AnnaRae Grabstein: 0:05

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Ben Larson: 0:53

Hey everybody, welcome to episode 82 of High Spirits. I'm Ben Larson and, as always, I'm joined today by Anna Rae Grabstein. We're recording Thursday, april 3rd 2025. And we've got a great show for you. Today we are doing a little bit of a one-on-one our Cannabis Business News Roundup. We'll talk about that a little bit. So yeah, anna Rae, how's your week going? How are you feeling?

AnnaRae Grabstein: 1:21

I'm feeling good. I am in this funny moment of realizing how fungible reality has become.

Ben Larson: 1:28

Ooh, intriguing Fungible.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 1:33

Yeah, fungible. I mean, I don't know if that's the right word to use, but it's this feeling of after a lot of exploration as it relates to AI and using new technology in my work and in my life. It's like starting the line is getting blurry of what's real and what's computer generated. I have for a while been doing exercise classes at home, like on YouTube, a yoga class or some other sort of like hit high intensity workout at home, and this week I started experimenting with this app that will do like these custom workouts for you and you can tell it how many minutes you want to work out and what sort of extra tools you want to use Do you want to use a resistance band or a chair or whatever? And and then it generates a workout for you.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 2:24

And I was really enjoying the workout. But I was also watching the person that was leading me through it and saying, oh, I think this is a robot. I'm pretty positive, it's a robot. And then I went off on this whole thing of how do I feel about getting exercise tips from robots, even though I knew that I was benefiting from it, and after this whole narrative of coming to grips with the fact that a robot was guiding my health. I started Googling around to try to figure out if it really was a robot, because I couldn't even tell. At which point I found out that it isn't a robot and that it's actually a real person that recorded all these different exercises and they just reorder them in the app. And then I thought it was even more weird that I can't even tell who's a real person and who's across the uncanny valley.

Ben Larson: 3:13

That's that. That's an exciting time, as, as a technologist, I don't know, um, but mind blown, it raises the question like, what is a robot? Right? Because ai in general is just an amalgamation of our collective consciousness, like all woven together into whatever it is that you desire. So, like, this is the same. It's not the same, maybe different, but it's like the same internal uh debate I have with, like targeted ads, right. It's like no, don't track me, but then you get all these shitty ads that you don't want to see. So it it's like well, if you're going to see ads, you might as well see ads that you like. Again, I think I'm losing the thread here, but I don't know. And what if you know thinking about how these AI agents are developing? You know what if this person is indeed built on a real person, but they leverage AI to weave together all these different moves for them?

AnnaRae Grabstein: 4:06

Well, and the amount of access and accessibility that can be broadened. When you scale things like personal training with computer-generated support, it all of a sudden goes from something that only rich people can afford to something that anybody can be doing in their living room, and that's pretty effing cool, um, so I think it's more just about, and what I'm thinking about this week is how we metabolize this fast pace of change that's happening in the way that we live, in our culture, our business and our relationships, and both kind of accept what it is, get out of the way to try to understand how this affects all the other things, all the domino effects, because that's really what it's about. It's like I can be having a consciousness crisis as it relates to is it okay that an AI bot is teaching me how to support my lower back better? But the reality is, is that I benefited from that and that's just what's happening, so I need to accept it. Move on, figure out how to manage through it. What does this mean about the world?

Ben Larson: 5:15

Yeah, I mean, we'll take it a step further, and I know we're not talking about cannabis. We might get there, maybe not, but we will I promise. But it makes me think about like therapy I, we, you and I were talking about this like I've, I've suddenly scheduled morning therapies, couples therapy, 8 am on thursdays, which is interestingly positioned not too far before this, this recording and just for the record, your couples therapy is not with me, it's with your actual wife.

Ben Larson: 5:47

Yes, that is true, although it might help us because, um, this particular therapist he focuses on eft, which is emotional, uh, focus therapy, which is all built around attachment theory and creating kind of safe space, uh, for someone to feel attached so that you can process your conversations and your actions healthfully. Anyways, we recently started with him. Matthew is awesome. If you're doing therapy, check out EFT. It's really great. He's made us cry every session and even on my one-on-ones, which I like to cry. So you know there's that.

Ben Larson: 6:25

But I got to thinking it's like anyone that does therapy generally knows that to find the right person, to find that effective method, to find the right time in the day that really is able to unlock and and make you cry every session, it can take years if you ever find it at all. But I think the power of AI might be able to accelerate that for people and, like you, remove that, that human error. I just think it's going to be so powerful. It's a little scary because, like this is a step beyond. This is getting into your psyche and not just your lower back. But then it manifests in different ways, like how people are feeling about the Studio Ghibli stuff, which we posted something on April Fool's, but then Belinda, our designer, the root of the art, but it is forever changed because of how accessible it is, so like. What does the future look like and what does it mean for everyone?

AnnaRae Grabstein: 7:37

well, everything you said it's goes back to this like what is real and what isn't real and how do we accept the future path? Because there's this funny thing happening is like yes, therapy can be done very effectively with a real human therapist, and yet you can also, in a crunch moment in the middle of a crisis, when you don't have an appointment with a therapist, you can go onto chat GPT and say pretend you're my therapist. I'm having this massive crisis right now about X, y, z and I don't know what to do, and it will give you some pretty good feedback. Try it everyone. You might be surprised. And so this coming together of like when we do the human path and when we do the computer generated path, I think starts to become more of the question do we do some of both appropriately? Yeah, wild times yeah, yeah and should?

AnnaRae Grabstein: 8:30

should we start to make? Should we start to make the jump into the news of the world?

Ben Larson: 8:36

I don't know, I'm having a lot of fun here, but I, we can, we can. There's the news is real, ish, I guess there's. There's a lot going on. We can talk about cannabis news, which you know, leading up to this show. There's a lot of news, but at the same time it just seems like a lot of noise and I don't know if I'm just getting long in the tooth and just kind of jaded, but it's just like oh yeah, the attorney generals are doing some nonsense down in Arizona, or there's a ban trying to happen in Texas, or Trulieve is doing their thing in Florida, or what's happening in Georgia. I don't even know All that's going on. And then the layer of like what's happening in the macro environment with this administration and the tariffs and all that. So I don't know what direction do you want to go with it?

AnnaRae Grabstein: 9:23

So I don't know what direction do you want to go with it? Yeah, I want to talk about what's happening in the global economy and how the new trade war that was announced yesterday is going to impact cannabis, because I think that there is a like. Is that? Yes, iipr, one of the largest cannabis public REITs, has lots of defaults of large public and private companies. Yes, that's news. Another prominent California company is in receivership. This time it's voluntary. Yes, that's news too. And, as you mentioned, lots of hemp stuff. But really, the trade war that Trump announced yesterday is the news in cannabis and in the rest of the world, and what's so interesting about it, and why I want to talk about it today, is that this narrative around the trade war is about creating domestic manufacturing. That's what the Trump administration is talking about.

Ben Larson: 10:23

So creating jobs back at home, bringing everything back to the soil, repatriatizing everything.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 10:29

Yes, making America great by bolstering our manufacturing legacy and ensuring that the money that is spent in the US is going to companies that are creating in the US. That's the narrative.

Ben Larson: 10:44

Okay, I'm starting to see the connection here with our previous conversation, but the initial question that jumped in my head is like are those the jobs that Americans want? And maybe there are a lot of Americans that want those kind of blue-collar factory working jobs, but then I, you know, connect it with what we're talking about. Maybe that's what they'll have to have if all their white collar design work, therapy work well so.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 11:08

So let's take it a bit further.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 11:10

I think that what you're saying is is what needs to be true, for what this trade war's stated objective is to actually come to fruition, and, and so, if the point is is that the trade war creates manufacturing jobs and that makes America great, what is needs to be true about those manufacturing jobs, and what those manufacturing jobs need to be in order for America to be great as a result of them, is something different than they are now, because what you are alluding to is that Americans don't want manufacturing jobs right now, and the reason has been that, largely, if you have a manufacturing job, you are probably living close to the poverty line. You are struggling in a hourly role with not a lot of protection. It is not the 1950s, where working at the Ford plant was a path to homeownership. There's less homeownership than there ever has been before. So, really, what we're talking about, though, is that cannabis is already a largely domestic industry. There is no allowance to be importing cannabis into the US from other places With one exception and there is the hemp industry.

Ben Larson: 12:28

Right, and I don't actually know the exact status of this. We talk about the Farm Bill a lot, which is focused purely on domestic hemp, but there is murmurings of hemp coming from China, south America and otherwise coming into the states. I'm curious what's going to happen when these tariffs hit and how that might affect the businesses and or practices or prices of some of the suppliers in the hemp side of the business. And just real quick, in case no one's aware, I think list is accurate but I'm just going to go through it. There's a baseline tariff of of 10 on imports into the us. China's tariffs increased to 20. European union uh, 20. Japan, 24, which, god damn it, I better stock up on my japanese whiskey. South korea 20 percent. Vietnam 46 percent. Taiwan 32 percent. So uh, dennis o'brien, in in the audience, commented that chips and pharmaceuticals are very important. Taiwan a lot of chips coming from taiwan. Mexico and canada 25. And, uh yeah, steel, aluminum, automobiles, automobile parts all 25. This is nuts.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 13:53

Cars are gonna get really expensive if we take, if we really are trying to connect the dots here with our audience being people that are working in cannabis and hemp and the businesses that surround them what? What does this trade war mean? And I'd say that we already know we talk about it all the time that cannabis businesses are financially in a very tight spot. It's been hard to make a profit. There's been a lot of complicated oversupply in certain regions while there's undersupply in others, but there's not interstate commerce, so it's not flowing.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 14:25

But what we do know is that all the cannabis in the regulated market outside of hemp is being produced in the state markets where it is being sold.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 14:35

And if the trade war policy works, as the Trump administration is telling us it will, it means that manufacturing costs of labor will increase and that will mean that labor costs at cannabis companies will be forced up. And this is a hard time for that, when cannabis companies are already struggling to figure out how to have a profit and at the same time, because of the oversupply and because of what we'll talk about next time, because of the oversupply and because of what we'll talk about next, consumer confidence decreasing. Consumers are spending less on cannabis, buying less cannabis, and are really like starting to go more towards value products across the supply chain, not just in cannabis, but in all categories. So this is a scary thing, because what it feels like is that everybody's going to get squeezed, that producers are going to struggle to raise their prices, but they'll need to because their costs will go up and, at the same time, consumers aren't going to be able to afford what's being sold.

Ben Larson: 15:35

Because the truth is is that even if labor costs are increasing, they're not going to increase at the same pace as what's needed to metabolize all of the other increases and costs for consumers, in my opinion it's just an interesting confluence of the market, the cannabis market, and like where it's currently at, it's not, I mean, it's not in a good, great state currently right, and so it's like putting more pressure on it's certainly not going to help. But maybe it forces a conversation of like how do we actually make it tenable and how do we help. And there's two different ways. There's the. There's the business side, the private side. Like you know, you can consolidate and create efficiencies. You can launch value focused products, like we've seen cheap products on the market. You can go out to a dispensary right now and and buy a hundred milligram beverage for for less than eight dollars.

Ben Larson: 16:30

So there's alternatives out there, not to pump my side of the business, but if there are indeed politicians which I'm not fully convinced yet but if there's indeed politicians out there that support the category and they've already been made, made aware of, like how untenable the infrastructure is right now Like this will be a breaking point and unfortunately there will be a lot of casualties along the way. But maybe it forces a conversation for a better framework. I don't know. I'm going to be in Sacramento next week talking about some of this. I wasn't planning on talking about tariffs, but maybe now I will.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 17:05

But I think that the other winners that happen in the more short term, because policy reform is so slow. Is larger companies, because the fact is is that underscaled craft businesses in an environment like this really struggle.

Ben Larson: 17:37

It's harder to metabolize. What do we consider a large company in the cannabis industry?

AnnaRae Grabstein: 17:42

Because, by the measures of general commerce, we're all craft business that have reached 10 to $15 million of annual revenue per year, which is there's not a lot of them. There's so many more that are in that five to $10 million a year range. Yeah, I think it's. It's the companies that are above $10 million a year and that have the ability to consolidate and scale existing manufacturing with capacity. Because that's what this is going to mean is that you're going to need to do more with less.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 18:32

If your business is not built from the beginning to be able to do more and it's intended to always stay small, it will be very challenging to compete small. It will be very challenging to compete, and that means that ultimately, like what you see as a result of this is consolidated interest at the top. And yes, the top might still look like a small business in the eyes of a larger capitalist environment, but it will set the stage for those 10 to $20 million businesses rolling up together to consolidate further into larger, harder to compete with operators that are more resilient and focused. So it isn't that the Republican trade policy is going to break cannabis. I think that it's actually doing what it's designed to do, which is to favor big business and to reward capital over craft. That is the point yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

Ben Larson: 19:37

I I'm thinking about the, the journey that our company has gone on. Right, we've gone through a number of different waves in the industry. For a couple of years we focused, we were fortunate enough to be in a position to pare back, focus on efficiencies and building systems so that we could maximize the utility of each employee, which generally, with most companies, that's your biggest line item in your P&L. And now we're in this phase where you know it's a mixed bag. There's certainly restrictions happening here and there, but the category that we largely serve has been moving up and to the right, and so this year it's about building on those kind of metrics that make us feel a little bit better, a little bit more established as a company, but still focused on that employee efficiency and what that's allowed us to do.

Ben Larson: 20:28

I'm feeling like maybe we'll get ahead of it a little bit. You know, paying our across the board, our employees, you know from the manufacturing level up to the executives like just making sure that we're paying good living wages. And, you know, I think about like where we might have been in times past is like, yeah, the workforce might have been bigger, but we wouldn't have been paying everyone as well as we are, and so it's like, yeah, it's this catch 22 where it's like I hear you Like we can meet that moment and pay people what they need to be paid, but there's gonna be a lot of people that are out of work.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 21:01

it feels like yeah, and so in order to pay people more, it means that you have to be more efficient, which is a buzzword these days. But what does that really mean? It means more automation. It means AI. It means people doing only the things that people need to do and other levels of automation, ai and technology doing as much as as is possible to keep the humans doing human things yeah and and what those human things are, start to become less so.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 21:32

When we talk about bolstering domestic manufacturing, how much of that is actually going to be done by humans and um, and how? How fast can we even build that? I think you know in cannabis, we have seen how long it takes to build manufacturing as new markets have come on. We've seen the struggles to improve electrical infrastructure and power so that people could build cultivation facilities and manufacturing facilities all over the country, and one of the things that's so interesting about this conversation and then looking at cannabis is that the Trump administration is talking about bolstering domestic production, but cannabis is not only domestic, it's hyperlocal. It's like all these different state by state markets.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 22:17

So cannabis has been building domestic manufacturing on a state-by-state level incrementally over the past 10 years, with varying levels of success and in some cases and I remember before Pennsylvania passed its medical law, there were some Pennsylvania legislators that came to California to do this tour to learn about legal cannabis, and I met with some of them, and this was back in 2018. And a couple of these legislators two of them that I sat and had about an hour long conversation with really had absolutely no interest in cannabis at all. But what they liked about cannabis was that they were hoping that coal plants that had been abandoned would be able to be turned into factories for cannabis products, and they thought, okay, we should legalize so that we can use this existing, old, abandoned manufacturing infrastructure. So is cannabis a proof point to bolster domestic manufacturing? Has it created the economic pathways that the Republican policy thinks that manufacturing will inevitably create for the American worker?

Ben Larson: 23:33

I think it could. I mean, that certainly is a narrative right, like it's, if anything, it's an industry that is in high demand and can create a lot of jobs and a lot of manufacturing jobs or agriculture jobs. But, to your point, there's going to be that consistent pressure to refine that and make it more efficient over time. When you were talking, I was thinking about Huawei's dark factory that they have that basically spits out a new cell phone every second and it's an entire building that has no people in it. It's crazy.

Ben Larson: 24:06

I you know, we do hit this interesting tension in the cannabis space where, like the hyper localized nature of the industry, like I want to break down those walls, I want to like be able to, you know, move product from state to state and have more free commerce, right, and so it's like, after we achieve that, then US cannabis wants to go international, right, and then we start talking about internationalization again, and that's the interesting thing about a trade war, right, we can impose tariffs on other countries to force jobs back to the US, but then those other countries want to impose more tariffs on us, and so the likelihood of us being able to export becomes more challenging.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 24:53

Absolutely, and you're right that there is this narrative about wanting to be able to transport cannabis over state lines and then globally, and so it's almost the flip side of what we're talking about. And and yet I think that what we're seeing happening with US policy is not dissimilar from what we could see if federal legalization happened that, but was more of like a state's rights path, in that I think it could be very likely that even if there was US policy change that said, okay, now cannabis is legal, states can regulate it and states can come up with whatever policy that they feel is right for them, which has been a pathway to legalization that's been proposed, that it's very likely that states are going to say, actually, we don't want product from California and Oregon, or states could be imposing tariffs from other states to be able to import product into their state so that they can foster their own economic activity.

Ben Larson: 26:00

But then you start hitting constitutional issues there right Because of the dormant commerce clause and so you can't disincentivize commerce from one state to the next.

Ben Larson: 26:10

But this brings up an interesting conversation that is kind of layered in there, which is like states' rights versus federal preemption, and I think this is coming up a lot. So I want to just dwell on it for a moment. Because of the bans that are happening in different states and, as we said on our last episode or the episode before, like we are anti-ban. I'm not a fan of bans, right Like I like the opportunity that the hemp industry has presented for the cannabis plant, hemp industry has presented for the cannabis plant. However, we should not be trying to defend against these actions by saying that this federal law exists and therefore it preempts the state's rights, because the benefit that state's rights has granted us is the cannabis industry which predates, you know, this intoxicating hemp movement, and so like I just want people to be careful when they're out there being like, oh, federal law reigns, reigns, supreme. It's like, well then, we have the controlled substances act. That kind of fucks a lot of a lot of our industry. Yeah, you know it's.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 27:17

It's one of those two things can be true at the same time. Uh, that is so challenging to wrap our head around in life and in business, especially when it comes to policy stuff like this. Well, we've been talking a lot about kind of manufacturing and labor force as a result of what's happening with the trade war, but I think that it's also worth talking about consumer confidence amid tariff concerns and how that ties in to the cannabis industry and the products, because during COVID, there was this idea that cannabis was essential and the industry did very well, and the thought was that people were really stressed and so they needed their cannabis and we saw these big spikes.

Ben Larson: 28:01

There's also stimulus. That was happening.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 28:04

But it's maybe that it was the financial stimulus, that people actually had more money to spend, and so they chose to spend it on lots of things, and cannabis was just one of them. Exactly Because I think that what we are seeing and what the data shows is that consumer confidence has basically been on a downward trend since the financial stimulus ended during COVID, and that surveys are indicating that 80% of consumers are concerned about tariffs driving up prices on everyday goods, and this behavior, or this anxiety, is leading to changes of purchasing behavior. This behavior, or this anxiety, is leading to changes of purchasing behavior. In particular, consumers are trying to be more careful about spending on non-essential expenditures. So the question becomes are our THC beverages and our pre-rolls non-essential or are they essential? And what are consumers going to do when it comes to their spending patterns with weed?

Ben Larson: 29:06

I think it's as essential as I'm going to choose my words wisely here I'm to try a wide breadth of categories, right, so like caffeine, alcohol, therapeutics, vitamins, whatever, what you purchase within those categories is more fungible, right, and so it's like. I think this drives to again like low cost generic products, unfortunately, days of bud light and folgers and and what have you, not to get super depressing. But like, people want their cannabinoids. So if they can get good, clean, cheap cannabinoids, so if they can get good, clean, cheap cannabinoids, they're going to purchase them. Yeah, you're going to see the top line revenue might drop, the craft products, the premium products might suffer, but I don't think cannabinoids are going away. It's just a shift in consumer purchasing.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 29:59

Yeah, I don't by any means think it's going away. A shift in consumer purchasing? Yeah, I don't by any means think it's going away. But this idea of continuation of depression in the markets, of pushing prices down within, the yeah, the push, pull of prices, of costs of production going up is is just very complicated Because I I think ultimately that consumers are going to be purchasing less cannabis.

Ben Larson: 30:26

Yeah, um, well, I mean this.

Ben Larson: 30:29

This is a motivation because they're purchasing less of everything, right, I I have to think that the general macro trend in in what they're purchasing you know, alcohol versus cannabis like that also comes into play, and I do believe that we have more people picking up cannabis instead of alcohol, especially as we progress into the future, and so, absolutely so, it's providing options for those people.

Ben Larson: 30:53

But as we we talk about all this and how it all comes together is like we kind of need the the, the barrier, the state barriers, to drop so that we can create concentration of manufacturing and production, because that's where economies of scale is, where you actually get to start creating products that people can afford. We've seen it in the beverage category. Right, we used to be like who wants a $10 five milligram drink in a dispensary? Nobody, like that's just not a price point that people want to pay like, even people that are super enthused about the product category. But you get it into the open market where you can find a manufacturer in the Midwest and serve the entire you know, the entire country, and all of a sudden you're getting to price points that that people can palletet and so like we need that across cannabis, because the way that the market is designed today it's like it's like sure it works in california when you have like the fifth largest economy in the world, it doesn't fucking work in in rhode island.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 31:56

We need to create that opportunity for for the category and yet that is the push and pull, because that is also a reduction of manufacturing jobs. Because when you consolidate manufacturing across markets, less factories, less production.

Ben Larson: 32:13

You, you take venture capital out of the equation and then you will see like what a reduction in jobs looks like, which is going to happen like the other. The other side of the coin with consumer confidence is is lack of investment. People pull their money, put it into cash, which means a lot less venture right, and this industry is built on venture capital although I do think that's changing.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 32:35

I think that we're seeing a lot of more. I mean, we already know that the money that's been coming into cannabis predominantly is now debt, not venture, and the reason for that is that there has been a loss of confidence that these types of businesses are venture scalable in most cases, in most situations. That doesn't mean that there aren't some types of businesses that are venture scalable, and cannabis and I just I want to be clear that, like I remain resolute and confident on indicators and these things that are moving all around us affect cannabis businesses in very specific ways, and it's that that we're not seeing in the news. Seeing lots of coverage about the trade war and we're seeing coverage about one-off little bits of cannabis, news of a business failing or a transaction here or there or a new policy turning on, but what we're not seeing is the is the connection between what's happening in the world and what's happening in our local cannabis.

Ben Larson: 33:56

oh my god, yeah, such a good example of this.

Ben Larson: 34:00

Right, it's like it's like what the news likes to highlight you and it's this highly politicized like news cycle that we're in, like this, this whole signal gate thing, where you know they were talking about like bombing the hooties or whatever. It's like what you get out of the news, like what does that even mean is. It's like, oh, like they were using the wrong platform, but but like what was that actually about? And it was actually about like moving goods around Europe, mostly Europe and Africa and the Suez Canal, and if anyone's receiving goods or products that come through there, which most of it's going to Europe, but like some of it comes to the US or some goes to Europe and then to the US. So like how does that impact your business? And like these are the things that the mass media is not talking about, but it's like super important to our business. And so I'm really appreciating you kind of bringing this topic up today, because this is the kind of conversation that we should be having as as business leaders.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 34:53

Yeah, I mean we have to. We have to pay attention, we have to be constantly thinking about what the solutions are to respond, but also weighing what the different potential outcomes are. This idea of intended consequences versus unintended consequences and asking ourselves the question constantly about what needs to be true for this other thing to be true is kind of what takes our thinking to the next step. So if we believe that the industry is going to go a certain direction.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 35:20

what needs to be true is kind of what takes our thinking to the next step. So if, if we believe that the industry is going to go a certain direction, what needs to be true in order for that to happen? And and understanding if everything else that's happening outside of the cannabis industry in policy in Washington, in in the factories in China does that support our hypothesis on where we think the industry is going? And those are the conversations that I'm excited to be having and I hope that people have enjoyed our ranting as we've thought about this.

Ben Larson: 35:49

It kind of showed itself throughout the conversation is is the challenge of where are we going and who is we right? And and I think this gets lost in cannabis and hemp and as we converge and again, I know this is one of your favorite topics, but like we have to accelerate the regulatory convergence of hemp, cannabis, or at least the conversation, and we we need the leaders of both sides of the us hemp roundtable, of ncia, attach, uscc, aha everyone needs to get together and like start thinking about what a unified future looks like and what that conversation should look like in congress. When we have this kind of chaotic opportunity to insert a new narrative right, like whether you're right or left, trump or not or never, we have what we have and we need to make some progress here. And we need to think about what RFK's position is and I know it's been flip-flopping or what Trump has said about the cannabis industry and how he's thinking about all this.

Ben Larson: 36:55

And how do we take this labor conversation and make it a pillar of why cannabis and hemp need to be legalized. And we need to take down these internal barriers and I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I will die on that hill. We need to take down the state barriers because, like many of the businesses, are not scalable. And we've talked about the MSOs, right, like we talk about big companies and their likelihood to survive, maybe one as we've identified like yeah sure, gti, but I don't think any of this is going to help all the others who are running, you know, negative on their P&L and balance sheet.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 37:37

Well, you are right to say that I do believe in the importance of looking at a policy-based regulatory convergence, of looking at the full industry as one the cannabis industry and the hemp industry are ultimately a cannabinoid industry but the reason that I think that, and where I think it needs to start, is because, ultimately, it's about the consumer, and the consumer doesn't know the difference, and the consumer is thinking about form factors, experience and access, and that that is where we have to start, with the consumer.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 38:08

We must center on the consumer all the time, because those are the voices, the stories, the motivations that are going to be able to drive policy change stories, the motivations that are going to be able to drive policy change, and the ripples of that policy change obviously have massive implications into what the business opportunities are, to how businesses build supply chains, how they go to market, how they price, how they distribute all of those things. And yet, though, the stories of distribution and supply chain are not moving the needle Policy makers to get anybody to care, and I just I think that the narrative must focus on consumers If, if we want to, if we want to ever believe that progress could happen, the story is going to be about the people.

Ben Larson: 38:57

Yes, I 100% agree. Story is going to be about the people. Yes, I 100% agree. I'll take it one step further, though, and say that if you are in the business of strengthening or building walls, I'll accept that maybe you can defend it as your fiduciary responsibility, but you're on the wrong side of history. We need to break down the walls. We need to build for the future, and if we're not doing that, we're going to be stuck in this conversation for fucking ever, and it's going to get really old.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 39:34

Yeah, and it already is getting old, and while I don't disagree, I just also am skeptical of the ability for such broad, sweeping change to happen, and have just come from 20 years of paying attention to cannabis policy and seeing how small incremental progress is the only thing that we have ever been able to do, and so, while, of course, having our eye on this prize of even a global market, not just a national market, is something that is both exciting and hopeful, it doesn't feel within reach at this point, and so I think working within the constraints of what we have now is the short-term strategy that everybody needs to deal with is great. Yes, let's have our eye on the prize, but let's also be realistic about what we can do today, what's coming at us in the next two to 18 months because of the global macroeconomic environment, and let's also make sure that we're responding and not reacting.

Ben Larson: 40:46

I hear you. I'm all about the incremental wins, right, and a lot of the beverage wins I see from a macro perspective as those incremental wins and it's causing a lot of infighting, right, because people want those big, sweeping changes and they see an incremental step as like a give yeah, not enough not enough, but I'm and I'm gonna, I'm gonna do some nice connecting back to, like, one of the topics that was disconnected from this and that's like eft, like the emotionally focused therapy.

Ben Larson: 41:22

Right, it's like the whole goal and I'm going to read this is of eft is to help people recognize and express their emotions in a way that fosters connection and emotional safety in couples, that aims to transform negative interaction patterns and build stronger emotional intimacy, and so this actually connects. I could go on about how this connects into your like business relationships, how this connect hemp and cannabis, but I think it's important to understand that we all generally want the same thing. We have our own lived experiences and our own biases. But if we find like triggers of like infighting is like okay, this is the infighting, is the enemy.

Ben Larson: 42:05

Like we need to find alignment and like now we now is the time, we are at the tipping point, as dennis o'brien in our audience said, it's like we need to create these triggers for ourselves in this industry hemp or cannabis or marijuana, whatever you want to call it and use those triggers to be like what is the commonality here? How do we get to it? How are we both open to why we are acting the way we are and maybe some people are just assholes and they don't belong in the industry or conversation, and I am fully accepting of that, but I think, on the whole, the majority of us want to see cannabinoids succeed. I think now's the time, like I just have this sense of urgency and anyone on my NCIA board understands that right now, or in my company or like anywhere that I'm interacting with people I just have this like 2025 is a year for me where like urgency is just like top of mind.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 43:01

Yeah. So policy must shift, otherwise the math doesn't math and um, otherwise we risk endlessly replicating the same broken cycles that we have seen manifest over and over again. So, yes, 100, don't stop, don't give up. But there's this difference between what we can control and what we can't control, and so, as business leaders, we can control our actions, our words, our ideas of how we move forward to try to get policy changed. The other thing you can control is maybe it's been for president what do you guys think?

AnnaRae Grabstein: 43:38

These are the things it's that we have to be careful of, like how big we go in our thinking in terms of what we can change compared to our actions in our daily lives and the way that that manifests in our business. And so that's that's the constant is is getting back to the core and the center of who you are. What are you you trying to do? Taking in all of the information, connecting the dots and responding in a thoughtful way that is hopefully going to open up opportunities in your business and your teams for the consumer, and that are ethically and morally aligned with the direction that we think the policy needs to be moving.

Ben Larson: 44:19

Yeah, I'll just cap it off by saying that we can do hard things. We can do hard things and you, the audience, you can do more than you believe. Hell yeah.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 44:32

I feel like we've said enough yeah.

Ben Larson: 44:36

Is anyone listening? Is this thing on? No, I'm good, I feel fulfilled. That was fun. A little bit of a departure, as we tend to do sometimes, from the typical news, the typical conversations. But let us know what you think, Anne-Marie. Any last words before we sign off here.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 44:56

I think that leadership is about stretching the bounds of our imagination and really making sure that we are metabolizing lots of outside information in order to be able to move it through our own process, our own perspectives, and to form opinions. So what you're hearing us do today is go through the process of metabolizing some major news and shifts and thinking about how that relates to the work that we do every day, and my hope is that we're inspiring others to do the same and to broaden their horizons of their information and the way that they process it.

Ben Larson: 45:36

Amen. And if you want to do that, and you want to do it live, in person, I will be in Sacramento at the NCIA Stakeholder Summit next Thursday in the afternoon. Reach out, yeah, I'll meet you there. And if that's not your sauce and you want to get on the hill, we have Lobby Days coming up in May as well. So a lot of time to get involved. And now is the moment. Big shout out to our teams at Vertosa and Wolfmeyer, our producer, eric Rossetti. Thank you for keeping the lights, the mics and everything moving so smoothly. Thank you for tuning in to High Spirits. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, share, do all the things, give it to your family, your friends, your colleagues. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, please leave us a review. Very helpful Five stars. That would be great, thank you. Otherwise, folks, as always, stay curious, stay informed and, most importantly, keep your spirits high Until next time. That's the show.