019 Beard Bros. - Top Shelf Source of Cannabis News

00:00 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Hey, we're out here in Alameda, california, in the East Bay, and we're here with Beard Bros and Anders Peterson of Pip Horticulture and I just want to say thanks for getting together with us while we were in town. Absolutely appreciate it.

00:13 - Bill Levers (Host)

We appreciate you having us out.

00:15 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Yeah, well, your story is really interesting and I was kind of part, I wanted to learn from my side. I kind of you know, you hear stuff and you think you know the real story, but I kind of wanted to hear kind of your evolution into the current business that you operate today and kind of what you were doing before that.

00:30 - Bill Levers (Host)

ivators mostly up until about: 2015

01:05 - Michael Willamson (Host)

And the original intention was just to promote the brand itself.

01:10 - Jeff Levers (Host)

I mean not even really to promote the brand. It actually spawned initially from, as he was saying, we were trying to get legal in the city of LA. A lot of our cultivator friends, extractor friends were all trying to navigate that process and there wasn't a lot of good information then and what was out there wasn't verifiable and in the industry we had a different perspective on it and could kind of vet that for people. So we got that reputation of trusted information. So it kind of started in a local fashion in the LA SoCal area and then it broadened out to more of just a general news in California and then around the US and eventually international as well.

01:45 - Michael Willamson (Host)

It's pretty incredible. So you guys were like, hey, there's a void in the market. The noise and story and dialogue around cannabis isn't necessarily true to type Because there's a lot to sift through. And that was one of my questions for you guys is like, how do you sift through all this information and decide, like, what are we going to highlight or raise awareness to? Right?

02:10 - Bill Levers (Host)

omewhat simple because it was: 2015

02:45 - Anders Peterson (Host)

, I heard about you guys in: 2015

03:48 - Bill Levers (Host)

Yeah and we appreciate you for that. It really just became there was 100 stories, but two or three of them were relevant and we were able to look through those and, being in the industry and trying to learn all the laws and the new regulations coming out, we were able to pretty quickly identify which ones were real stories and which ones were clickbait, and obviously we were trying to inform our friends. So we stayed away from all the clickbait, unless we were just making fun of it. That was always fun to do.

04:11 - Anders Peterson (Host)

It kind of reminds me of the way you just described what you do, reminds me of the early forum days, you know, of being a cultivator trying to find good information. I spent thousands of hours on THC, farmer, icmag you know all these forums and you couldn't reliably find the answer to what you were looking for. And I think that's what you guys were trying to do. Yeah, absolutely.

04:33 - Jeff Levers (Host)

I think that's the key we were able to unlock is we were able to parse through that and not only that. Usually back then, as you said, there was no MJ Biz, there was no Benzinga and Forbes really focusing on the cannabis industry. So you were getting those things as news reports from local news and other things like that and needing to give the industry perspective. That wasn't there because it was just coming from a field reporter or an anchor in the newsroom that was just reading off of a script. Sure, yeah.

04:59 - Michael Willamson (Host)

It's so interesting when people take passion and turn it into a business. So at what point? You know, because it sounds like it was passion based first and it was like now this is the need, we want it. You wanted it for your own knowledge, but then you were like I'm going to share it with, like you know, the people, the community, because there was a lot of opportunity for elevation but, like you said, there was no clear path. So, like, the more information you had back then, maybe the greater chances of you trying to actually figure out how to move the you know the pieces forward. What's the point? Does that go from being like a passion project to saying like wait a minute, I think we have something here, I think this is going to be a business? How does that transition happen?

05:35 - Bill Levers (Host)

passing in: 2016

06:33 - Michael Willamson (Host)

And at no point were you like I'm leaving LA.

06:36 - Bill Levers (Host)

No, no, we had spent enough time. We had been there for about seven years by that time. Superty established. We were established, we were ingrained and, honestly, we liked LA and California. And you knew what a crazy market it was going to be. We didn't know how crazy. We knew it was going to be crazy, but it's even more crazy.

06:52 - Jeff Levers (Host)

Yeah, there's definitely been times we've been fortunate to not be in the cultivator side of it, and there's times I really wish you were in the garden more often.

07:00 - Michael Willamson (Host)

How many hours goes into like. It just seems like there's so much information these days and, unless you are using some kind of AI resource, what does that sifting process look like and what's the best way to validate and how do you kind of, I guess, make decisions on? There's so much noise in the space, like what gets acknowledged?

07:20 - Anders Peterson (Host)

It's like you're fino hunting for the next couple. Yeah, how do you select?

07:23 - Bill Levers (Host)

Yeah, it's really just become more of familiarity with the people. I mean, I say this sometimes, like a lot of times, it's not just that we're interpreting the news that we're sometimes in the news, because we've become known in California as cultivators and as a news source that's trusted. So it's been a fine line, though it's a very tricky thing to do. But as far as finding the stories, it's really just the current events and then putting our particular I don't want to say spin, it's just our particular opinion on it, because it's different than other people that aren't in the industry.

07:55 - Michael Willamson (Host)

From the cultivator's lens.

07:57 - Bill Levers (Host)

Yeah, cultivator, and then, and quite honestly, through the adaptation into media, it's just become even more than just a cultivator. We've gained knowledge on a lot of things because people reach out to us. When you become this trusted source of news, a lot of times the news actually comes to you. People will reach out to you with things that they feel are going to be important, and then the process comes in of, well, how important is this? Is it something that affects just a small area, or is it something that's a national or international?

08:24 - Michael Willamson (Host)

You guys get a lot of probably interesting direct messages, I imagine, of people trying to. You know who are like. I want this to be known, but I'm not the person that's going to blow this whistle, I guess. How do you validate some of this stuff? Because I imagine a lot of people are just trying to throw shade, different directions on different people and maybe take advantage of your platform potentially.

08:46 - Jeff Levers (Host)

Well, I would say there are definitely people looking to do that, but I think the way we've always carried ourselves leans people to understand that's not going to be the case, that we're not the ones to fall for the clickbait, we're not the ones to just take somebody's side. And the fact that we do know so many people on all different sides of the industry somebody from the legacy side isn't going to tell us something about a corporate person that we're not going to be able to go vet and fact check ourselves. So I think it lends to people not doing that, and when they do, it usually blows up in their face.

09:14 - Bill Levers (Host)

Well, and yeah, and the fact that we've put out what we feel is honest, very unbiased news kind of I joke about this it kind of keeps a little force field around us. People realize we do create content for people but we don't lie right, we're not going to lie on our media. So it kind of keeps people away that would try to take advantage of us, because we can pretty quickly see through those lies and it's just a pretty much a dead end. So it's been this nice little. The reputation that we built has kind of put us into a I don't want to say a bubble, but a nice little niche to where people don't especially try to take advantage of us like you think they would.

09:54 - Michael Willamson (Host)

One of your recent posts that hit home for me and I think hit home for everybody because I saw it get reposted so much was like there is no SOP for culture.

10:01

And when we travel around and we talk to cultivators and it's interesting when you get one-on-one with these cultivators and it doesn't matter if it's one of the bigger MSOs or a small craft grower a lot of them are dealing with the same struggle as they are trying to build culture in their space, but they're trying to do it in, like Maryland or New Jersey or something like that.

10:23

And a lot of the people who are working in some of these more consolidated states like California and Colorado as when they couldn't find a home like, let's say, in LA, well, they said I love this plant, I love California too, but I can't work here, but I have an opportunity in Pennsylvania or something like that and so we meet a lot of people with California, colorado, washington, oregon roots who are working in these other emerging states. But that's their biggest struggle is trying to build culture in a state where, historically, they don't have culture. And a lot of the employees that start with these companies they don't have any. Maybe they're passionate about cannabis, but because of where they grew up, they just don't have any real cultivation or experience, and so it's just a really culture is such a hard thing to shape and I think it's really overlooked.

11:09 - Jeff Levers (Host)

It's actually funny because that's one of the silver lines, I think to Prop 64, and how transient California is as a state is that it allowed a lot of people that were here in California that didn't see a path to go back to their states, and it's not bearing fruit now, but I have a feeling in five to 10 years it will bear fruit because it's the right kind of people that will emerge into positions of leadership within their own states.

11:30 - Bill Levers (Host)

at was happening in the early: 2000

12:02

was what: 1996

12:33 - Anders Peterson (Host)

I think it's somewhat coming full circle too, because people who were interested in cannabis and this plant in other parts of the state of the country migrated to California and Emerald Triangle for the love of the plant and built this culture, and I think that's great because it's still. It brought different perspectives and different skill sets to the industry here in California and now we're seeing a migration of these people going back to their home and it's spreading that culture and knowledge that was built here and kind of innovation that was started here and it's also funny to see how much more accelerated the timeline is on the East Coast Watching whether it's from a business or a culture's perspective of them having, you know, being non-existent to the levels that they're able to bring it.

13:15 - Jeff Levers (Host)

And even just the education and knowledge level of the consumers were out here. You know everybody's understood THC has kind of been the driving factor for a very long time. East Coast cultivator I mean East Coast consumers are going into dispensaries asking for things high in mercy and high in carioffilion, asking for specific effects and specific results that they're looking for. So seeing the market mature that way has been really exciting to watch.

13:37 - Anders Peterson (Host)

Well, it was interesting too. A trend I've seen is you know, back in 15, it always seemed like the East Coast was three to five years behind in like genetics and cultivation techniques and just new trends and cannabis. But with this hyper-popularity of social media that timeline is shrinking. They're getting up to speed on the California culture and trends much faster. Even in now the gap is between United States and Europe, like we were noticing in Berlin a few weeks ago. The hot genetics out there were the symbiotic stuff from a few years ago.

14:12 - Michael Willamson (Host)

The Merlin punch crosses.

14:14 - Anders Peterson (Host)

And that would have been. You know, they would have been a few years back previously, but now they're only a few years behind, like in those trends.

14:21 - Bill Levers (Host)

I think social media. It's very interesting to us with the state of the California cannabis market right now. The biggest advantage to being a known brand in California is the fact that you can go work somewhere else that actually has a better system for a business owner.

14:36 - Michael Willamson (Host)

California is a brand Like as you travel internationally and even before cannabis, when I was a child and I'd go to Italy to go visit my family and like California is an international brand, People visualize it and they have this image of what it is. And we were in Berlin and people are actually naming their companies like basically spin-offs of the word California, Because California to them is known as like the pinnacle of the best quality of cannabis you could find Everyone wants California weed.

15:06 - Anders Peterson (Host)

All the menus in Amsterdam at the coffee shops. Half that product is from California. I mean, we've been around the world.

15:12 - Bill Levers (Host)

But we've been around the country and California. Genetics absolutely rule every corner of genetics and cannabis. Will that be the case forever? No, because people start developing different things on the East Coast. That'll catch on, but for now California had that 20 or 30 year head start on genetics above everybody else. The other thing I point out, which a lot of times people don't even think about Hollywood. La will always be the epicenter of cannabis. People in the Bay will argue that, but I'll tell you why LA will always be the epicenter of it. Because Hollywood. It's just that simple. The only reason we even know about what OG Kush is is because Be Real smoked it and went on tour and spread it around and talked about it. Otherwise, people wouldn't even know what OG Kush was. Wouldn't he be called OG Kush?

15:52 - Anders Peterson (Host)

I'll give it to you. The import hash that came in the 70s and 80s first came to Hollywood.

15:57 - Bill Levers (Host)

All the Afghani, the Moroccan, Well the money's there too, so the people that can afford the exotic things are in Los Angeles as well, but nothing against any other part of the country. It's just you can't take away Hollywood's broadcast in everybody's living room across the world every single night. You can't compete with that.

16:13 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Yeah, they're like our modern day demigods, and so if you can get them to accept something as this is good or great, everybody falls in line. So there's a big push there. We saw that. I think that's talked about in cocaine cowboys, as an example. They're like celebrities doctors, lawyers and then all the dominoes fall after that. To go back to something that you said, I was always curious. There's so many growers in California and you're one of a handful of growers that I know that's born and raised here, but a lot of people came here to grow. I'm always curious how many actual California natives, I wonder, are actually in the state as far as growers go.

16:51 - Anders Peterson (Host)

I have no idea.

16:52 - Michael Willamson (Host)

I don't think anyone does.

16:53 - Anders Peterson (Host)

But it's the way I look at it, though, is that maybe this is because I'm biased, being from the Bay Area, growing up in this culture, but this is kind of the big leagues here. It's the biggest cannabis market in the world, and if you can survive here and succeed here in this market, when the federal walls come down, you're going to win. I mean, that's why MSOs can't survive here right now.

17:18 - Bill Levers (Host)

An example is the MSOs leaving. California is too refined of a market for MSO bullshit. That's right. That's really what it comes down to. Yeah, consumers, too sophisticated Consumers too good for that MSO bullshit?

17:29 - Jeff Levers (Host)

Yeah, because even though they don't have the SOPs. It's all been passed down generationally, as we were talking about earlier. You're starting out when you're very young and the trim crew doing things like that, and that knowledge is passed down and those traditions and those customs are actual SOPs. They're just called something different.

17:44 - Bill Levers (Host)

Yeah Well, we always had SOPs, but they went from burned notebooks to whiteboards that you could erase quickly. So putting information on computer was always something that was just so crazy to us, especially coming from the East Coast, because on the East Coast you didn't even tell your best friend, you grew the pot. You just said you knew a guy, I know a guy.

18:03 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Well, and I also.

18:03 - Anders Peterson (Host)

Everybody has like a fake name and I always will stand by. Something that Ivan from Jungle Boys said once was I can give you the SOP or the recipe. It's how you execute it as a team and day to day show up. That actually produces fire. And that's where I think a lot of these MSOs are falling short is the passion and love for the plant doesn't come through in the product. They can buy an SOP all they want, but the recipes only have the equation.

18:28 - Bill Levers (Host)

So you mean those stolen SOPs don't work. That's right.

18:31 - Anders Peterson (Host)

I've been burned by people who take the SOPs and they think they got the secret sauce. It's honestly about passion.

18:38 - Bill Levers (Host)

It really comes down to passion. You have to create the highest level of this product. You have to just love that product, you have to love that plant and you have to put the time into it. It's just that simple. And when you're just turning rooms it's not there.

18:52 - Anders Peterson (Host)

You know I'm curious about something being cultivators moving into media, do you? Were you finding yourself excited, like I guess? How do I phrase that? Were you pleased when you moved into media? You enjoyed it more than you thought? Or was it something that you weren't interested in at first? Like I don't know how do I phrase that?

19:15 - Bill Levers (Host)

No where we excited. Well, I'll be honest with you, we're cultivators at heart, so not cultivating it's still a dagger in the heart. Not having a nice big facility somewhere. I mean, I've got an entire safe full of genetics that I can't even start popping until I know I'm gonna have two years somewhere. Right, you can't really do correct hunts without spending the right amount of time, so we just keep collecting genetics, but they but like. Do you enjoy it more, I guess, than you thought I was just gonna say? The funny part is there's days that you do and then there's days that you don't.

19:47 - Jeff Levers (Host)

I mean it's definitely not as, even as unpredictable as cultivating is. Media side is way more unpredictable because in cultivation you're already forward-planning three, four, six months a year out. On the media side Sometimes you're doing that with clientele, but a lot of times it's churn and burn of clients and it's something that may be a client this day and is in solvent the next day because it's the cannabis industry.

20:08 - Bill Levers (Host)

There's many days I wish I was just cultivating cannabis instead of actually having to stay up on all the media and keep up on it and then create the content. I mean, like he said, it's not where you're just. I mean not trying to take anything away from cultivating. It's very difficult to do it at a high level, but it's predictable. Like you say, we always work backwards, like when's the harvest date? Okay, back to. We have to do this to get to this harvest date. So everything's planned out for months. And with cannabis news it's like oh my God, this happened at 5.30 today and shit, now I gotta do something with it.

20:41 - Michael Willamson (Host)

I mean, I think a media company would be way harder than a cultivator. I mean, look at how many cultivators are out there, how many cannabis media companies are out there that are any good.

20:49 - Jeff Levers (Host)

Well, the other thing is, instead of inwardly focusing on yourself and all of your own practices, you're literally focusing on the entire industry and what's going on at that particular time. That's the most relevant topic, which causes you to pay attention to local, pay attention to state, pay attention to national, pay attention to what's going on in European countries like Ukraine just announcing that they're gonna push a medical bill through while they're in the middle of a war with Russia, like all of these different facets that you need to be paying attention to, and you don't have control over all of those things. Inside of a facility, you can control the majority of things.

21:18 - Michael Willamson (Host)

There's some Godplex stuff going on in cultivation.

21:22 - Jeff Levers (Host)

Yeah, but the reality is it's. They're both a creative process, but just a very vastly different creative process. And to me I liked the constant growth and the constant yield and the harvest and seeing the fruits of your labor with the cultivation, and that feeling of accomplishment of not only yourself but, as you were talking about, operating within a team and being able to have that team pull a room down, flip it in one day, get the next room of plants in there, get it back on its cycle and everything flows correctly. And of course, then you forget to turn off the reservoir and you end up with 400 gallons of water on the floor and you hate everybody and then the cycle repeats itself.

21:59 - Bill Levers (Host)

If you haven't flooded you ain't growing. It's that simple. There's their next shirt. If you haven't flooded a room. You ain't growing.

22:06 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Yeah, that's like that If you're not rubbing, you're not racing, kind of calling right.

22:10 - Jeff Levers (Host)

If you don't know what this is, with a shot back image you're not growing.

22:13 - Bill Levers (Host)

Yeah.

22:14 - Michael Willamson (Host)

I like that one.

22:15 - Anders Peterson (Host)

Yeah, at least the issues that come up in cultivation are somewhat predictable. You know power goes out, blow a compressor, flood a room, whatever you know, you can at least plan contingencies for that. When it comes to media, it's like there's so much crazy stuff happening in the Canemas industry.

22:29 - Bill Levers (Host)

Law suits getting dropped at 6 PM.

22:31 - Michael Willamson (Host)

And it's like you cannot predict this stuff. How do you take time?

22:35 - Bill Levers (Host)

off. We unfortunately don't take a lot of time off.

22:38 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Now that cultivators really do either. You know some do, but like not really, because it's just this living breathing organism. And now you have this living breathing monster.

22:46 - Jeff Levers (Host)

It's this really weird thing it's called the Canemas Vacation, where you go on vacation to MJ Bizcon, you go on vacation to MJ Unpacked and you go on vacation to the best of event, new York, where you go to Spannabas or ICBC. So that's your vacation, is? You try to get in a little bit of tourist stuff while you're dealing with a three or four day conference.

23:02 - Bill Levers (Host)

Well and honestly, you know, as a small company in cannabis, the fight is not even remotely over. We're trying to be beat up by Goliath daily, right? So I mean, it's just this you don't have time to take off, right? It's almost like you feel like if you take time off, you're gonna I'm gonna be that step behind, I'm just gonna have to make up extra steps. So why take any time off?

23:23 - Michael Willamson (Host)

That makes sense. Do you think that there's? You know, there's this weird balance of like you've all these wonderful cultivators, but a lot of times they don't have the financial backing to actually do the thing. We see that, obviously, capital and space has been pulled back quite a bit in the last, you know, 12 months, 18 months, however you wanna look at that but the suits or the chads or the brads whatever you wanna call them and cultivators, whether they're legacy or been operating in like a licensed compliance state for a while, they somehow kind of need each other, like they need to figure out how that works. I guess if there is a question in what I just said, it's is it possible?

24:01 - Bill Levers (Host)

Yeah, well, no, actually great question.

24:03 - Michael Willamson (Host)

I have an answer for it.

24:04 - Bill Levers (Host)

We've been talking about this for a while. There. You almost can't be in cannabis without some type of capitalization. Now the only way you could is, for instance, somebody like ourselves that has built a name over the last 10 years and our name means something without the capital behind it. So we've always talked about you're gonna have to have some type of business acumen along with some type of cultivation and culture acumen. So where is that? Is it 50-50?, is it 60-40? Is it 70-30? It really, in my opinion, just depends on the situation you're in as to what part of that ratio you're working with.

24:37 - Jeff Levers (Host)

Well, and I think what you have is the small brands and the legacy people trying to give up just enough control to get capitalized to potentially maybe do their own thing, and then you have the corporate side looking to pay just enough money to try to extract that knowledge from you until you're not useful anymore and then push you to a side. So I kind of look at it as like a race. Can they learn enough about our side before we figure out enough about their side? Or safe banking goes through and we don't need as much of the corporate Chad private equity money to come in because there's SBA loans and there's conventional funding and financing options available, and that's what this kind of is. It's this delicate dance of yeah, you do need some of that, but you kind of want to stay true to your own morals and your ethics and the base of who you are as a person, a company and a brand.

25:21 - Michael Willamson (Host)

That's a tug of war, right now it's rough and you guys have mentioned you guys were social equity applicants at one point. I mean I look at a lot of social equity groups out there. They can't get capitalized to do the project.

25:33 - Bill Levers (Host)

Social equity. I hate to even say this, but social equity is somewhat of a setup. So in concept, it's fantastic. We should be rewarding the people that were most put against into war on drugs. Completely agree with that. Problem is the implementation, because most of the implementation, I feel, has people's best interests at heart, but then you get these outside people that come in and want to manipulate it and they're not making the social equity regulations or whatever you want to call the structure of it. They're not making it solid enough to actually help the people right. And then, on top of that, one of the things somebody pointed out to me just six months ago and it completely made sense If you're going to look for capital and you have to give 51% of your business to somebody who had a conviction but has no business experience, has never run a business, a multi-million dollar business, you can't find capital to get a social equity license and establishment financed. So it's just this constant running in place, in my opinion. Well, and the investors of today.

26:34 - Michael Willamson (Host)

They've learned some hard lessons in the last five years. A lot of people thought it was like this rainbow pot of gold thing. It's cannabis. Gold Money grows on trees. I haven't heard the word like green rush in a while.

26:47 - Bill Levers (Host)

Yeah, they got the memo.

26:48 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Yeah, well, people got burned. And so now, Just like the sophisticated end user is evolving, the investors have evolved a lot too, and they know no, I didn't see a return on this investment.

27:00 - Anders Peterson (Host)

Well, they've learned that I think that the tech bubble in Silicon Valley spoiled a lot of investors to a one to two year ROI and they're realizing that cannabis is not the tech industry. It's not a tech bubble, it's farming. At the end of the day, plants take time to grow and this is a longer term three to five year type of investment deal, you know, and there's volatility in it and it's people are learning those lessons. Finally, you can say it all you want till you're blue in the face.

27:26 - Bill Levers (Host)

In some aspects you could turn that around to be a good thing because they're getting burned. But it's because they were trying to skimp and they weren't bringing in maybe some legacy people that they should have. So you could kind of turn it around to they got burned, but now they realize that they need us as well, right? So it used to be just this big attitude of we don't need you, right, we can steal your SOPs and we can set it up and it's just a plant, right, anybody can grow it right, like it's an orchid or it's a shilling or a petunia or something. Yeah, totally, and it's never going to be a CPG. People can call it a CPG all you want, but a living, breathing plant that can change from one crop to the next, in my opinion, is never going to be a widget. You can't get it into the specs. It's a widget, would fall into.

28:07 - Michael Willamson (Host)

I mean, we've seen people from some of the biggest name companies that we won't name from, like CPG products, beverage products, who just thought like and they work for big companies that make real money. They thought they could transition into the space and really elevate the thing and they usually fall flat on and they're like I hear all the time I had no idea what a difficult business this is.

28:28 - Bill Levers (Host)

Well, I mean, for us guys that have been cultivating for decades, now we are MacGyver, like we had to do everything ourselves. You didn't hire AC guys, you had to figure it out yourself. Or you had a friend. You didn't hire a plumber, you did it yourself. Right, you had to do these things. So I think where the corporate people completely underestimated the legacy market was we will pivot, we will survive, we've been hunted down, we had to hide, we had to do all of our own work and we're still here.

28:54 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Creative and scrappy. That's what I always think of. Like we'll find a way. But on that same note, I've also seen where a lot of legacy cultivators that they typically they didn't have a lot of experience working on a team, they were more of a solo act. And then, also because they built everything the way that they liked it and they weren't general contractors or journeymen electricians, they also brought some pretty bad habits into commercial design and operations and so I think we've seen a big wave of that kind of get washed out.

29:25 - Bill Levers (Host)

You just brought it right back. How far do we? How much on each side do we need to work together? Because, like you said, the legacy brought some bad things in. Obviously, corporate brings some bad things in. The idea is to get together and get rid of those bad things and put out a product that people can pull.

29:38 - Michael Willamson (Host)

That's the utopian goal. I think the other thing I see that's a big challenge is like traditionally legacy cultivators, not really good at establishing a fair contract for themselves. You know really good people, great intentions, really talented, and then they just get so excited about this opportunity to go legit and they get railroaded by their contract and they didn't even realize it until like two or three years into the deal and the thing's been signed for a while.

30:03 - Bill Levers (Host)

Yeah, I mean we can actually speak to that. The reason we came to the West Coast is because we didn't want to catch a 10 year charge on the East Coast. I mean we would tell people we just wanted to be able to go to work like normal and not take a different route, park out front right, like just be a normal per credit Credit would be an amazing thing, right. So we're just still in that normalization process in my opinion. But that was the whole reason for us wanting to come to the West Coast so that we could do what we were passionate about and be a normal human being in the United States.

30:33 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Growing up on the East Coast, because that's the three of us you grew up here, so you have a different perspective on things, but it's such a like a fresh breath. I remember being like such a fresh breath of air. I got to Colorado and I was like oh, they're pretty lax about this. Oh, you smell a little bit of weed around, like in public. People are talking a little bit about it in public, because everything was so hush, hush and it's literally the whole thing's been flipped on its head and it's like the further you traveled west, it was like it's like this is real. I remember the first time I went out to California and just being like everybody grows weed. It seemed like everyone in their backyard had a little something going on in our neighborhood and the sky isn't falling, no, and everything was fine, it wasn't a big deal.

31:11 - Bill Levers (Host)

mean, I remember specifically: 2015

31:58 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Yeah, or a small amount. I mean personal consumption, a tiny amount. I've watched good friends growing up.

32:02 - Jeff Levers (Host)

It happened to me during my senior year of college, coming back from Jacksonville, florida, to Gainesville to University of Florida, from a Monday night football Jags Steelers game. I'd smoked before I left so I wasn't actually smoking in my car, but I'm sure it smelled like it Got pulled over for speeding. I had a noug and a glass bowl and told them I'm a UF senior, I've got a final tomorrow, I'm graduating in like three weeks, and they arrested me, made me spend the night in jail, had to bail out in time to go to my final at 9 o'clock in the morning, ended up getting 100 hours of community service and a misdemeanor deferment program for literally a gram and a glass pipe.

32:40

It was just different times.

32:42 - Michael Willamson (Host)

And that's what I think an investor just will never understand unless they have that same experience. And that's that grit. It's like I'll do anything for this plant and a lot of people give up easy in this space. We saw a lot of giving up this past year in California.

32:56 - Bill Levers (Host)

Well, that's it, but after a bloodbath it's been an absolute bloodbath.

33:00 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Well, when your state doesn't set you up for success. Oh, the state is just, and the local municipalities and counties have their hands out left and right.

33:06 - Bill Levers (Host)

California had the opportunity to show the entire world how to correctly bring cannabis to the mainstream. They had that opportunity.

33:17 - Jeff Levers (Host)

And greed fumbled it Absolutely. They should have been the first in investor, the last to cash out, and they're the opposite. They're the last in investor and the first one to cash out from everybody before anybody gets even cost of goods. That's just any profits.

33:33 - Bill Levers (Host)

The reality of it is, if you're looking at it from a federal standpoint, california is a bigger partner with every illegal, federally illegal cannabis company than anybody else. Because they bring in, we bring in what $5 billion total over $1 billion. Well, it's dropped under $1 billion, but $1 billion in taxes. They don't give a shit how bad we're doing. They still get $1 billion a year out of us. They really don't care. It's sad Because Prop 64, I truly believe Prop 64 only passed because they were going to A expunge records.

34:03

That was a big thing. Actually, the only good thing from Prop 64 was actually reducing felonies down to misdemeanors and just getting rid of misdemeanors. That's the only good thing from Prop 64. But if they would have adhered to the small farm like they promised I mean they promised Prop 64, promised a cottage industry. They even said to us we know that all you guys put your life on the line, your freedom on the line, for years to get here and when we're going to legalize, we're going to keep out all the big operations for the first five years and they didn't do that and that completely reduced, completely ruined the California market.

34:35 - Jeff Levers (Host)

The funny thing with all the Glass House talk lately is they shouldn't even be in existence yet. The sun setting shouldn't have happened until November of this year and I joke with people. I'm like if Glass House looked at the California market right now and was considering getting into the California market would they Nobody bakes?

34:49

Probably not. But since they already have the amount of canopy they do and they already have what invested, they're going to stick. But I don't think they'd make the same decision. Looking at the market five years in is starting out right from the beginning, getting a leg up on every single person over scale.

35:04 - Bill Levers (Host)

I mean, just think about how different it would be. You wouldn't have these monolithic grows putting out tons. You'd have small farms putting out hundreds of pounds a year, not that, and then you wouldn't have the big distros because there wouldn't be the big farms to service. It would have been so much of a different. It would have been so much of a small farming model, rather than this, just more creativity more innovation, more product diversity.

35:31

Basically, california did the cannabis what they did to big ag they just turned it into just this massive farm field project, rather than what it should have been, which was a small cottage industry that catered locally.

35:46 - Anders Peterson (Host)

I'm curious what states do you think have done a good job? And from my experience, Maine has a good cottage industry.

35:52 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Maine does have good meat. They put out a lot of fire.

35:53 - Bill Levers (Host)

It's going to be your small ones, right. So New York followed California, right. Florida is great for the companies. It's horrible for the patients. A forced monopoly and forced vertical integration. Florida is a perfect example of why that's not a good thing. Missouri is doing pretty well. They have lower taxes. Their licensing process wasn't as open as I would have liked to have seen it be, but their taxes are low. But yeah, it's going to be the small. I think Vermont, connecticut are doing some loud.

36:23 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Connecticut's got four active licenses and there's another 22 that are in limbo. They're not social equity, but they're something like a craft grow license. Again the issue only one of them that I was told recently has actually broken dirt and they're all just they can't raise capital.

36:39 - Bill Levers (Host)

And when they do raise capital, those capital people take it over and now it's no longer a small business, it's capital-y funded and they tell them what to do because they now run it.

36:46 - Jeff Levers (Host)

But their problem is having enough populations to sustain businesses. But those states only have a couple of million people at the most.

36:52 - Michael Willamson (Host)

I remember when we were operating down in Salinas, we did some math and it was like, well, wait a minute, like our farm plus four other farms just down the street, the same size can supply the whole state of California and it was kind of like an oh shit moment. But that being said, thank you. To me all this is somewhat of a math equation, Like you've got population, you've got some percentage of them that are like maybe, if it's medical accepted users or medical licenses or we can assume this many people enjoy recreational. It seems like you could figure out like okay, because I am actually an advocate for limited license states, just not hyper limited license states that have ridiculous. I mean, you don't want 20 licenses, barriers to entry.

37:34 - Jeff Levers (Host)

So you mean they should have actually taken into account supply and demand and that equation when they were forming the laws and the framework that we were going to operate under.

37:41 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Who are these people and how are they in these positions and how come? It shouldn't be as difficult Like you shouldn't just blow everything up and it maybe it's just a greed thing. Where they're like these people are going to apply, there'll be a bloodbath. The strong will survive, the weak will go out, but either way, we're going to get paid the whole time.

37:56 - Bill Levers (Host)

That's actually. That's how I believe California views it right now. I really do. It's really sad.

37:59 - Anders Peterson (Host)

I've always been torn between the whole free market states like Oregon and Oklahoma, where they just have unlimited licenses and let the strong survive. To me, that allows people the opportunity to get into an industry when they haven't had a chance to. However, I've seen people, you know, bank their life savings on this, like in Oklahoma $2,500 for a license. Mom and pop devote their life savings thinking they're going to make a ton of money and it ends in ruin. You know, part of me likes the concept of that market, but it's hard for me to find a middle ground. I do think limiting production is the right way to do it by canopy square feet by population. But what is that metric? What is that?

38:42 - Jeff Levers (Host)

I liked Oklahoma's free market approach to it, but they didn't put in any structure to actually maintain the industry and the integrity of the industry and it just became oh, I can just move from California to Oklahoma and continue what I was trapping from there to the East Coast and cut my costs by a ten.

38:57

They did a terrible job in forcing it and make it appear to be legal, and how long is it going to take for them to figure out? I'm not legal, If they even do, because there's ways to manipulate all of that. So I'm not a fan of the police, I'm not a fan of enforcement, but if you're going to set it up like that, you need to protect. I mean, it's somewhat same thing here in California. They didn't protect the people that put the money in for licenses. They didn't give them a feeling of safety, a feeling of security of what they were trying to do.

39:22 - Bill Levers (Host)

We need something in between Oklahoma and California, in my opinion, right. So California got a couple things right. Oklahoma, the free market's great, I totally agree with that, letting the good companies rise. But we're in this weird place where they even the big cannabis companies, in my opinion don't mean anything to anybody. All right, so the true leads and the cure leads, they're billion-dollar companies, but what are they to fill up Morris? They're nothing. They're absolutely nothing. So part of me thinks that they just want everybody to stick their head up. First movers and people that stuck their head up get their head whacked off, and then somebody's going to fill the void, right? So if people go out of business or it gets consolidated, there's going to be some type of void being filled. So we're in just this really weird phase of cannabis history right now, where it's quasi-legal. The art of the pivot right. Isn't that what you were talking about earlier?

40:19 - Michael Willamson (Host)

I've heard good stories in California even today while I was visiting, and it was essentially grower picked up a distressed asset and they didn't know what they were doing. You know, got the van, redo it all, but this team would have had to spend three or four times the amount of money and they would have lost traction to even getting to market, because that's where I saw a lot of people in California get shot in the foot was somewhere between local municipality regulations with building codes, fire marshals and then CCC, california Code Check. I remember we got our comments back from California Code Check and I got 87 comments on a new build greenhouse and one of them was 87. One of them was the greenhouse has to be solar ready, meaning that they wanted us to have the ability to put solar panels on our greenhouse and I had to educate them.

41:09

's where it was, and this was: 2016

41:18 - Bill Levers (Host)

And they want you to put panels of the block to sun.

41:20 - Jeff Levers (Host)

That's when you pull out the Princess Bride meme. I don't think that word means what you think it means.

41:25 - Michael Willamson (Host)

But it is nice to hear stories of people who understand the art of pivoting, that come from a long background of being scrappy and surviving, and it's nice to hear while I was in California this trip to hear about someone who's actually already has an existing farm, acquired a distressed asset at a reasonable rate, is turning it around and is selling all their own product legitimately through their own brand. So for every gloomy story, there are people that are navigating these waters and a lot of them aren't thriving but they're surviving, and I think right now it's that time where it's like we just need to stay afloat.

42:04 - Jeff Levers (Host)

Surviving. You can see the green side of the grass.

42:06 - Bill Levers (Host)

Surviving right now is thriving Right, and I look at it too, though even if you're not making money, if you're still not making a lot of money, even if you're still in it, you're building a brand that's going to have value in the future. So, even if you're not banking the way you'd want to bank, you're still building towards your future.

42:24 - Michael Willamson (Host)

He said, let me say he said it's all about right now. It's all about the three Ps for me. I got to make sure I can handle my payroll, I can got to make sure I can handle my plants and I got to make sure I got my power handled yeah.

42:33 - Anders Peterson (Host)

Well, that's how I see it too. You have two ways to build value right now in the campus industry. You either build an asset, a really good facility that you can prove with data that it can reproducibly hit quality and quantity every run, or you build the brand and that's the value. If you have a good facility, like a good asset, value on your facility and a good brand, that's the winning success right now. Unfortunately, what I see is a lot of people don't have the facility that can produce the quality right now that backs up their brand, or vice versa the dilemma we've dealt with for several years and potential partners and potential opportunities and yeah having the brand but having the consistent product.

43:15 - Jeff Levers (Host)

Kim and I debated all the time of not having flour in the market, I'm like, but it's the main thing people are buying. It's the main way to build the brand.

43:23 - Bill Levers (Host)

We tried, we tried to do some white labeling, we tried to do some licensing deals. They just didn't work out and they didn't stay consistent and it wasn't the quality that we would have put out of our own facility. And so we just said if I can't put out a product, I would put out myself. I'm not putting out a product, it's just that simple.

43:39 - Michael Willamson (Host)

People that I see doing the best in this space will say something generally like what you just said. It'll be like if we won't smoke it, we won't put it out. The people, on the other hand, who don't smoke, or don't really, they don't know, they don't care. It's just a widget again to them and they're shoving this booth right down the line.

43:54 - Bill Levers (Host)

We see how well this it's just a CPG works.

43:57 - Michael Willamson (Host)

It's interesting too. Like you know this whole, there's this paradigm shift with the big guys. I've noticed they're now like aware that quality matters, but it wasn't the case for many years. It was like we're the biggest.

44:09 - Jeff Levers (Host)

My favorite was the story coming out recently about Canada now focusing on the micro licenses, going from macro to micro.

44:16 - Michael Willamson (Host)

I worked very much in Canada, up until COVID really, and then we couldn't get in the country anymore. I have never in my life seen more capital wasted. If you were like an entomologist or you just loved like IPM, it would have been the Mecca to study plants. I mean every bug, every disease, every pest, and then at a million square feet of greenhouse.

44:40 - Anders Peterson (Host)

Yeah, if you ever want to get a funny read, pull all the financial statements of the big LPs in Canada and all of its non-gap reporting. So it's a really interesting accounting that they put on these financial statements. Some have a line item called inventory obsolescence and if you read into this line item on their financial, their income statement, it's basically how much product they burned and destroyed. I mean it's millions of pounds. It's ridiculous, I mean it's ridiculous.

45:05 - Bill Levers (Host)

It's like my understanding was they were having so much capital thrown at them that they had to find things to invest it in and they were just making real. I mean, I heard some of the companies that they're bought hundreds and thousands of hectares in South America and it's just sitting there now. I mean, just don't like. They had so much money thrown at them that they had to buy shit and they didn't even really know what they were buying.

45:25

They just it almost was like they didn't get the budget yeah well, if they didn't, if they didn't spend it, they wouldn't get any more.

45:30 - Michael Willamson (Host)

I can't name names, but I knew a gentleman and this shocked me. He still had his job and he introduced himself to me. He's like hey, I'm so-and-so, I'm the guy that made the $220 mistake acquisition. So this gentleman lost $220 million.

45:48 - Bill Levers (Host)

It didn't lose a fool, he lost $202 million, and that was his introduction, as I'm that guy, yeah, and he still had a job.

45:58 - Michael Willamson (Host)

It's amazing, isn't it? This one group spent about $860 million while I was there in a couple years, and the only reason that I was able to work with them is they gave me some of their product to try and they wanted to get my opinion on it. And the next day we had a meeting and they were so excited to see what we thought of their cannabis because we came from Colorado and California on my team and I said, with all due respect, I didn't try it, and they were so perplexed they were like why? And I was like I'm very particular about what I put in my body and there is noticeable botrytis and remediation and still botrytis. And I'm just I'm not doing that. And it was that comment in this big executive corporate, all these suits. They were like we need these people.

46:49 - Bill Levers (Host)

They did.

46:50 - Michael Willamson (Host)

And at the time I knew that we had bitten off way more than we could handle. You're talking about a million plus square feet of controlled environment, agriculture and all brand new stuff which was poorly commissioned, brand new teams. I watched Hypergrowth. I watched a team grow from 200 people to 800 people in seven months, so you could just imagine trying to train.

47:11 - Bill Levers (Host)

I mean, would not even want to. Yeah, I think the numbers I've heard most recently is is it eight billion that canopy has lost overall? Eight billion with a B? That's insane. That's eight years of tax that the state of California makes that one company burned.

47:29 - Anders Peterson (Host)

People like billion. It is a hard number to fathom.

47:32 - Bill Levers (Host)

A thousand millions is a lot yeah.

47:34 - Anders Peterson (Host)

Like, a million seconds is 12 days, a billion seconds is 32 years yeah.

47:40 - Michael Willamson (Host)

And people don't understand the difference between millions and billions a lot it's our hope is that we don't see these same mistakes in Europe and the rest of the country.

47:46 - Bill Levers (Host)

I don't think you will. I really don't. They're taking a different approach.

47:48 - Michael Willamson (Host)

There seems like the government's going to have a stronger I don't think Canada would be rep.

47:54 - Bill Levers (Host)

I don't think Canada would ever happen again. It was a combination of everybody thinking that money still grew on weed trees. We were at a time when everybody's trying to invest into it and they had just they had done their federal legalization. So people viewed I actually was telling people Canada is going to eat everybody's lunch. They're the ones importing into, they have import contracts in Germany. Years and years ago I said how can we compete with that? We can't even. We can't even sell outside our state. These guys are shipping it over to Europe. And so five years ago I was I was warning that Canada is going to eat our lunch and somewhere in there they just screwed it all.

48:26 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Evaluations are based off of what you could produce, not what you could sell. And then the Canadian government. They limited the outlets internally, so there just wasn't a lot of outlets, so the bottleneck was massive.

48:38 - Anders Peterson (Host)

Well, my dad's an accountant, he's a CPA, and he's taught me quite a bit about how to run a financial statement for a cultivation business my businesses, right. How do I actually account for my business and know my numbers? And we've looked at a lot of these Canadian businesses together. Like he finds it interesting and I think that's one of the reasons that they failed with these evaluations is very creative accounting to investors in a way that wasn't illegal but was semi-fraudulent.

49:09 - Bill Levers (Host)

There's a guy on LinkedIn that used to work. Do you remember his name? He used to work for like Bacardi, so he understands products and distribution. He tears every-.

49:20 - Jeff Levers (Host)

From Rob McPherson.

49:21 - Bill Levers (Host)

Yeah, rob McPherson tears every single large Canadian company a new ass every day on LinkedIn and does it by the numbers. He absolutely Linton dude. He will not stop on LinkedIn he is. This guy has just buried Linton on LinkedIn Like if anybody ever hires Linton again, I'll be absolutely amazed. This guy has just completely laid out how this guy is the worst CEO of a cannabis company ever possibly.

49:46 - Michael Willamson (Host)

It's wild to me. That person will for sure get hired somewhere else.

49:49 - Bill Levers (Host)

I know that will.

49:49 - Michael Willamson (Host)

That's the worst part about some of this space is like somehow like the crooked just weasel into another channel.

49:55 - Jeff Levers (Host)

They initially gave him control of a fucking speck. Yeah, hey, you don't need to tell us what you're doing with this money, we're just gonna give it to you. Yeah, I mean, they've lost billions, I think.

50:03 - Bill Levers (Host)

Linton burned through four billion while he was there. Yeah, Half of their debt was from him originally running the company. It's crazy.

50:12 - Anders Peterson (Host)

What can the United States learn from some of this? Like we kind of got ahead of Canada in a lot of our legalization at a state level. Canada kind of took it to the federal level. It was a really good example for me and all of us to learn from, and I think one of the lessons I took away from Canada's federal legalization was the needs for standards and better regulations. I think that standard reporting, standard KPIs and metrics coming out of these cultivation businesses a little bit another layer of legitimacy and that doesn't mean we have to change any of our culture or how we grow this plant, but I think it's a way for us legacy guys to protect ourselves and a way for us to gauge our performance, but also a way to protect ourselves and grow from a corporate level, I guess too. Like I think standards and regulations are gonna be really important for a successful you know federal legalization here in the States.

51:10 - Michael Willamson (Host)

No, I agree with you the question is is who sets them.

51:13 - Anders Peterson (Host)

Well, I think that's why, personally, I'm pretty involved in it. I think it's an important, it's important to have voices in these meetings, cause I sat in these ASTM meetings and all of these large standards and organizations, you know, nonprofits and whatever, and there are some people who get it and there's a lot of people who don't, you know, and I think it's important that people from the legacy market aren't afraid to speak up and share a little bit. It's so counterintuitive to what we know keep everything in, keep it secret. But unless we share a little bit and have a voice in these standards and regulations, then it's not gonna be regulated correctly.

51:54 - Bill Levers (Host)

No, I agree with you, and the problem is the path that we're going down is putting us further and further away from being able to influence those regulations. We've already seen it. I mean the fact that the things that they've done on a regulation and state levels doesn't make any sense. If they'd asked anybody who'd been in this industry for any length of time, they wouldn't have done that. But the problem is now is now we've got this consolidation going and the only people with the money to even talk to lobbyists, to talk to congressmen and congresswomen and senators and things, are the bigger companies. So what's happening now is we've got companies like Trueleaf and Cureleaf that are influencing regulation and of course, they're influencing it into hyper focused, as many as few licenses as possible. Let us handle it. We're the professionals. Now Let us run all the dispensaries. So we're going down a very bad path to where we're not gonna even be able to participate because we're gonna be written completely out.

52:46 - Anders Peterson (Host)

Well, I think what's interesting too is this industry has developed somewhat backwards to a lot of other agricultural type industries. It typically starts at the academic level and in universities, where crop registration, agronomic traits are defined, kpis are defined, and then industry evolves around academia, and instead we are completely backwards. Industry is innovating in a bubble, in a silo, and academia is trying to legitimize some of what's coming out of our industry, and the politicians and regulators are all just confused because they don't know who to trust and what information is correct.

53:25 - Bill Levers (Host)

They're doing what they're told by the donors, and the donors are the big companies with money.

53:30 - Jeff Levers (Host)

Jeff has a lot of money right.

53:31 - Bill Levers (Host)

You used to say that. What would you say about the industry? What about California? We'll know about the canvas industry in general. It's new, but it's a-.

53:38 - Jeff Levers (Host)

Oh, I usually said it more about California that we're an adult baby. We've been in existence for 25 years but we're still an infant in the scheme of things and we don't understand things. We just throw tantrums and sling shit at the wall.

53:50 - Bill Levers (Host)

e harvest. They harvest it in: 2022

54:04 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Meanwhile. There's three dispensaries on every corner that are-.

54:07 - Bill Levers (Host)

Buttega, every Botega as well.

54:09 - Jeff Levers (Host)

But we saw that because they forced them into the pact with the company that was gonna raise $200 million for all the retail locations and then mysteriously, they can't raise $150 million in New York City for real estate development. Like how much of a drop in the bucket in terms of New York real estate development is that?

54:26 - Bill Levers (Host)

I honestly can't believe, after watching what California did, I can't believe that New York dropped the ball the way they did. It's just unbelievable to me.

54:33 - Jeff Levers (Host)

I don't know how much of it's a drop in the ball and how much of it's intentional by the people behind the scenes with their own motives. Well, they're kind of like what?

54:39 - Anders Peterson (Host)

California's making. New York wants to make that revenue too. You know they're probably doing it on purpose. I don't know.

54:46 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Yeah, follow the money. It's always gets you to some version of the truth. Well, I know this could be the never ending conversation, but I'm getting a little chilly.

54:54 - Anders Peterson (Host)

I'm getting a little hungry. Can I ask one last question? Oh, always. What's next for Beard Bros farms?

55:01 - Bill Levers (Host)

Media expansion. We've actually been toying with maybe getting some investment to expand our media, so we're hoping to expand the media. We are expanding our product line, which currently is RSO. We're going to expand that into a few states. I guess I can drop that on here.

55:18 - Jeff Levers (Host)

Yeah, I'd say it was.

55:19 - Bill Levers (Host)

We're going to be launching in Massachusetts in August, more than likely launching in Missouri by September. We have a couple other states that aren't signed yet, but we've realized that California's cannabis industry got so screwed by Prop 64 that the real value of being a brand and a cultivator in California is that you can take it to other states that need it. It is outside the state you can bring that culture and that type of legacy, mentality of passion for the plant to other places that didn't have it so.

55:52 - Michael Willamson (Host)

Awesome, cool. Well, thank you, bros, we're excited to watch you. It's been a real pleasure.

55:55 - Bill Levers (Host)

We appreciate you having us out yeah.