not focused so much on today's stock price. The
best thing I can say is short term voting machine
, long term weighing machine. Um and so today
we're being voted off the island. But we're over
time trying to build the weightiest media company that has
the longest term weight. That will create value for
all of our stakeholders. And we really think we
put the pieces on the board to execute into the
U. S. Demand growth curve. That's really
maybe an inning two of a decade long story.
And then, I mean not so hard too much
on the stock price. But it is fascinating to
me that if you look at how analysts are rating
your company, you have 20 by recommendations. zero
holds, zero sells. The average price target is
about 117% upside from its current price But still your
stock is down almost 46% over the past year.
What are investors missing? I think it's a great
opportunity for the buyers. We think there's a lot
of value to be created over 3-5 years. Remember
this is us, cannabis. So it doesn't trade
on the new york stock exchange because the rules don't
allow us to trade there. It's hard for the
average investor to access the stock. You can't buy
it on Robin Hood and there's a lot of misinformation
out there in the market. So it ends up
being a pretty thin sort of stock that's a little
bit of liquid. We are focused on the business
, not the stock focused on the stock when we
sell equity. So if I was a shareholder,
you might look at what we did in 2021,
which was Cell$160 million$33 us to share Raised
$250 million dollars of equity at the lowest cost of
capital in the industry. And now we put our
head down and we're going to execute on that.
And what happens in the short term is less impactful
for us. We believe, go ahead. Sorry
, just real fast. We believe states like Virginia
, new york, new Jersey Connecticut, all of
which have adult use recreational programs coming that have not
started is a monstrous new bull market cycle essentially for
cannabis in the US, It will continue to propel
what is now a$25 billion$50 billion. And
you talk about stocks and things, we think 25
billion to 50 billion of annual revenue should create approximately
50 billion more of the market cap. That's how
we're thinking about this over 3-5 years. And we
don't see any stopping that demand from the American consumer
. Well, Ben, I wonder how you execute
on this strategy with regulatory uncertainty on the federal level
here. You mentioned, a handful of individual states
and the regulatory environment is such that you have to
make changes based on state to state to adhere to
whatever is legal and not legal in one state versus
another state. President, biden is set to give
his State of the Union address tonight. Certainly we
know that it's going to focus a lot on high
prices for consumers. I'm sure he will. You
mentioned the war in Ukraine right now, but despite
the fact that proponents of legalization of marijuana have been
pushing it for years, do you think we're going
to hear anything from him on a federal legalization of
marijuana? Well, the most important thing for me
, for us, for our business, for our
people are there are 40,000 Americans sitting in jail right
now for marijuana offenses, that should be out of
jail. 4000 of those are in federal prison and
the president in one motion could get them out of
jail. It makes no sense for us to have
a business where we're all gainfully employed where people are
behind bars for essentially the same thing. Um,
but I've learned that common sense and logic are more
difficult in D. C. We are focused on
the state to state markets because of a couple of
key things, Monstrous tax revenue, for example,
Illinois will create$500 million dollars of taxes this year
. Far more than alcohol, monstrous job growth essentially
cannabis is an economic job stimulus package for these states
that have not had this kind of capital investment or
jobs. So the tidal wave of taxes and jobs
are very important in capital markets. And so that's
why we see a lot of momentum for this market
. And let's focus on the state level markets.
Because your fourth quarter revenue, you generated revenue from
15 states, your most recent state that you expanded
too was Minnesota late last year. What are you
viewing next? Where are you going to go?
We see a tremendous amount of opportunity within the platform
now. So Minnesota, you mentioned about six million
people live in the state. Today is the first
day any medical patients in Minnesota can buy flour.
That's a product that people like for medical patients.
So it's just the beginning of the opening up of
prohibition in the state of Minnesota Virginia just started earlier
this year. So we're seeing sort of the opening
up of the rest of the country, but it's
still the southeast where there's not a lot of cannabis
reform and there's a lot of opportunity for new folks
to get into the industry and create wealth. You
can change a lot of the economic cycle by creating
wealth in new entrepreneurs