Yoray Halevy
Upon receiving his MBA from Binghamton University, Yoray has spent his time working for PotBotics, a premier data aggregation and technology company in the cannabis industry. At PotBotics, Yoray thrived as the director of business development and operations, while playing a role across many different departments of the company ranging from marketing to finance. Yoray's unique strategic vision and experience helps companies that look to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
David Goldstein
Since founding PotBotics, identified as a top 10 technology company in the medical cannabis space by venture beat, Mr. Goldstein has ascended to the forefront of the industry and is now considered a pioneer and thought leader for cannabis. Mr. Goldstein, through his consulting firm Our Green Solutions, leads start-ups and scale-ups in navigating the cannabis space to grow brand equity, develop brand presence, and grow sales channels. David's accomplishments have been covered by media moguls such as Forbes, New York Times, & NBC.
https://www.ourgreensolutions.com/
david@ourgreensolutions.com
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Thinking Outside the Bud where we speak with entrepreneurs investors thought leaders researchers advocates and policymakers who are finding new and exciting ways for cannabis to positively impact business society and culture. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:30] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc. Award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For details on the program visit Eckfeldt.com/thrive. That's E C K F E L D T.com/thrive.
[00:01:06] Welcome everyone. This is Thinking Outside the Bud. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host. We have two guests today, David Goldstein and Yoray Halevy. And we're gonna talk a little bit about their business in cannabis and CBD and some of the work that they're doing. Some exciting stuff. I'm excited about this one. Experts in the medical side as well. So we're going to talk about the medical side of this industry with that. Welcome to the program. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having us. So, David, tell us a little bit about your background. I know you're both Potbotics originally and then working on now are green solutions. You've got some interesting CBD products coming up. Let's let's talk about just a little bit the background and then we can talk about some of the business things and some of these new ventures and these new products that you're bringing to market.
[00:01:47] Absolutely. So start Potbotics about six years ago co-founded a company focused on educating doctors and patients more about what the science side of cannabis is about. We launched an application called PotBot that broke cannabis down to different cannabinoids so that there is a more transparent conversation about the more than 10000 strains in the market. And at the same time, my background is in marketing and really working with startups and scale up. So it was exciting to found this business. They've moved on to creating a dose measuring vaporizer right around the time that I decide to depart as the company geared to go public. We want a more experienced public facing CEO. And to be honest with you, I think a lot of enjoyment in that startup scale up phase of the company. That's really where I work to my strengths. So it was a great transition as a company is in a good position to succeed moving forward. But right now, I'm working on some new exciting ventures that I'm excited to talk about today.
[00:02:42] Excellent. And you're right. Tell us about your background and and how you and David met and what your angle to the businesses.
[00:02:48] Sure. Absolutely. My background is a little bit different. I got my MBA from Binghamton University was always in the finance industry. And, you know, medical cannabis has always been such a interesting topic and a passion of mine. Ever since my aunt started using it, when she was going through some of her treatments and some of the challenges that she went through, it really hit home for me. And I thought, you know, this is super interesting. This is something I want to affect change. So I actually called David up, who we met in high school. We've been very good friends of. Wow. Yeah. And I asked him, you know, I know that politics, Potbotics is doing some things in the industry. I would love to learn more, more about it. And lo and behold, we hit it off again. And I came on to the business and helped out with business development. Even some investor relations and kind of tried to move the needle forward in getting our company sales and bringing our products to market.
[00:03:46] Great. And tell us a little bit more just kind of around us in terms of what pork products did and then how you kind of came up with or pivoted into our green solutions. You're primarily working on the medical side, if I remember rightly then. And tell us about the medical focus versus adult use and how that's kind of shape things for you.
[00:04:02] Absolutely. This is David speaking. What we did when we started Potbotics is that we looked at where the current space was from a data mining standpoint, how can we take these thousands of strains, start actually correlating them to patient results so that physicians can have meaningful conversations on a higher level? There is a really big difference between an adult use for recreational user versus a medical user on adult use. A recreational user they may use out of desire usually to get some type of high or whether that's something like CBD, which is relief from everyday stresses or something that's high and THC that's already, you know, a psychoactive effect. Now that might improve their inter-marriage relation or enjoy their concert medical users using out of necessity. Oftentimes these users do not like the feeling of being stoned. There's a big stigma around it. But not only that, you have to imagine someone that goes to work in the morning that's using cannabis to alleviate their back pain instead of opiates. Now, this is a mother trying to go about her day, but needs this for a plethora of different reasons. And what's exciting about cannabis is that it has so many different medical uses.
[00:05:12] One of the questions that I often get is how can this one plant help with so many different things from anxiety to fibromyalgia? The answer is, is that in the 1990s we identified something called the endocannabinoid system. It's one of the largest receptor networks in the body and it helps. homeostasis So that's why I is able to help with both mental and physical ailments. It's a really new field of study for physicians. So when we start Potbotics, the whole conversation was how can we improve data collection and really add an extra level of integrity and science backing to these conversations that physicians and patients want to have. So while Potbotics was very focused on the medical side of the industry and the company grew to launch an app in the Apple App Store, a dose measuring vaporizer, a physician dashboard to help educate physicians. As I was the co-founder and CEO of that company, my goal was really to remove the stigma, bring more people into this conversation and have a real conversation as a foundation based in science and something that you could continue growing as more data gets collected in the space. Since leaving the company. Sorry.
[00:06:18] Are you going to say something? Well, she's going to ask him. And I think the the challenge, or at least the perceived challenge that I've heard a lot of people talk about is just the lack of good data we have around cannabis historically, particularly from medical point of view. Is this is that the case, too? I mean, were you able to find and have you been able to find good medical data about, you know, related to to cannabis that you could use to help with the kind of treatment planning and things like that? I mean, we're. Tell me about the data side.
[00:06:43] Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot of factors that went into how we actually built the reason that pulled the data. When we look at it from the perspective of cannabinoids in Turkey, there's actually a lot of studies done on turbines. Unfortunately, a law that had to do with old factory censer and how that has to do with essential oils and diffusers of when it comes to cannabinoids.
[00:07:03] Now we have a lot of different levels of study. You've got studies that came out in the 1970s around the time that THC was first identified when that was found. You had studies on here are the effects of just THC then in the 80s, early 90s.
[00:07:19] We got studies on CBD. Now we've expanded to six cannabinoids that we can test for from actual testing. What the actual potency of those cannabinoids are, you've got results of potentially one hundred forty three different cannabinoids. It's not to get a little bit ahead of myself, but the answer is where the time and place of that study takes place is extremely important.
[00:07:40] And on the other side, there's absolutely ways to begin correlating things like CBN, CBG, CBD, THC, THC V what are those cannabinoids seeing markers for from a health improvement and then looking at strains as a whole and starting to say, well, OK, you go sour diesel in California, you grow sour diesel Colorado. Those cannabinoid levels might be different based on the strain name, but I could still have a meaningful conversation. OK, ok. I'm looking for a mid THC, something around 15 percent THC with THC that really makes the conversation something like here's where I'm getting my medical benefit from which are these molecular structures instead of just a conversation of a sour diesel. Here's White Widow, because oftentimes there's no regulatory body saying, hey, here, this strange. Is that strange? Yeah, exact right. But the fact that states and this is something that I highly encourage, the fact that states have begun mandating testing on these strains, not just for pesticides and mold, but for cannabinoid potency, guess gives an extra layer of transparency that simply wasn't there nine years ago.
[00:08:42] Yeah, interesting. So tell us about getting into our green solutions. What was the focus there? How did you make that transition? Tell us about that business.
[00:08:50] So Argan Solutions is a consulting and consulting firm focused on helping companies scale in the medical cannabis space. What we did is that we took our understanding of East Coast, which tends to lend itself more to the medical side of the industry. And what we really feel is currently an untapped market. When you look at New York, New Jersey, even Massachusetts now picking up momentum from both reck and medical. The future of East Coast cannabis is very bright. And I think that a lot of players that are coming in from the West Coast don't quite understand the cultural differences, the legal differences, the nuances that they need to expand here. And also brands that are starting on the East Coast that want to scale among the East Coast. I that's one of the in general, the issues in the industry is that scaling is a challenge. And I think that a lot of new entrepreneurs coming into this industry from other sectors. Let's say let's use technology as an example. Sure. When they start to scale, they think of, OK, it's going to be as easy as getting these API accesses. And then now we can scale to every single state now that we have this foundation of our software bill.
[00:09:51] But the reality is, is that every state has different regulatory meet, needs different labeling, needs different real marketplaces, that even when you're scaling something like technology, that I could make changes at my base in New York for, for example, laws enacted in North and South Carolina, I still need to be very aware that scaling into those states will require their own integration teams and really limit our ability to scale on a national level. Day one. So what are green solutions goal is to come in to help startups or scale ups understand what it takes to gain brand equity in the space. What does it take to be compliant in the states that they want to go after? Help execute on marketing and go to business strategies with a team of experienced players that when you combine the whole team's efforts we've had over 30 years in the industry, which we often joke a year in cannabis is like dog years because things change so quickly. So I'm happy to say that we have quite a veteran team helping make those decisions.
[00:10:46] So you're right. Tell us about some of the challenges or some of the obstacles that you just run into and how you've overcome them and what's what's been the nature of building the business. Minister, you could you're not touching plants, so you're not dealing with the least directly dealing with the regulatory and the legal aspect to it. But what also come up, I you as you've built this business around the cannabis space and helping companies navigate that process.
[00:11:10] Absolutely. So there's a few problems. I'm just like David mentioned, the difference in regulations and and laws on the federal level and also on the state level create a ton of obstacles for people that just enter the industry or are trying to scale in order to meet their goals, meet their demand and to reach that end user and buyer. So a lot of our experience like that mentioned that comes in technology. A lot of it comes in marketing. Understanding what that end user wants and how to develop a product that is missing in the industry and something that the end buyer will see perceived value.
[00:11:43] So one of them main issues that's been out there has been the inability of companies to understand what does the end user want? This industry is so new and there's so many different types of buyers in it. Like you have, for example, in the West Coast, you have the guy that just wants to get high and he wants the coolest way to get high. He's going to go up on the East Coast, somebody who wants the fastest way to get their medication to work for them. And beyond that, we're talking even further. How do you market to those people? How do you market to that medical consumer without saying, oh, this is the benefits that cannabis has marketing to the guy who just wants to get high by saying, you know, this is the highest THC when you can't say those words. So those are just two of the biggest problems. And finding solutions and identifying the best ways to market to those people and creating the best products to get into the users hands has been some of the biggest challenges for companies that are starting across the industry.
[00:12:40] So let's and let's dig into that for folks that I think go on to make sure people understand or at least get a little more insight into the marketing kind of informational challenges that you have, both for adult use and for medical. I mean, at this point, what can you say? What can you not say? Why can't who is regulating these things? What are the what are the kind of the rules and the boundaries to these rules that end up impacting your ability to effectively market and to make claims and to talk about benefits from these products?
[00:13:06] So we have a great case study example of this. Right now, we're working with a very exciting brand called Very Good CBD, which is a line of smokeable hemp products.
[00:13:16] And so this is the raw form of Henton. This is it looks like flower. It's a new boom. You see growers now growing, artisanal grows and specific for people to smoke. Which one? Originally hemp was legalized by the farm bill in twenty eighteen.
[00:13:30] That wasn't really the vision for the farm bill. Vision for the farm bill was OK, let's make hemp now a textile row and plastics, which has a very bright future. But when talking about CBD in specific or THC for that matter, you run into a lot of issues. For one, this is something that is in kind of an FDA gray zone. Why do I say the FDA said that they want to regulate it, that CBD should fall under them. But for what it's worth, when they're talking about CBD to talk about CBD as a deliverable, so that's a CBD tincture, a CBD edible CBD dog treat, for example, these would fall under the FDA domain.
[00:14:06] What's interesting is that the raw form of it is for lack of a better legal ese word for it. It's the most legal form of it's literally a form blackness.. This is raw. Hemp is now legal for interstate commerce is a federally. We have substance and you're seeing states create whole plans on how to grow hemp in their state and how to really encourage the side of the industry, because in our opinion, I think it's the industry with a very bright future because of all attempts, different uses. But the issue when it comes to marketing and you're talking about CBD is how can you talk about it?
[00:14:38] We saw recently Cura Leaf got a letter from the FDA, stop making medical claims, stop saying this is going to help with insomnia, relieving anxiety, any type of anti-inflammatory claims. Which really leads to a conversation of how can you market this? Not only that, you see that Google and Bing Instagram don't allow for paid advertisment the way that you would in another industry. So when coming across those challenges, you have to be unique. You have to be unique to the marketplace you're pushing. Is it something guerilla marketing related? Is it boots on the ground or no boots on the ground? Is it events? Is it another strategy for getting online engagement outside of paid advertising?
[00:15:17] And one of the reasons just to add to what David was saying, one of the reasons that the marketing difficulties continue is the differences in states. You know, going back to the medical versus recreational. For the medical user marketing in those states, you really want to go after the doctors, the physicians that really explain to the end-user why cannabis has been for them and what makes cannabis and specific strains that are high and different potencies of different cannabinoids. What makes those strains, you know, valuable to the users? If we're talking about states like California, where there's a high rate of recreational users, you're going to want to create a, you know, online marketing campaigns that that you could market directly to the end user and show them, you know, this is the cause and strain or this is what a lot of people are smoking and this is why they're smoking or why they're vaporizing, why they're eating it. So all these different markets create challenges for companies that are just starting now to understand how do I market here and what's what's the best return on investment for my company in these different marketing platforms?
[00:16:20] Now, it certainly seems a challenge. I mean, navigating the what do I want to say? What can I say?
[00:16:25] When can I say it? Where can I say? Where can I not say? That is is part of the kind of crazy situation we're in the cannabis industry, honest kind of state by state than the federal issues.
[00:16:33] But I'm curious on the medical side. You spoke briefly about marketing to doctors or to educate doctors. What's the state or what's your kind of perception of the number of doctors that are kind of pro cannabis or at least cannabis friendly? Where I guess where are we on the medical side in terms of the medical profession, medical professionals embracing cannabis as a form of treatment for some of these conditions?
[00:16:59] You know, unfortunately, we're far behind. And when I mean that, I mean some very clear terms.
[00:17:04] For one, they're not currently educating about the endocannabinoid system as part of your general medical education to become a physician. A lot of times the physician needs to initiate that themselves by taking a continued medical research class about endocannabinoid system, which happens to be one of the most popular classes that physicians are taking.
[00:17:24] But the issue there is that it's done the initiative of the physician themselves. And one of the marketplaces that's really interesting to look at is Canada, because what happened in Canada was that Canada went federally legal, but they didn't really make an effort to catch up their physicians. So suddenly you've got all these positions that whether they were on the fence or not on the fence about cannabis having to have cannabis conversations because they're their patients are in their rights to purchase this and they want to know how this could benefit them. So as America moves itself towards legalization, which is something that we do believe is going to happen. I don't think it's a matter of if, but a matter of when. And there's a lot of unpacking. They're done. Yeah, a lot of factors. But there should be a concern that we're going to potentially legalize faster than the physician community could catch up on. You know, I can't tell you how many physicians I've met at networking parties that say, hey, I'm all for it. But I can't even talk to my patients about my patients no more than I do a lot of times in there. And they want to know. But one of their risk factors is how much of a conversation can I have? Should I say that I'm pro cannabis once I say I'm pro cannabis, so I have to talk to them about dosing. Am I now on the liability of if the patient dose is too much? And how do I even have a conversation about dosing when my patient wants to smoke a joint or a day or a water? You know, these are real issues that if you look at how a physician goes about their life or they have a prescription pad and they want to say, I want you to take this pill in the morning five, these pill in the evening, 10 milligrams.
[00:18:50] You can't have that conversation with cannabis. Hopefully we're moving towards that more standardised dose conversation. The modality of that is a very interesting conversation. What is the future of actual cannabis deliverables? But to be honest with you, I think that a lot of physicians are more positive about this conversation. And one of the telltale signs that that is just last week, AARP launched a feature about cannabis and health for adult use. I mean, yeah, we're seeing a distinct monetization happen. But the real leaders of this, while I do think it will be the populace needs to be the physicians. And while I'm encouraged by a lot of them taking action on their own selves to go learn about the endocannabinoid system, which isn't some type of pseudoscience. This is very much a medical fact that this receptor network exists in our body. We produce endogenous cannabinoids. Cannabis happens to have these vital cannabinoids. One of the only plants outside of flaxseed that has vital cannabinoids plant based cannabinoid that binds at the center of contaminants. I'm encouraged that physicians are taking this class in almost all those classes that are being offered in states for continued medical education for CMU courses are really filled to the brim with physicians. But at the same time, I'd like to see more universities and more hopefully one day insurance companies encouraging this conversation amongst physicians. So it is part of their curriculum and not something that they need to go out of their way to learn about. Yeah.
[00:20:09] Then what would have you guess identified or notice in terms of a state by state difference?
[00:20:14] Is there anything I mean we've kind of mentoring at the top of the show up your East Coast focused or there's kind of the East Coast tends to be more medical focused. West Coast, you know, a little more adult use rec focus. Is there anything that you've noticed about either differences, subtle differences? States or how, you know, the states have kind of legalized and how that impacts the medical side. And any interesting patterns or things like that.
[00:20:34] Absolutely. There's a huge pattern. Let's take the state of Washington state, for example. Originally, what did they do? They had a recreational license that a medical license. And they encouraged physicians to talk to patients. On the medical side of that, in just one point, they decided and correct me if I'm wrong, I want to say it happened in twenty seventeen that they decided they were going to roll up medical and recreational into one store. So you no longer need a medical specific establishment recreational establishments to now serve the medical. What was the shift that happened? Less physicians became engaged in the conversation, more of the quote unquote bud tenders were required to have some type of health training. Usually one person on staff that could answer some medical facing questions. But what we've done is that we've changed the shift from a physician patient relationship to now a bud tender patient relationship, which isn't nearly as close to, for example, a caregiver patient relationship. This is, you know, a person there that, you know, they want to push what they have most in inventory, what they have highest margins on. And let's assume they're the most ethical player. They don't have a medical background, don't have a patient case on this consumer. So what you see is you start seeing a lack of interest from physicians in Washington because they're less engaged. And that was purely due how the industry decides to establish the laws in Washington state. You know, to juxtapose that.
[00:21:50] Take a look at a state like New Jersey or even New York. You need a physician to give you a medical cannabis recommendation. Oftentimes, that recommendation sometimes expires within one month. So what that means that you need Constance's you, your physician, on a monthly basis to renew your cannabis subscription. Now, do I think that's the best solution? No. But what it does is that encourages that physician patient relationship. So New York physicians are interested in having that conversation and really maintaining the relationship that you wouldn't get in a state that didn't structure itself back to what David was saying.
[00:22:21] You know, I think that especially in the medical states, given how every single state has different laws, it kind of creates both challenges and benefits. So, for example, David mentioned New York, New Jersey, which is a perfect example. New York, for example, doesn't allow the sale of flower, which has its own makeup, its own endocannabinoid characteristics. So you have these doctors that are president, each state that have to study specifically how to market and how to provide better product feedback only regarding those states regulations. But on the other hand, what I personally believe is that a lot of these medical states, because they have these strict regulations and even when it comes to growers, they end up creating products that are better for you, that aren't price driven and cost driven, such as the farms in California and Colorado that, you know, kind of get into this bottom feeder price war, that, you know, who could create the cheapest flower. That's the best. And on the East Coast, it's more like who would create the best flower for their users in order to get that market trend or to provide the most benefits those users will end up coming back to if their medical symptoms get old. You know, so you have, you know, both challenges and benefits for the doctors. It's a little more challenging only learning on their state by state basis and their rules on how to promote products, how to find which products work best for their patients. But on the patient side, it's actually better to be in a medical state because they have higher end products. They have products that aren't grown on farms that aren't audited specifically by that state on a regular basis. So, you know, there's both benefits and there's no benefits.
[00:23:56] Yeah. Just always struck me as just odd how this legalization is played out on these states where the you know, the doctors prescribe or basically qualify you as having a qualifying condition or so that your qualifying condition, then you've got to go to the dispensary to basically start the process over again, to say, OK, well, I'm I'm qualified to use cannabis, but now I have to figure out what to take. And I've got to I've got these bud tenders that are basic diagnosing my ailments and helping me figure out the prescription. For me, it harks back to, you know, early, late, 18, hundreds, early nineteen hundreds medicine where the pharmacist was basically selling anything. They think I think of that they can make money on, you know, and the whole prescribing process like it put in place to control it. I mean, we're back at this kind of wild west of, you know, being able to sell anything under these under these conditions.
[00:24:42] So, I mean, what do you think is the is the ultimate solution around this to really tighten up the connection between the prescribing doctor and the critical unquote pharmacy or the, you know, the dispensary where the pharmacies couldn't or the doctor can really say, okay, yeah, here's here's here's what I want you to do. I want you to take, you know, three of these in the morning, two of these in the afternoon, you know, six times a week. And then call me and we'll see how it goes.
[00:25:05] Is that is that where we go with those to make this a more effective industry?
[00:25:09] Bruce, I think you're hitting on one of the biggest issues in the industry. And I think there's it's a multi-faceted problem. Let's start from the High-Level perspective.
[00:25:16] I think that cannabis patients need to have the ability to integrate their cannabis based regimen into their consisting EMR electric medical regimen. If they. An easy way to access what your medical records says and what you can prescribe and what your current prescription is and what the potential use that you're using cannabis under.
[00:25:35] That will help streamline this experience because there currently is no real electric medical record for candidates. One of the funny things I noticed while I was traveling in Colorado was that everyone decided to take medical records on paper and pencil. And I said, well, why aren't you guys electrifying? Why are you moving into the digital age? And they said, well, you know, unfortunately, in the state of Colorado, if you have a cannabis recommendation, they take away your ability to purchase a firearm. And that's the reason that they still keep things, pen and papers, that people are afraid that their rights are going to be taken away, that their insurance company is going to drop them if they have a medical cannabis card, which is a real possibility. There are ramifications to publicly being a medical cannabis card holder.
[00:26:15] I think that helps encourage the black market. I think that does a disservice to physicians really trying to do their work. So let's start from the high level of let's get medical records, digital medical records that pharmacists and doctors can be on the same page with. What does a prescription look like? I think that we need to refine what this prescription mean in some states. You hit the nail on the head. Doctors just recommend cannabis might work for you. Now it's a bud tender conversation. There are few and far in between, but there are physicians that go over that and say, no, know, I want to know what my patients are taking. I want to make a regimen for them. I want to keep them having a screen journal so I can have a meaningful conversation with my patient group. And that also comes down to is the modality of dosing. What does it look like in the future? It's easy for us to say he'll take this in the morning, take that at night. But how many options are there?
[00:27:00] There are THC pills that are nasal delivery. There are teachers. But a lot of times even things like patches are slow acting. You're talking about 45 minute to two hour onset, especially for recommending something with just CBD might not be a quote unquote noticeable effect. That's why patients often gravitate towards smoking, because it's instantaneous relief. If you're a post-traumatic stress veteran and you're about to have an episode, you'd rather smoke just in all honesty. And that will noticeably help calm you down instead of taking a microdots of an edible and having to wait another hour till that potentially takes effect. So I think that there's really three main problems. That's the unifying and really making integrated medical records that could be accessed digitally from physicians into a conversation with understanding, hey, where's the line of my conversation? And then finally, actually talking about those, what does a cannabis prescription look like? It's still so early on in the industry, especially on the medical side of this, which helps really build the recreational side. I think it's important that states that do decide to go recreational don't just abandon their medical community. There's still people in Washington suffering from fibromyalgia now suffering from wasting syndrome that have real medical questions and want real medical context to their purchasing decisions that they're simply not getting because the industry has left them behind some more recreational conversation.
[00:28:24] So it's a multi-faceted issue. And the only way to get it together is to really work through the current health care system and medical establishment to push these issues through. Otherwise, we're gonna find ourselves in the same position of Canada where the populace has voted this to become legal. We're going to see that in upcoming elections as the hot button issues that it's bipartisan. And then it's going to be up to major lift from the health care industry to play catch up to what will potentially be a federally legal substance that as a lot of medical questions surrounding, you know.
[00:28:56] Well, you didn't. So you hit on my next question, which is, you know, how is the international market kind of playing into the international kind of industry around those? So we've got a couple of countries that have no legalized. Well, we've been in the U.S. We've got both Canada and Mexico, both the various levels of our at least on the way of legalized on various levels. How is that impacting the market or how is that impacting the industry? And where do you see that playing out over the next couple years?
[00:29:23] Well, I think that the international markets are actually providing a little bit of a use case for the United States. You know, if we're moving forward now, we are going to legalize this. You know, there's countries like Israel where it's not completely legalized, but it's a hotbed for research. They allow you to understand how the plant affects different types of symptoms. That affects different types of medical ailments in order to kind of provide a basis around the rules that will come once regularization happens. And then we have someone, you know, a country like Canada, which has its own issues, one of which was they gave a lot of power to these big conglomerates, cannot be tolerated, what have you. And from what I understand from a lot of the patients that I've personally spoken with in Canada, they don't like to buy from these big conglomerates because they don't understand what the patients need. They are there to provide as much flour as possible, as many, 10 times as many oils as possible to the greater masses. They don't tailor it around what the end medical user would like. So it creates, like David mentioned before, it kind of a purification of between the medical user and the. So I think that when it comes to regulating the entire country and trading legalization, we need to be very careful as to how we legalize it. If we're talking about federal legalization on the medical level, I think that would actually be better because it would help us understand the regulations, it would help us understand how this plant needs to be brought into the market in a controlled manner versus creating legalization on the federal level. That will be just direct to the end user and something that everybody could buy on the corner store because that would essentially alienate a lot of the medical users that seek relief from cannabis and that rely on their doctors to provide them with the information that they need in order to get that.
[00:31:10] Now we're going to hit time here. David You'reright, thank you so much for being on the program here. If people want to find out more information about you about green solutions, what's the best way to get that information?
[00:31:21] Feel free to reach out to us. My email is David@verygoodCBD or David@ourgreensolutions. More than happy to answer any questions that anyone might have. And in general, I think we're looking at a optimistic year for both the public markets and the cannabis space and also regulatory change. So always exciting to be on this wave of great momentum. And Bruce, thanks so much for having us today. Talk a little bit more about our expertise.
[00:31:44] My pleasure. Thank you for being on. Great conversation. I think a lot of good takeaways on where this business is going, not only from an adult use rex side, but really on the medical side. Great points. Hopefully we we don't impact the medical side too much with this growth of RAC. So I think it's important work you're doing. Ben, thanks for thanks for taking the time today.
[00:32:01] Bruce, thanks for having us.
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