a company from an idea to a certain level maybe a different type of executive but there was there was no fairness you know it was almost like a first in first out kind of mentality and there was a a long period of time there where anyone that came to canada with the word cannabis on their business plan could raise capital and the only condition was you have to go public and so there was a time where all the money was in canada uh and that money was now being deployed globally to try to create like these global assets and i will say to answer your question that a lot of those sort of like world domination aspirations have been you know curtailed quite substantially and we've seen actually the opposite of a lot of the larger canadian companies unwind a lot of their investment capital in foreign jurisdictions uh they've seen aurora canopy uh cantrest and various other companies unwind expensive and non-accretive acquisitions or joint ventures in all sorts of countries like colombia like le soto and so they kind of came in you know promising the moon and then they left a little bit of carnage behind so to your question what's going to happen in these other countries you know this is a really important outcome right now because you know we can learn a lot from canada a lot of what went right but also a lot about what has not necessarily gone right and i feel that um the problem or the challenge with cannabis is you know isn't it we've created it such that it's an expensive industry with barriers to entry and that perpetuates a certain mentality and a certain type of outcome so i wish i could say i'm brimming with optimism that we're going to see other countries do it in a way that is more inclusive but i'm not because i do think at the end of the day money talks in this industry and this the people that are placing them money they have one agenda and one mostly one agenda and one agenda only which is to earn a return on that capital and to have a liquid investment so um i feel that there's we're at almost a crossroads in this industry what do we want to become what are our values what is our soul what's our mission is our mission just to make as much money for a few people as possible i hope not and people could say you know paul you're a rampant hypocrite because you've apparently made a lot of money in cannabis and i suppose that's true but um but that's that's you know i took a big risk when i could have got annihilated for it and i got and i got paid out okay but that doesn't mean that i think necessarily everything that happened was in the best interest of building the industry that i want to participate in so i'd love to get your point of view on this i feel that um you know that expression by that journalist i think matt to leaves his name about goldman sachs he said they're a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity with their blood funnel stuck into anything that smells like money famous quip that started a legendary article in um rolling stone and i think that is the you know that is the nature of of investment banking and i'm not making a moral judgment i what i do a lot of now i do a lot of mentoring for young companies and i just want them to go in eyes wide open i was a naive myself i did not count i was a i ran like a small private business as self-funded i didn't know nothing from public markets and raising money i never raised a dollar of capital and so you know a lot of the outcomes for me were really not like were i didn't exactly realize how naive i was and that the bankers whispering sweet nothing is in my ear weren't necessarily my best friends and that they had their own agenda and that there's you know i've definitely got burned a little bit i guess i feel like some of the outcomes weren't what i thought was gonna happen i take i'm cool with it it's all part of life's great lesson but um you know i often try to help young entrepreneurs make effective decisions if they do need to raise capital to make sure that they don't enter into term sheets or agreements that they're going to regret at a later date uh and i feel that i'm becoming like a bit of a you know a safe keeper because i love entrepreneurs like i i believe entrepreneurs are amazing i never want to see them demonized for success that's not good for anybody we create you know i say but entrepreneurs we privatize risk and we socialize positive outcomes that means that when we fail we feel all by ourselves we crawl up in the fetal position and and you know say why did i do that i'm so stupid why did i do that and then when we succeed we succeed for the benefit of so many communities and constituencies we create hopefully good products or services we employ people and good well-paying jobs with integrity and in the case of cannabis we help patients in need uh ameliorate their suffering so i'm here you know as a guy that's been on both sides of this now an entrepreneur that's been through the whole grinder of public companies and it still understands the role of capital and doesn't want to demonize capital but wants to protect earnest people that are smart and that have you know great businesses uh from negative outcomes from not knowing that their investors have a plan that may not be their plan i feel that we should have an industry that is way more inclusive much more broad-based and less concentrated than than what has happened for a few reasons um you know one because that's just the way i think the world in general should work i'm i i think we should be working on reducing concentrations of power and capital rather than increasing concentrations of power and capital i've also been stunned by the incompetence of many of the investment banks and the people that they've chosen to empower and it's just been remarkable to me to see people who essentially know nothing about cannabis do not consume cannabis themselves and have not really consulted with any subject matter experts getting funded with tens of millions of dollars and i haven't been surprised at all when we've seen a lot of them go belly up what encourages me is the thing that just happened in british columbia where a regulation has now been passed that will allow small craft farmers to take their product directly to retailers this is the system that we had in california before 2018 it worked very very well it produced great quality products at low prices they were affordable for consumers uh it was a great system and so i hope that we can see more decentralizing of the of the industry and and d concentrating rather than um these aggregations of of capital and power amend to that we need to let more people into the industry and we need to create a unified market enough of this like black market white market gray market one market where everybody should be able to participate and you know the thing that i don't like and that i don't think is serving the long-term interests of the people whose shoulders we stand upon is limited licensing i think it's a mistake we had it in canada i get a regulator is a little bit uncertain and they want to get their sea legs before they let too many licenses you know enter the program in canada we were very limited licensing for the first two or three years there was less than 20 licenses for the whole country of 35 million people for like almost three years now we have had a acceleration of our licensing i like the colorado model or the oregon model where it's not discretionary it's administrative if you qualify you get a license if you don't qualify you don't and that it doesn't have to be big and you don't need 10 million dollars to get your foot in the door and so i think that um my wish is that i do believe that we we should you know i do think having a regulated program is actually a good thing i think as a user myself as a consumer you know i i didn't like the uncertain outcomes when i would go to my you know basement dealer listen to his shitty guitar for half hour before i could get to the point of why i was there what i didn't like was it was literally buyer beware i had no idea never mind like is the stuff clean as it being like you know uh does it have like any microbial content that might give me an upset stomach or distress my lungs it was like what's gonna be the effect and we didn't have like indica or sativa or leafly or other strain reviews so it was just you know buyer beware so i think the idea of having more of a treating it like any other product that where that has some oversight is a good thing but we've created the conditions where without a lot of money you can't you can't get in the game and that means that that's becomes crony capitalism if you will uh and that's why just to your point steve you've seen uh companies that really ought not to have been given this um huge wallet to spend uh they were given it because the providers of that capital weren't really concerned about anything other than their quick return on their own capital and they had a plan you know by the time those companies went belly up i can assure you at least the bankers were in and out almost entirely so they had you know their compensation often coming in the form of stock they maybe didn't they maybe understood some of these operators are not best in class this is not the best and the brightest but this is what we got so we're going to bank it and then we're going to break out of it before it kind of goes to [ __ ] and i think that is something that the rest of the world can learn from but i have touch points in many of these countries and it you know it's very hard to um to break out of that that mentality and so i i'm concerned as i'm sure you are that you know the capital is not going to flow to necessarily the most uh qualified or entitled organizations i'm deeply concerned when i see what's happening with regulation in most places it's it's going towards this model of creating these very formidable barriers to entry that prevent most people from participating and basically sets up a situation again with this industry like with most industries where unless you're already a wealthy person you're not allowed in to play and that's just completely contrary to everything that this plant teaches us and it's completely contrary to the ethic of the cannabis community which is to spread opportunity uh widely to spread resources widely to build a sharing economy to make sure that there's enough food on the table for everybody instead of trying to grab the very last chrome for yourself and there's just been an awful lot of that and i think that you're right i think that the answer is administrative licensing uh if you meet certain basic and i mean really basic requirements you should be given a cannabis license let's look at it from a matter of social policy you know the cost for a cannabis license even in some place like oregon is magnitudes greater than the cost for a store that's selling tobacco or a steward that's selling alcohol or even a pharmacy that's selling opiates that people overdose and die on from a social policy point of view what we should be doing is making the taxes lower and the licensing less demanding for the substances which are safest for society which means man just about everybody should be allowed to pay to sell cannabis and it should be taxed if at all at a very minimal rate and then these other substances that really do kill people like alcohol and tobacco and opiates they are the ones that should be more appropriately strictly regulated i still don't believe in prohibition of of any kind but it's just completely contrary to any kind of sensible public policy and i think it's it's you know part of it is because there's a lot of interested people who are benefiting from that system and part of it is that that the stigma is just continues to be so deep i so agree with all of that here here to that and you know there's essentially been a corporate takeover of government as far as i could tell corporations run our countries now and their lobbying dollars to make sure that they get the outcome more or less that they want at a national or at a state or provincial level um and i don't think that we're going to be able to i think we have to figure out how to work around that uh you know absolutely full-blown revolution um it's it's gonna present challenging on the other hand you know i'm concerned but i'm also optimistic steve because um i feel that um the sort of overall zykus of the culture is beginning to re-examine our value set and and cannabis could be that sort of battering ram that helps reform opportunities and access to broader communities that don't have the same conventional access to cap but all that uh limited if you do well that's a great segue to a question that i wasn't sure i was going to answer ask you but i'm going to um and that's the one drive question you know on this show we have a concept that we talk about the one tribe concept it came out of my travels all around the world and meeting cannabis people from every walk of life that you could possibly imagine and and and the idea is that now there's hundreds of millions of us all around the world who have had the same experiences with cannabis and out of those experiences we've learned common lessons and out of those common lessons we've developed a shared value system and of course the basis for any tribe for any group of people that's really going to sustain itself as a group is having a shared value system now some people have pushed back on on that idea some people have really embraced it i like to think of it as as the way that we are going to deal with economic inequity of the way that we are dealing with political authoritarianism my belief is that if enough people around the world are exposed to cannabis experience cannabis and learn the same lessons that we've learned from it that will be a lot closer to a planet that is in balance and and is free and is healthy so but sometimes i think i'm maybe i'm just tripping right that that you know could it could this really be possible so i like to check in with some of my more sober-minded uh friends on this on this whole concept what do you think about it i mean i think it's the most like sort of visionary approach uh anyone has ever articulated about uh what we aspire uh for this plant to help the world and i think that is such a holy mission steve um so what are those you know let me ask you like i'll say that the value set that largely has informed cannabis legal cannabis legal medical or legal recreational cannabis has largely been um it's not being one only one simple thing but a lot of it has been around the money to be made and there's no doubt and i will fully cop to the fact that when i uh was a co-founder and president ceo of my first public cannabis company you know it would be disingenuous to say that money wasn't on my mind it it it was it was but as i got more into the industry i started to broaden my own goals as to what i want to see this industry achieve so there's so many things that we ought to be doing better in fact that we need to do better so many things um you know one of the things that i am concerned about is sort of the carbon footprint of our industry which is massive which is partly a regulator issue because you know if you don't allow outdoor growing as some countries don't allow um and then you create a packaging format where you got to like triple over package everything it's you know if you've seen those youtube videos about people trying to open their canvas package they're hilarious it's like they just give up so i feel that um where we need to do better is we need to be more environmentally sensitive as an industry and we certainly need to be and i'm not leading with that that's just one example riffing off what i'm saying we need to be way more inclusive as an industry and we need to get regulators across the globe into a more evolved set of thinking so when i've been fortunate to be able to actually offer advice to other sovereign nations about what should they do uh whether it was greece or jamaica or other countries i've had the benefit of doing some advisory on i tried to get them over their cautious paranoid approach that you know that you're dealing with some radioactive substance that you gotta handle with caution and assure them that they can just get over that that we can now prove empirically that all the doom and gloom scenarios about what's going to happen to civil society are just total [ __ ] we can look at mature jurisdictions like colorado and say so years later what is the impact on colorado uh you know have cats and dogs falling from the sky is is it a gateway drug to more serious drugs no has teenage use gone up no has alcohol use gone down yes has opiate use gone down yes are there good new paying jobs yes is there taxes yes so it's just like you can actually do this i've got all these articles because we were all around back then i think it was in denver in 2012 when this first happened and you can just go back and read all of the strong editorials saying you know we are at the end this is the end of our civil society and like you know get ready for everything that you believe to be blown to smithereens and we can see total propaganda [ __ ] so let's go back to what you just chimed on is that we need to turn licensing into an administrative not a discretionary regime we need to reduce the cost of entering the industry for everybody and we need to as those of us that have had some success we need to do what we can to lift up other we'll call them disadvantaged communities that haven't had access to the same success and there's so many ways we can do this there's so many ways we can do it the way i do it is i make myself available for free not that i'm worth much more than that but to the degree that i have value people sometimes will offer to pay me for advice consultation and i've made it you know one of my give backs to offer uh free pro bono mentoring to all sorts of companies i've been doing it for years i love it and i'm there to try to help i'm there to give but not to take something out so if we all just tried to bring more of a give less of a take mentality we could start to create the conditions for something that is closer than what we want i i wish i could be an idealist i feel that the world right now you know the disparity between rich and poor and the way that the rich disproportionately are able to influence policy does not give me a great hope that we're going to have reform at a government level so it has to happen at a grassroots level and it is happening it is happening i think it's just happening too slowly so you know what you do moves the needle and what i do maybe can also move the needle incrementally this is going to happen you know one brick at a time but we are all of us i think that are like-minded that have that one tribe approach need to really not just talk about it we need to put our talk into action and even if that action is as incremental as just trying to help other disadvantaged people that want in or that are in but are having challenges help them with their challenges by offering your time and taking nothing back that helps that really really helps someone wrote me yesterday a year ago i gave this some advice i didn't hear back from they wrote me yesterday to say your advice has set me on the most amazing path and i just want to tell you thank you i was like that's incredible what are you talking about like a two-hour phone conversation but they believe they say that that was a fundamental moment for them and that only really good things have happened because of their own hard work so we've got to all find where is our most valued use to give back and then we've got to actually give back and how does it feel when you do those give backs for you it goes way better than anything you do in the private sector like straight up it just does you know um business it's like an operatic cycle it's up it's down it's stressful but when you just give and you you have you take your own outcome out of the equation and it's just pure give it's joyous in a way that you know even some of the companies i've started that i'm proud of that those may have been exciting but they weren't necessarily joyous and when they were joyous they were joyous because it was you know it wasn't always for the most pure reasons there was you know it's hard not to get a little bit drunk on your own mythology there for a while like oh look how [ __ ] great i am you're not that great none of us are that great uh but when you give something to somebody and you don't it's not about what did i get out of it it's just i'm just doing it for a pure reason there's a level of joy that is so qualitatively superior to when you're when you're just making money that you know you want to you want to do it again and again on the other hand i develop those skills by being you know an entrepreneur and by doing some of the you know taking companies public uh and and sometimes not being thrilled with the outcome going public not quite what i had imagined when i started the company and that that informs my ability to actually help at an actual level so i'm not by any means the smartest person i have i think a lot of integrity i go into these with only pure beliefs but what i do have is an insane amount of experience running now i think 13 companies in multiple industries um some of which three of which have gone public and just that collective experience makes me valuable to smarter but less experienced people or organizations so uh that reads like an invitation to our audience so don't be surprised if you if you if you hear from a few of them seriously i've i'm the guy that has given out my cell phone on stages and given on my email address paul rosen44 gmail.com you know you right i will respond i can't be you know i have a multiple full foolish time jobs in cannabis so you know one of the great things about doing it for free is i can say i can't help you today i'm really busy gotta look after my own farming cow today but you know i'm there for you just give me a couple of days i need to get i need to get there but it's been um like i said joyous and i'm happy to continue to do that and let me be clear steve that you always get something anyways it's like you just can like i when i get to work closely with i think brilliant energized you know people younger than myself they have a whole box of tricks that i don't have in my mid 50s and while i may not take anything specific like cash or stock what i take back is an exchange of ideas and it i always go back to my own companies just a little bit better because what i've learned from these companies so it's a very reciprocal thing i don't sit there and like lecture and drone on and on and on but i'm able to like i joined that rkv mentoring program and that's an another great outcome and i've been fortunate to work with a couple of great young entrepreneurs um both from communities that haven't typically had mentorship and uh they're so wonderful and it's so wonderful for me to be able to add value because i'm not doing much other than just giving my point of view which but for them it's useful and i got to tell you so many times in my career i was pre-cannabis i was in really tough situations like really objectively tough situations and i bemoaned at that time you know when i was up late and i couldn't sleep and i was scared shitless as i often was there was no one there to tell me to help me with my decision making my critical decision i had no mentorship none and um you know i lived to tell but it would have been so great just to have someone with more experience than me to say you don't want to do this you probably you probably want to do that or what you're doing is exactly what you want to do yes it's painful but you're making the right decision so like i said we all have to find how we can give back most effectively and um that's for me being my most effective give back and i'm now doing it you know through globalgo globally i'm helping entrepreneurs in south africa i'm helping entrepreneurs in other in south america and it's just wonderful because they're so idealistic they're so motivated to do well for their communities that it really reignites my passion you know i kind of had gone through these cycles where i was like ah you know this industry's lost its soul the only thing left is money uh money's okay but you know when i engage what what reignites my almost inexhaustible enthusiasm for this industry is the ideals of the young the next generation coming up that want to do it the right way and that that really excites me and it keeps me sort of you know if you will forever young and forever enthusiastic this would be an inspirational spot to end the show on but there's one more question i really want to ask you which is what do you think about the pace of change globally what do you think that that our listeners and countries all around the world where prohibition is still very much in place can expect how long will they need to wait and what role tell us also a little bit more about globalgo what role you hope it plays in that process i'm actually really excited about the uh accelerated pace of um sensible cannabis reform across the world right now and you know just in the last couple of months we've seen you know countries that we wouldn't necessarily have thought were ready for this like pakistan would be a great example uh pakistan is now bringing in a medical cannabis program and a hemp program it's more than appropriate the kush region is where the original cannabis cultivars come from and there's a you know a cultural association with the plant in in those societies but it's encouraging to see more and more countries so i actually believe that within the next five years steve um five to seven years i'll say uh the only countries that won't at least have a medical cannabis program will be the most autocratic uh leap most poorly governed countries and there's only a handful and i'm gonna name them because i wouldn't be shocked if even those countries we'll call them like the north korea pariah states i wouldn't be shocked if even those companies countries saw that only good outcomes could come from bringing in at the very least a medical but ultimately they should bring a recreational cannabis program and they're going to lift up their communities let's stop prosecuting people for a victimless crime instead let's bring a transformative medicine to communities all around the world as well as an economic boom to those same economies that probably need a lift so kovid as terrible as it is is i think a bit of a force multiplier for the development of more and more new markets coming in so it it's moving very quickly uh more quickly than i might have even imagined a few years ago and i feel like this is now uh a tsunami and there's no way to put the you know the cat back in the bag and that each time another country turns over it just creates the conditions for the next one to show leadership so bravo lebanon bravo israel bravo pakistan you're going to create conditions where the other countries in your region are going to get more socialized and more comfortable with bringing in sensible cannabis reform as to global go a company that you're involved in and that i am the executive chairman in you know we're here to help migrate best practices and avoid worse practices that we've learned in the development of the north american industries to all of these nascent emerging jurisdictions and so i i'm there to really as the chairman of the company along with this amazing team with regional offices in south africa colombia mexico cyprus switzerland i probably left off a few so uh if i've left off any of my apologies but we're getting rolling up our sleeves and helping our those jurisdictions through our own advisory located in those countries follow a best practice and where permitted were lobbying local government to bring a big tent approach and to make sure that they don't just create another asset class for only the very wealthy and very uh high access organizations to participate in to let full communities a lot of these communities that have strong agricultural traditions like we'll use jamaica as an example you know the point is to make sure that all the ganges growers are able to participate in a regulated industry and have an equal opportunity to bring their products to market and not just let a handful of richer organizations dominate the local market so that is our mission at globalgo uh i'm confident that we're playing a role at the marginal level and i'm very excited about the global development not just of cannabis but about psychedelics as well another plant-based medicine that has great therapeutic benefits um and one that i've also benefited from over the course of my own development so you know steve we kind of stand on shoulders of people such as yourself um you're one of the if there's a mount rushmore of cannabis which there should be a mount rushmore of cannabis hemp creek you're going on you're going on yeah i have creed exactly you know your your visage is going to be on that i've said it before to you on stages and and i say it again now that we all owe you and people uh of like mind that we're doing this before it was vogue popular or profitable and doing it for passion and for ideology you know that we can't i can't even calculate the debt of gratitude we owe to people like yourself without people like you we would not be where we are right now as an industry so it's you know these revolutions start at a very low level and then eventually they sort of reach exponential breakout but you and people like yourself have played a foundational role well above what i've ever done to create the conditions where we could have this kind of dialogue today so you know on behalf of all of us stakeholders we need you to keep being your best self we need you to stay on message we need you to stay on your mission and we need you uh to help move the needle to make sure that we create that one tribe vision that is you know is so inspiring and will improve outcomes for more than just a handful of individuals yeah man right on um uh thank you for that kind appreciation paul i support it and you know look forward to um to building this new world that we're talking about with you thanks so much for being on the show today it's been my sincere pleasure thank you steve you know one of the reasons that i wanted paul to come on the show today is it comes out of how large our community is how vast we are how many different countries we are in how many different religions races economic levels educations religions anything that you can imagine we are so different and there are so many of us and we've been separated by laws and by fear and by stigma and so sometimes it becomes easy it becomes easy not to recognize each other it becomes easy to think about oh those big canadian companies or oh those people who are just trying to skirt on the margins or it's really important that we dialogue with each other and you know what comes through for me in this conversation with paul is the complexity of of who he is and the role that he's played um his ability to look into some of the things that he's been a part of with a critical eye and to think about what we can do moving into the future and you know one of the reasons that that i've been so passionate about creating a new cannabis industry a legal industry is the idea that we would create not just a new industry but a new kind of industry that would embody the lessons that cannabis teaches us about nature about being compassionate about sharing with each other about being gentle and sometimes that's happened i see some amazing companies doing some amazing work very frequently it hasn't happened and i think that even people who have been involved in this process of concentration of power and capital in the cannabis industry are coming to see that we will be healthier if we build the kind of system that paul and i have been discussing a system that's open to everybody a system that doesn't require millions and millions of dollars to get into a system that offers a possibility for people who love cannabis to spend their life working with it spend their life teaching other people about it and not having to live in fear anymore that's the goal that we're all moving towards and i know that some of you who are listening to this episode are in places where that goal seems very very far away well it seemed very very far away for me for most of my life too but things have changed they will continue to change i agree with paul this wave this spark that we started here in california and in canada is going to keep on going all around the world and we will not stop and we will not rest until everybody who needs this plant has safe affordable and legal access to it and our last prisoner comes home to their families and is given the resources they need to rebuild the lives that were stolen from them so wherever you are stay strong know that we are many and we are coming [Music] you