Modern Wisdom - #333 - Chris Walsh - How Does The Cannabis Industry Work?

Episode Date: June 12, 2021

Chris Walsh is the CEO and President of Marijuana Business Daily and an industry trend analyst. People are claiming that cannabis will be the next gold rush industry. After it grew by nearly 50% in 2020, that seems even more likely. Chris knows everything about the world of weed, so we get the inside scoop on this rapidly growing industry. Expect to learn how weed is somehow illegal federally but legal at the state level, why THC suppositories are a thing, whether there will be a psychedelics industry, what to expect from the next few years of legalisation and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & Free Shipping on awesome vegan meals at https://vibrantvegan.co.uk/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on all pillows at https://thehybridpillow.com (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Chris' Website - https://mjbizdaily.com/  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Chris Walsh, he's the CEO and president of Marijuana Business Daily and an industry trend analyst. We are talking about how the cannabis industry works. People are claiming that cannabis will be the next gold rush industry. After it grew by nearly 50% in 2020, that seems likely. Chris knows everything about the world of weed, so today we get the inside scoop on this rapidly growing industry. Expect to learn how weed is somehow illegal, federally, but legal at the state level. Why THC repositories are a thing?

Whether there will be a psychedelics industry, what to expect from the next few years of legalisation, and much more. I also tried to find out how it is that Dan Billzerian's company is like the only weed company in all of the world that went backwards in 2020, but Chris is diplomatic and a professional. So he remained impartial on that question, but it's still an interesting thing to consider. It takes a real talent to be able to go backward when an entire industry grows by 50% during the space of a year. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for the wise and wonderful Chris Walsh. What is someone with an MBA doing working in the cannabis industry?

Well, I was finishing it when I got involved back in 2011 and definitely got a lot of questions about what the hell I was doing. I was finishing my MBA and was at a background in journalism. So I was a business reporter and editor at newspapers in the US and in South Korea. background of journalism. So I was a business reporter and editor at newspapers in the US and in South Korea. So what is a person with an MBA doing? You're seeing more and more of people like me come in, but it's a massive business opportunity and it's in the US, it's in Canada, it's in Europe, it's in South America, it's all over the world now. So I made it because, first and foremost, it was a fascinating industry that I wanted to

be part of. I don't come from the Canvas culture, but from a business perspective, I thought there was a lot to like here into helping develop a new industry. And also, you know, Canvas helps people in a lot of ways. So it's not like we're making cups or whatever. You know, like we're doing something, we're making a product, we're helping an industry that relies on a product that's actually helping people,

and that's important to me personally too. So a lot of unique aspects about cannabis that lured me into it. What makes the cannabis industry so interesting? Well, I would say that the rapid speed at which cannabis has gained support all over the place. This was something, even when we started, that was really taboo still. And so, again, we started 2011. And even then, it was like, what is my aunt who's a nun on the East Coast going to say?

And what is my dad, serious political journal is going to say And so you know what we've seen is that the rapid acceptance of this industry has has has been phenomenal Way faster than I thought so there's just excitement around it people are embracing it. They're accepting it It's an industry that has come out of the darkness very quickly. It's existed for a long time, right, but not in a legal fashion. And people are interested in it. It's fun. It's cool. And, you know, there's not a lot of industries that offer this level of excitement and opportunity. The people in it are different. There's great people. There's not, there's, in some cases, there's not a lot of business sophistication, which is changing. But what you have this industry crop up, especially here in the US, where the average everyday

person could get involved. And that is changing. Initially, the regulations were really low. The cost to enter was low. And so you had this American dream type industry where you didn't have to, you know, have 15 years of experience or have started three other companies or have a million dollars in funding to get involved. So these are some of the aspects about it. And just the massive, you know, when you bring this up at a party that you're into it,

that you're at, no one, even over the 10 years I've been in it, most people are not like, oh, I can't believe you're doing that or they don't like kind of turn up their nose and walk away. If anything, they're interested, even if they don't support it, they're just interested. So for all these reasons, I think it's a really fun, exciting industry. It's challenging though. It's really hard. It's harder than anything I've ever done. But it's, it changes so quickly, right? And at first of all, to start with this, it's really difficult to learn the industry because in the US,

and this is a microcosm of what we see internationally, including in Europe, every state is handling this differently, and every city is handling it differently. They use different terms and jargon, and they view it differently, and there's different regulatory structures. There's no commonalities.

So you just to learn about what the heck is going on, and so you feel like you can hold your own in a conversation even at a base level, takes a long time. Because just when you think you got to figure it out, there's some whole other area of the industry, you're like, oh, I didn't even know about this, or it worked that way. And so the international industry is that way too,

the global industry, the UK is handling it different from Greece and they're handling it from Denmark and all of them are handling it different from Colombia and South America. So you have to really, it's constantly evolving. It takes a long time to get a handle on it. And then it changes, and you don't know how it's going to change. You have no idea how it's going to change, both in positive and

mentally positive ways and also in negative ways that can hurt your business because you don't know what to expect. So these are the reasons it's challenging and I'll go back to what I said a minute ago. The people in the industry now are different. And that's often a very good thing. But if you're used to regular business norms and ways of conducting business, it's different here. So that takes a while to learn. There's a lot of people who won't do business unless they know you.

It's not like you can come in using all this MBA jargon right and sell them on something. They're going to smack you and tell you to go away. So there's just a lot of unique aspects of it. You once get accused of being an FBI agent at an expo at some point because you were the only guy there in a suit and tie. Yes, very close. When we first started in 2011, I was doing research trying to understand the industry myself, which is much different than it is now, but at the time it was only legal for medical purposes in Colorado where we were based and some other states still illegal, you know, federally then and now. So there was a lot of the people who were forming businesses

then came from the cannabis culture. They were maybe growing in their basement or buying and selling on the illicit market. And so they didn't know if someone was going to come in. We didn't know what the federal government was going to do, even though it was legal in the States, it was not from the federal government. And they were operating businesses that you could find on C on the streets. They weren't underground. Hidden. And so I went to an industry trade group, and yes, I actually went to the bathroom, and there was a guy in there, and kind of awkward, and two dudes are kind of there going to the bathroom,

and he's like, you know what, you seem pretty cool, but you're not at FBI agent, are you? And he really felt that. I wasn't just in jest, because they didn't know this meeting of professionals in the industry was gonna get broken broken up and they be hauled off to jail. That's the situation these people started it. Can you explain what on earth is going on when you have something that's legal at the state level, but illegal at the federal level? How does that even work? Hey, if anyone can answer that for me, please do because I've been racking my brain to figure

it out over all these years. Basically, the government just turns its head away and says, this is a low enforcement priority. And that's what really changed the industry is, you know, in 2011, 2012, there have been crackdowns because the government was going in and raiding dispensaries. What, when you say the government, is they deploying, is that the FBI? Federal agents. Right. Different agencies.

And they were going in and there weren't regulations really around the industry. Then the states were regulating it. There were just people saying, hey, it's legal in my state. So I'm going to open up into spenceery or cultivation operation. And I'm just going to do this until someone says, so that it just built from that and expanded and then there was crackdowns by federal government agents and and there was a point where after we started where we almost got out of the industry because we're like I don't know if it's going to make it as a real business.

But then the federal government basically under Obama said, okay, we're going to look the other way. This is going to be a lower enforcement priority. They didn't say we're going to look the other way, but they said, look, we got a lot to deal with. So, you know, don't worry about this, especially if there's regulations behind it. That was the key. So all these states started regulating the industry and establishing, you know, this is what you got to do. You got to get a license. You got to operate under these rules and regulations. You got to be a legit business. When we started, there were people on the corners, you know, for their dispensary and they'd

have a big sign with a joint on it. They'd be spinning and around and, you know, pointing this way. And, you know, you're on major thoroughfares and there's kids and there were billboards. And that, people didn't like that, like the community didn't like that, lawmakers didn't like that. So you have this move to start regulating the industry. And that really started making it more acceptable. And so to get back to your point, the federal situation, it just developed on its own in all these states.

And it eventually reached a critical mass, and there were enough people that supported it, enough people involved, enough money coming in in taxes, enough startup activity, and job growth that it just dominoed and snowballed. Then you had more states legalizing and starting industries and more. The federal government really got to the point where they couldn't really do anything about it.

So they didn't really do anything about it. And so they didn't consider a priority. And with that basically pathway forward by saying, hey, this isn't going to be a top priority for us. The industry just ballooned. And so it is this stupid situation where you've got 38, I think we just have 39 state legalizing medical. And then we have 17 with recreational plus our you know the capital of our nation was you can see has legalized both.

Any of all these businesses and billions of dollars being generated but it's really legal it's a it's a it's a. Dumbest situation i've ever seen that we can't do anything about i mean so it's so ridiculous when you step back and that that's where your question was. It's like, how does this even happen? Was that the final word from the government? Was the final word from the government? This isn't a top priority. And there's been no other updates since then, basically. Not really. There was a modification of the memo that basically paved the way for the

recreational industry that said, if it's regulated, if it's regulated, the adult use, recreational use it for anything you want, when that started cropping up, the government was like, okay, kind of same thing. We're not going to, as long as the states are overseeing this, and there were some key guidelines in there. And there's been comments on it along the way under the Trump administration, we weren't sure if there was going to be a crackdown, a traditional long-time conservatives,

older generation is usually against this historically, and has come around, but still, especially in Washington, DC, has still a lot of resistance from that group. And so we didn't know what Trump was going to do, his Jeff Sessions, our top law enforcement official. It looked like he might crack down, but it never occurred. So it's just this gray area, but what you're seeing is that it's so big, it's so accepted

now, over 90% support for medical marijuana legalization across the country, whether you're in the really conservative anti-marijuana states or in the more friendly ones, and recreational marijuana is above 60%. I mean, this is a losing issue in general. So, yeah, I mean, there hasn't really been. We're just kind of, people are just moving forward. And now there's been a lot of moves federally to change the laws, but they kind of, they're working their way through our government process and the resistance has kind of blocked them. And so we don't

know what's going to happen. We're in a good position now where there could be federal change because the, you know, the centers of power in our government are all controlled right now through next year by the Democrats and they have been pushing marijuana. So it's become a big topic. They're trying to get bills through. They're still resistance. It's only a matter of time. It's like is it a year or four years?

I don't know. But here's John Swann to point out that it's interesting because people look to the US and say, oh, this marijuana industry and they're the leaders. And in a lot of cases, the US is their biggest, right? And there's a lot of innovation going on here. If you ever visit a store, there's all these array of products and it's really cool to see. But there's over two dozen other countries that have legalized medical cannabis federally and some of them have legalized recreational. So the US is actually way behind from that policy standpoint. And so it's just a weird dynamical around.

What are your reckons going to happen with the UK? Can you imagine the uptight spritz over here, gloomy skies, cup of tea, and a spliff on a morning? I can, I'm sure that's already going on in many cases, as it is in every country around the world. In terms of the broader legalization, I mean, I have been surprised many times, as I mentioned before, you never know what's going to happen,

some of the developments have been negative, but a lot of them are positive where we've never thought something momentous would occur or to this level. And I do think, and by that, I mean, you've seen countries, you've seen states in the US legalize, when they weren't even on the radar a year before, or there seemed to be like no way. And I remember a couple years ago, I was doing a lot of our global market research and traveling around to Europe and South America and other areas of the world. As we expanded globally, I was speaking and learning about these industries and where they were at with the cannabis

discussion. And everyone I talked to in Europe said, UK will be the last. They'll be the last. And they said, no, people from the UK, people from other countries in Europe said, UK will be the last. And, you know, what happened is there was the one case that got out there of a couple who had a daughter, and she needed she had seizures. And we've seen this play out in other areas, including in the US. And this whole debate, all of a sudden out of nowhere arose around, you know, CBD and people started changing their minds. And then there were some, there were some moves there to loosen laws around that. So I do think this, I would not put it out of the question that it's five, 10 years off or will never happen. It can absolutely happen and attitudes

all over the place are changing really quickly. My impression whenever I go to America is it's bonkers how widespread the acceptance of it is now. It's seen the same way as having a beer would be, you know, there's no friction at all as far as I can see. People do it on an afternoon because it's a Saturday and we're watching football or we're going out of some food or whatever it might be. And yeah, it's crazy. I wonder how much romance is still attributed to it being a drug as opposed to a drink or something that's obviously legalized because you still have that layer of federal

scrupulousness, right? They're looking at what's going on, and you know that there's still a tiny little one percent amount, even if you're in the most liberal state in all of America, it's still kind of a bit illegal. If the wrong person at the wrong time saw it, there's still a law somewhere that says, no, I wonder how much that contributes to kind of the romance still of it being a bit of a counterculture of it being something that's up and coming. That's a great observation or question. I remember a couple of years ago, I didn't know someone who lives in the south, the southern

part of the US, a very close person to me. And he said, he came to Colorado, tried out all the marijuana stores and went to, I got him a tour of a groan. He's like, this is fantastic. And he had used a long time's life. Again, I don't come from that background of using heavily, but he did and it was like a candy store when he came here. And by the time he left, he said, you know, I don't know if I want this to come to my state.

And I said, why? This should be what you're rooting for. This is your heaven. And he said, it just feels like it's going to be like everything else. And so to your point, there's absolutely, there's resistance in numerous ways. So I want to make sure we're clear that there's people who are against it morally, there's people who think that are unsure, there's others who think it's going to ruin communities, but there's also this contingent that enjoyed and part of the fun of using cannabis

was the counter-culture aspect and how you got it and the people you talk to and smoked with and the type of marijuana you were getting, right? Even though this is much higher quality and better and it's packaged nicely and there's all these products, some people say I just want that really good bud that I got, and I'd roll into a joint from the guy I know. Yeah, if you know it.

Johnny Fat bags on the colon rule, whatever it is. Yeah, Johnny Fat bags. Yeah. I don't like that name. Yeah, so you hit the nail in the head there. There are people like that. And there are others who do not like how it's progressed into more of a corporate mentality.

And that has been needed to push legalization because the general public doesn't want to see the counter-culture aspects of people. Hong Kongers stood up in front of Congress saying that we need more dispensaries in our state. Yeah, or running stores without regulations, right? People are afraid to go in or they're, you know, whatever. And so there's definitely people who are saying it's gone way too far in the business corporate

direction. And we're losing that counterculture element. And they are right. They are absolutely right. Now, you can argue whether that's a good thing or not, but the fact of the matter remains is it's happening. And the counter culture is actually becoming smaller and smaller piece as the suits, as the business people come in, and start running this like every other industry. So I'm concerned about that too because it needed to move along the spectrum, didn't need to move all the way this way, shouldn't be all the way over here.

It should be in the middle, and that's what I like about the industry is it's different. And if it does become like anything else, it's going to lose its alert. And unfortunately, it's going to block out a lot of people for business opportunities, for careers that might have had an opportunity in the past, because then you need a different skill set, and they're gonna be looking for people from the mainstream corporate world. So, a lot going on in this industry,

a lot of changes, and they're happening quickly. It really seems like that, man. It doesn't surprise me either that it's difficult to keep on top of. All of these different moving parts and elements, it was an industry before, it was a monetizable industry, or at least on scale. Here's one of the things that I found that was really fascinating. I spent a fair bit of time in LA over the last

five years or so and going down Hollywood Boulevard you would see a 150 foot high ignite poster or some of the big marijuana brand poster. And what I realized or what I thought, what I figured at the time, was that when marijuana became legalized recreationally and you could advertise it as a recreational product, what was essentially happening was that the government or the state was firing the start-up pistol for everybody to just decide to press go, right? You had similar amounts of technology that people understood the industry, abilities to grow, access to growers, so on and so forth. So what people needed to do was compete based on marketing because the products at the end of the day were all going to be relatively similar. But you had an industry that was

ready to go spinning its wheels as fast as it could launch control the button gets hit and everybody goes. So what I noticed was you had Mike Tyson, you had Dan Bilzerian, you had other celebrities and well-known influences that were getting involved very sort of at the figureheads of companies, right? I wondered how much of that was companies just thinking, right, what is the fastest way that we can become the ubiquitous name, that when you say weed,

you say this ignite or Mike Tyson's ranch or whatever it might be, Tyson Ranch. Is that, was that right? Is that what kind of happened? Was it companies just thinking, right? We need to capture as much of the culture as possible, therefore who's the biggest, loudest name that we can get? Strap them to the front of this rocket ship.

And then when the government says go, or when state says go, we have more cloud and we have more eyes on us. Yeah, and I would compare it to traditional business in general, the use of celebrities that resonate with your target customer is widespread, at least in the US, in many, many ways. It's a tried and true method that companies use to build a brand and to get traction. As more famous people or semi-famous, some of these people were famous like 30 years

ago. We're tied to the cannabis culture like Cheech and Chong, you know, also and they're back at it. But they felt comfortable attaching their names to this and then it started to expand and the companies, yes, to your point, are saying, how do I, how do I build a brand that's different? What's familiar to my target customer base, right? And a lot of cases, a lot of cases it's people who had initially the first couple waves of this were

more well-known people who have this cannabis type whether there are movies whether they smoke personally and then were open about it whatever it was and is what you've seen more recently is in uh... an iteration of this and so now companies are getting former federal regulators former politicians on the way yeah the former speaker of the house the u.s. house is all is on the board of a cannabis company

uh... you also had celebrities that uh... that one had nothing to do with cannabis so money talks right money money money talks in this country and so that has helped bring more people into the fold as it's becoming more normalized. But, you know, we had an event, I think I believe it was two years ago, one of our business trade shows, and we had Gene Simmons, the, you know, lead singer of KISS. And, and he, because he was, he was actually

signed up as the spokesman, kind of a brand ambassador for a cannabis company. He never used drugs in his life. Ever. He never even tried cannabis. But again, money talks. So you've seen another iteration, former politicians high up in Washington DC, former state politicians, and other people with brands and with names that aren't associated with cannabis traditionally that have jumped

in. And the companies are, you're absolutely right, they're like, how can I stand out as I see this progressing down the road and it becomes more of a bigger national industry, how am I going to build my brand and that's one way they're doing it. It's fascinating to look at as an industry because the barriers to entry are relatively low, as you've said. Even if you want to become fairly sophisticated, it's not going to be as hard to make a range of edibles and vape pens and pre-rolled joints as it is to create an iPhone or a competitor to the iPhone.

Also because this industry is just starting now, there aren't these established players. How many iterations to Apple and Samsung and Huawei have on creating electronics, and you now need to reverse engineer all the shit that they've done for the last. God knows how many years. Whereas with this, it really just feels like everyone's kind of going at the same rate. Just how big is the industry? Well, I just addressed your first point. The US is just like Europe, it's a tapestry of different communities and viewpoints. And so when you apply that to the marijuana industry, California's industry is way different

than Florida's, and that's way different than Colorado's, and that's way different than New York's emerging industry. And so in some cases, the reason I bring that up is, in some cases, states have tried to keep the barriers low. And they've tried to say, okay, there's going to be low application fees. We're going to have social equity components that help people that might not have the money that have been traditionally marginalized. There's a lot of different ways they're looking into these things.

But the trend has been that it's getting harder and harder. So those barriers are, yes, not to the level of creating an iPhone, but it's also to the point where you usually, in a lot of states now have to have a million or two lined up to be able to. To be able to. Just to get started. Just to like get a license, prove that you have the money to operate an effective business and then start your operation. So that's a barrier to entry, right? That's a big one. And that's where it's changing. But again, other states it's a lot lower.

It just depends on where you're looking. So it's all over the board. Did you watch Merda Mountain? I haven't. Oh man, you need to, this is your jam. This is completely about your jam. It's on Netflix. It's a fly on the wall documentary about a

bunch of different You need to watch it anyway, and there's I've heard about I've just I've been so busy keeping up with the changes the canvass industry I mean what time to watch? They're precisely I understand but you see you see the The likelihood in in situations like that of what's going on Just how these people these sort of small time growers that used to be there are no longer able to make it work because they are being pushed out, they're having margins squeezed, they're having particular stipulations put

on with regards to the type of yield, the size, the quality that's expected, certain standards that they maybe didn't used to have to meet or would different as far as they wanted to. And yeah, I wonder whether it'll loop back around and you'll end up with artisan blends, you know, kind of single harvest grows from very particular, not people that are coffee-efficient ados, are prepared to pay for a very unique blend that's a little bit more specific. And then you'd have the kind of Nespresso instant coffee pod for the normal day-to-day

user. Yeah, you're absolutely seeing the industry change in the sense that there's a feeling that you've got to go bigger, go home, and you've got a scale to compete going forward. So you've got to be in multiple states, and you've got to have chain stores, and you've got a scale to compete going forward. So you've got to be in multiple states and you've got to have chain stores and you've got to have massive grows and you got to be able to recognize and get you know efficiencies to mass produce. But and I think that is true in a lot of cases like eventually this industry will be like any other one where there will be the massive producers whether it's like the beer industry there's those couple big names and now you have the smaller ones as well that have a foothold. But I do think you have some businesses and it's all about finding

your place in the industry, like in any industry. And so some are absolutely finding a market for that, what we call it kind of craft cannabis, you know, a hand trimmed and really specialized and for the connoisseur and it's not mass produced. Yeah. And just saying that can bring a lot of people into the fold, even if the marijuana isn't as good. So yeah, there's opportunities all over, but everyone's trying to find their place right now. And in some as we go forward, that is going to be the key to their success. Who do you think's got it most right in terms of dispensaries? Because I've been to a medmen and man, that was like walking into an Apple store. That was insane.

Yeah, I mean, the thing is there's no one right model because of the consumer base is so broad. I mean, you have, you have the traditional kind of hippies, donor crowd, right? And they want a certain look and feel and they don't want it to feel like an Apple store at all. That's it. They went that's in tithesis of what they want. And then you have, you know, you have soccer moms and or football moms. And you have, you know, the people professionals that are coming home from work on a Friday night and they're grabbing an edible or they're grabbing a free roll joints. And instead of the wine or the beer, or maybe both, and so they want maybe that Apple store feel. And then you have just the people who are trying it

for the first time, and they need an environment where the store is really outgoing and friendly, and so they just wanna feel welcome, and they wanna feel comfortable, and maybe an iPhone type store doesn't feel that way for them. So it just depends on what your niche is and who you're going for and what area of the country you're in. It really does, it breaks down sometimes geographically

and this type of store is going to work over here. If you're in Manhattan, that Medman iPhone thing is cool and a tip and that's what you want. If you're in Northern California, you want something that feels more earthy or... I went to... I went to this one, Captain Jacks, or something. It was all kind of exposed wood on the walls. This was very...

It was an independent dispensary in San Bernardino Valley. It was the weekend of a big festival, a music festival, and I think Deadmouse was playing. So there's like a fairly big queue outside, and I just decided to have a little walk. I had some work on the next day, and I need to go see this, because I'd been to the Medmen, but I wanted to have a, I wanted to check this out. And sure enough, the dormant at the front, because there's usually, or at least in this one, there was a waiting foyer. So you have these people sat down, how you registered with us, can you show us your ID, there's a lady at the end, and you've got this huge African bouncer at the front.

It was somewhere between a dormant and a hype man for a DJ, so he's asking everyone, yeah guys, you're going to party this weekend? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, what are you going to get? You can't even hop down. God, man, I couldn't believe it. I was like, this is, it was mind blowing, like it's just a crazy experience to go into a place and that was the waiting room. And then you go into the actual thing and there's a bar set up with, I don't know what you call it, where you put a resin or concentrate into those special type of bonds. So, and there was a guy doing special blends,

like a bartender, essentially behind this bar, and there's people sat down on these stores, he's like, we recently have this in, we have the Estetiva blend, and we've got this thing. And it's mad, it's so funny. Well, and then you go to Vegas, right? Last Vegas, and you want a completely different experience, and you go to one there near the strip.

It's called Planet 13. And that's like a Vegas dispenser you walk in. And they've got like this LED floor. It's like you're walking on water. And then you get in and there's these circular drones every hour that come out of the ceiling. And they do this like performance. And they just all synchronize.

They got lights. And that's awesome too. And that's what people want when they're in Vegas. That may or may not work in Alabama. Shit, did you see, I'm pretty certain it was in Vegas. I got, because I'm on Medmen's mailing list. And they send out an email towards the start of last year before COVID hit saying,

if you land at, is it Macaron? Yeah, Macaron Airport, we will pay your Uber or we will get a taxi to collect you from the airport to come to Medmen straight away. Absolutely. The innovation in Vegas on this front is huge. So yes, we have our MJ BizCon, our big event, their industry trade show, Global. And when we went one year, yeah, MedMed had plastered a lot of the taxis with ads. So the taxis, the cabs were red, and they had MedMed. No way.

That's where it is. So people coming in the airport, you're seeing it all over town. So you're getting the best and perhaps worst of American branding expertise in a city like Vegas, right? It's just in your face, it's there, it's flashy, people love it, but it works. What about scaling out now then? How much is the cannabis industry worth sort of to America overall, and then have you got any idea globally? Yeah, I mean, in the US,

we've seen tremendous, tremendous growth since 2011. As I mentioned earlier, 30, 39 states with medical, 18th recreational, and we have billions of dollars on tap with new markets that are launching, new states that have legalized recently. But in general,

we've done market research on this history for a decade and it's really hard to pin down numbers because the government doesn't track it. There's a lot of ways to look at it. But so we've honed our methodologies around the way, but by our best estimates, with a wide range saying this is a more conservative view, this is a more aggressive view, you know, is that sales were up to $20 billion, $20 billion, with a B in retail sales. So that's through dispensary,

through recreational marijuana stores last year. And we expect that to grow about 30% this year. And the growth was much bigger in the past percentage wise, but now our base is 20 billion, right? So it's hard to double that. So 30% growth is massive for any industry. And, you know, that's billions of extra dollars in sales. And we expect it to double by 2025, 2026, and it could even go higher. Again, we try and take a realistic conservative view. There's a

lot of people just throwing out numbers and they're like, look at this and they make it look all shiny. We try and be careful because we don't want to steer people in the wrong direction. But, you know, put that in perspective for your UK audience. I don't know how familiar with some of this they are, but we, the current size of the industry that we expect this year already is well above the National Football League, the NFL, which is massive here, right? That's where we're all based around the sport in the US. It's already well above that, and that's saying something. And it's actually catching up, and we expect next couple of years

we'll surpass craft beer. And that's another big industry that has really exploded. Craft beer is the beer situation in most of Europe, but it's a 10, 15 year thing here. Everyone needs to drink the cheap mass-produced beer. So that's a big thing. It's actually surpassing elements of the alcohol industry. It's going to surpass the global opioid market soon. So there's a lot of ways you can look at this, but regardless, it's becoming a big industry. The US, is it one of the top 10

now? But it's huge. What did COVID do for the cannabis industry? Because I imagine that a year ago, or maybe a year and a couple of months ago, everyone in the cannabis industry was squeaky bum time. As what we squeaky bum, I like that. I don't have to use that. We, you know, in Europe and a lot of other regions, there was kind of a slowdown, a lot of the legalization efforts there and industries on programs were kind of in the formation stage or the early stages. So that kind of went way to the back burner in a lot of other countries and everything was kind of more or less put on pause.

What we saw in the US though was this remarkable situation. It's just, it's remarkable to me. This is one of those changes I mentioned before that was immensely positive that I could never predicted five, six, seven years ago. And that we had this pandemic that shut down the entire world and almost our entire economy. And one of the few industries, few types of businesses allowed to stay open were medical marijuana dispensaries and in a lot of cases recreational marijuana shops. And not every state went this route, but the majority of states that have legalized deemed

these businesses essential during a pandemic. I mean, think about that. This was a drug I couldn't even talk about or was nervous to talk about publicly 10 years ago and let people know I was in this industry. And I was worried about like searching because we were doing a lot of research and I was like, I want someone to be tracking my internet and I'm, you know, Google and marijuana all the time. And 10 years later, it's deemed an essential business in a global pandemic that has shut down the entire economy. I mean, so as what happened to answer your question is that move allow the industry to thrive. They were allowed to stay open. They had to shut

down in those early days in March and April when everything was shut down, but they were able to resume sales. And is what you saw is not only do they survive, they thrived. And that's because you have people sitting at home and the US was giving a lot of money to people to not work without much to spend it on. Everywhere is closed except for a few businesses. Yeah, yeah, order from Amazon, order a bunch of stuff that drives your door and alcohol industry did really well too. And as what we saw was cannabis did really well. Not all of it right there were pockets and there were certain companies.

But in general, it's remarkable how well it did. And you know, people, it brought new people into the fold that maybe hadn't tried it. And we're like, well, I got nothing else to do. And it, you know, current users tried different products. And so, you saw sales growth, you saw record sales in every state. And in some cases, huge. And even in the mature states like Colorado,

and I just wanna make this point when we first legalized recreational marijuana here in Colorado, there was a feeling among some that once you legalize, there's a novelty, right? And everyone will start coming. And then it kind of wears off. And you'll plateau at some point a couple of years down the road, has other states start legalizing to, you know, they're not just going to come to Colorado to do it.

And Colorado hit record sales again last year. And you know, we're six, seven years into this. And more than a dozen other states have legalized and have industries up and running. So that didn't happen. So that really shows you the potential out there in general for places for anywhere in the UK and Europe and anywhere in the world. There's a massive market out there and it's on the medical side for sure, but it's also

on that recreational side. So the industry did fantastic through the pandemic all all all else being relative. How does the recreational and the medical income compare? So it was I believe 2017 when recreational sales surpassed medical for the first time in the US, according to our estimates. And that was just a couple years after Colorado and Washington state legalized. And so, as what you saw is medical was the dominant because there was no recreational and then it started slow.

And now it is, it's three, four times, maybe even more than that. I have to look at the numbers again, but it's massively bigger than the medical. The medical side is still growing. And if you were just to break out medical sales, you'd be like, hey, that's nice growth for an industry. This is great. When you compare it to recreational though, it's just a little part of the bar, right?

And so we're seeing, what we're seeing is when states that have had a medical industry up and running then legalized recreational within a couple of years, the patient number start dropping because it's just easier to go to the store, buy whatever you want, whenever you want. You might pay more, you often pay more in taxes. But the medical side starts to diminish. And even the people who were truly using it for medical, they don't want to have to go see a doctor every year, they don't want to have to get a card and carry it around with

them. And so we don't know the long-term future. And if these two are ultimately just going to merge into a cannabis industry, or if there will be a medical component that's separate and separately regulated and has different requirements, it won't be homogeneity across this country for many, many years. But eventually down the road, it might develop into one singular thing. Given the fact that the cannabis industry overalls us saw so much growth throughout 2020

how is it that I've seen an endless number of videos on YouTube about how Dan Bilzerian and Ignite completely fucked it with their accounts? Well, I don't like to comment on specific companies just because of what we do with our journalism arm and our events. There's a lot of things that aren't going well when you dive in and look under the covers. There are companies that are growing too fast. They're not doing the right things. They're making bad decisions. You can look to Canada for this.

Canada, the first G7 nation, to legalize recreational, launched its industry, and there is this massive rush into it. There's all this money, and it's like anything everyone's excited, and you lose your sense, right? Even veteran business people, you lose your sense. And so, over investment, bad business decisions, in some cases some sketchy business practices, and you get caught in that hype and we've seen it over and over in the US when different tech industry, whatever. And so that's what's happened, and that's happening now. There's some of the bigger companies in this industry in the US are poorly run.

You hear a lot of scuttle butt in the background that there's potentially some shady things going on and you know, not picking out particular companies to say that about, but just in general. And there are. There's bad decisions. And you look at the financial system, these companies are like, what are you doing? What are you doing? And they're getting a lot of money.

What would you do if you were to design a company, a cannabis company that was going to fail? What are some of the things that you would have it do? It was going to fail. Yeah. I would say you jump at every single opportunity you see, which is very common because there are a lot of opportunities out there and everywhere you look, you're like, oh, let's do that. So if I was going to fail, I'd say, hey, let's go tackle this, this, and this, and this without a strategic thread behind them or the resources or the know how to do it right. I would play in the gray areas of the law heavily and take

shortcuts and do things that you really know aren't appropriate or even allowed. I would be, I would also probably be an untrustworthy business person who renegs on deals or who tells you one thing or who makes an acquisition and promises all this stock and everything and then it just disappears for the owners. These are the types of things we see and doesn't always mean they're failing the companies, but these practices are out there. And really not understanding the market or I just come in with my experience in some other industry and be like, I know how to do this. I don't need to listen to these cannabis people. Like, I know how to do this. I've done it successfully in another industry. So I'm just going to do it this way. And they're all silly.

They don't know what they're talking about. It does feel like a quick raptor failure. It does feel like a different beast. Different. It's different. What have you looked much into the potential for a psychedelics industry? So yeah, I've been focusing on that more recently. So, yeah, I've been focusing on that more recently and it's a tough one because my opinion on this is I don't know the business potential yet. So if you're looking at it from a business side, I don't know what this is. Right now there's money being pumped into it. Sizeable money in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars into, in some cases, publicly traded companies in Canada or in the US that are doing research or they're,

you know, it's one of these where sometimes you don't even know what the company is doing. It's just a psychic in Alex and people are like, cool. So it's hard for me to understand the market at this point. I'm looking into it more and we are as a team but one of the things that strikes me is the cannabis industry is quickly latching onto this in and not just in the US and Canada in Europe all over you're starting to see cannabis companies talk about psychedelics and if I start at the base level I have to question I don't have an opinion on this yet but what is the crossover like should cannabis companies be leading this charge maybe because it comes comes from similar, it's a drug,

it's an illegal drug that's coming out of the darkness and there and it's a plant in many cases. It's based on your extracting things. So and there's medical parts to it. So I see the reasons why companies are doing this, but I don't know if it's the right thing. Like, is there enough crossover why companies are doing this, but I don't know if it's the right thing. Is there enough crossover that cannabis companies can enter this or do this effectively?

I don't know. I mean, should this be a healthcare thing? Should this, you know, is there something else? So part of me is a little puzzled, and I don't know if it's the right route for cannabis to be leading this charge, although I understand why. And so, again, identifying what the crossovers are. And so for us, when I talk about how do you fail, you go in a million different directions, right?

Ooh, psychedelics, now I'm going here. This is a perfect example. So we as a business and how I try and run MJBiz, we have to figure out, does this fit with what we're trying to do, or is this the shiny new object that we go chase? And for our business, are we going to have an event on it? Are we going to have a lot of coverage, or are we going to have a newsletter? Maybe, but this is an example of how you can go down another path that may or may not have to do with what you're doing now.

So I don't know where this is going. I think there's potential here. And look, when we started in 2011, as I said, people were like, what the hell are you doing with marijuana? Like, this is crazy, you know, where you closet pot head and you're starting this little magazine. And so I always catch myself and say,

you can't view things like that. Cause I could easily say that about Psychedelics now and say, really? Okay, mushrooms, come on. And we used to joke at empty of his day. We used to say, hey, one day, well, magic mushrooms daily. As a joke, like five years ago. So I don't know where we're going with that,

but there's a lot to unpack there. Have you registered the domains just in case? Get them registered, Chris, come on. Come on, you know how to head your bet. It's 1099 on go daddy or something. Get them registered, Chris, come on, come on. You know how to hedge your bet. It's 1099 on go daddy or something. Get them registered. Get them all finished up on here. I think the, the, the does seem to potentially be a,

a bit of a difference between the cannabis industry and the potential psychedelics industry, in that the potency of the drug and the potential effects are magnified fairly significantly. It's the difference between having half a split and having one to two grams of mushrooms is fairly profound and I don't think it's the sort of industry. If it gets to the stage where it's recreational use of magic mushrooms, I'll be very, very surprised. I think it would be therapeutic use with guidance,

because as anyone that's taken psychedelics knows, sat in setting a very important, and if you just let someone wander in and uninitiate, go into some stores somewhere, Medmen's psychedelics wing, you go into the genius bar at the back and they say, well, we can try this and you can try this and you can try this. The aftercare that you need with psychedelics is significantly greater than it is with weed. I don't know enough about weed to know how big of a different set and setting makes. I imagine it would make a bit of a one, but nowhere near as much. There's a power law, right? It's a real sort of magnifying effect when you do have psychedelics.

So I would be surprised if we see it end up being fully recreational, but the therapeutic effect seemed to be outstanding. So definitely. Well, especially if you can do what they do with cannabis now and you can extract the certain elements out of it and get to a point where you don't have the psychotropic effects that it's not affecting you that way, but there are health benefits. So there's a lot on the health side that's exciting to explore. I mean, I agree with you on the recreational side. I can't

see that developing like the marijuana industry did. But if you asked me 10 years ago, if adult US marijuana would be legal, and you could walk into a store and see gummies and chocolate bars and bath bombs and, you know, jars of weed that you could just go in and buy it and then put it on the seat of your car and drive home and not worry about getting arrested, I would have never thought that either. What are the craziest iterations or the funniest or most interesting iterations of delivery mechanisms for weed that you've seen? I mean know, there's depositories. Is that really?

Well, that's on the medical side and it has a medical purpose. Yeah. You know, I, I don't have any really, really good examples of myself. I've seen some topical ones, right? There's sort of subdermal things that you rub on your skin, but you're skin can absorb it and you can still get some psychotropic effect on that. Oh yeah, topicals are big that you put on your skin. They're not huge part of the market, but they're appealing to some people. So that's all out there. There's products out there

to enhance your sex life, gels and creams and other things that... I can't do much when I... Use your imagination. Hi, when I'm high, I can't do much. I don't want to use it as some sort of like pre pre pre bed warm up routine. So for some people it works apparently so there are products out there for that. Okay. Yeah. Product out there for you for that. So yeah, I mean, I think that's where the innovation is. People are just saying, these companies are saying, what can I use this in? Tell you what I was really impressed by while I was in Austin,

I had some one and two milligram THC mince. I thought that that was a really cool subtle way to integrate THC into a routine. Yeah, absolutely. And you go into these stores. And again, the product selection is vast. I mean, it's mince, it's lozengees, it's lollipops, you know, it's gummies, it's chocolate bars, it's cookies, it's all the baked goods.

Now they've got powders that are water soluble and you can put them into any drink and you can put, you could sprinkle it in your seltzer water or you can put it in your beer if you want. If you want to come, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I don't know if you'd be working out much. I'm just going to be sitting in the corner on your phone. But there's a lot of interesting things out there and beverages is another one that's

gaining some traction. It's not a big interesting things out there. And you know, beverages is another one that's gaining some traction. It's not a big part of the market, but you know, you can buy, you can buy infused fruit punch and sodas and and teas and, uh, you know, it goes on and on. I mean, basically anything out there is a, uh, a consumer product that can be ingested. I think people are experiencing or experimenting with. What's the future of the CBD industry? Because I've heard you on other shows talking about

there's not just CBD, there's CBN, CBM? Yeah, there's a lot of other components that have not really been explored yet. So CBD is the one that gets a lot of the headlines and is the big industry focus. And that was kind of, I think, because it was the easier one that people had identified in that, that we kind of started rallying around that as an industry. But CBD is an interesting one. A lot of the countries that have legalized medical cannabis outside the US and Canada, they're essentially CBD programs. Called medical cannabis, but there's not a lot of THC,

the stuff that gets you high in them. CBD is interesting because I don't know where it's gonna go. I think there's been a huge ground swell of interest from consumers, from companies all across the world. And I think there's a lot of people who feel it gives them benefits. There's not a lot of science on it, so it's hard to say, does this really help you or do you think it helps you? But I absolutely think it does help people for different things.

You know, whether it's sleeping or just relaxing, reducing anxiety, there's a lot of areas that need to be explored into how this interacts with our bodies. But a lot of people in the US, you walk into a convenience store, your neighborhood markets, and there's little CBD oils or these lotions. And then you can get CBD heavy marijuana strains. There's a million products out there now. I don't know if this massive demand will wane and when. Is this going to be like some other additive

or ingredient to things that we use every day? Maybe. Does it become, we've had these fads. I'm sure you've had them probably in different areas in the UK, but fish oil and everything got fish oil in it for a while or a conacea. The thing he gives is this going to be like that. I don't know. But I think there's a lot of benefits to it.

I'm bullish about its potential. I don't know where the ceiling is or how it'll all evolve. But I absolutely think I've known many, many people who have used it for pain relief, even rub it on, sore muscles, and stuff. So there are a lot of uses. Have you got any concerns about long-term use of CBD given that we don't have long-gevity,

real extrapolated out studies in terms of time spans? I mean, you know, I guess that's the case with a lot of things. We don't even really have that with marijuana in a lot of cases. I mean, we do have studies, of course, but it's not a lot of funding globally behind really researching that. So I'd be more worried about the THC side, and I'm not overly worried about that. Anything that you eat, you eat too many carrots, and your skin turns orange. You drink too much water, you could die, right? So, I think in moderation, they're fine.

I don't personally, and I'm not giving any health advice. I'm not personally worried about like overconsumption of CBD and my long-term effects of everything I know about it. So, you know, THC, I mean, developing brains, teenagers, probably not a terrible thing, right? And I don't know what it does to regular users over 40 years. You know, you might need to want to be a little bit more cautious with that, but same with alcohol, same with coffee, same with chocolate. It's interesting making the comparison, especially between weed and alcohol. I think the hypocrisy is so flagrant and obvious that it's almost kind of cliché to bring it up, right? It's so it's so tried to say that, well, look at the way that people go about

treating alcohol, a substance which causes so many more externalities that are super negative. And we have, there's this study from the Lancet, which you may have come across or not, that the single line summary was, there is no safe level of alcohol consumption, The couple of things that people used to say that you get, which was some resveratrol and a couple of other unique types of vitamins and minerals that could be derived from red wine, was offset by the increased chance of heart failure and of the negative externalities. So even the one

thing or a couple of the things that were touted as potential benefits are negated and then further offset into the negative by that. And yet you can see within the pushback from the more conservative side or from people, especially in the UK, that we don't have the same weed culture in the media at kind of the top down and then Emergingly from the community bottom up either, you know, we don't have a thingy and thingy go to white castle We don't have that kind of stoner world over here so much so when you're talking about the fact that it might take a little while for it to break The UK that doesn't surprise me Yeah, I mean it might, but you know, I, and I know UK is a lot different than Germany

and Germany, you know, you walk around, everyone was already smoking it everywhere. I don't think they have that cultural side either though. That's an interesting point. That's an interesting point. That's an interesting point. It's, it's, so yeah, I mean, it's, again, it's hard to predict how quickly things could change. And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised to see you guys go in this direction soon or rather later.

Some people in the UK need it, desperately. Yeah, where should people go? They wanna keep up to date with Marwan and Hughes? Yeah, go to mjbizdaily.com and that's our main website where we cover the industry internationally and with a focus on the US of Canada and then from there you can get to our information for our big conference mjbizcon coming up in October

getting a lot of international interest in that again I think everyone's hoping the barriers to travel will fall and that will all be in a much better place with COVID in the US things are looking really good right now. And then I also started a podcast seed to see where I talk about for new people coming in the industry here's here some. You know lessons learned from those who are in it here's the things you need to know about your success stories in case study so you get all that forjvisdaily.com. What's the podcast seed to CEO? Yep. I love that. That's cool. Nice. Chris Walsh, ladies and gentlemen. Chris, thank you for coming on, man. Thanks for having me on. That's fun.