Catalyst CEO Elliot Lewis on Growth Through Confrontation and Suffering – Cannabis Business Executive

Elliot Lewis is the co-founder and CEO of Long-Beach, California-based retailer Catalyst Cannabis Company, and a prolific poster of social media videos in which he colorfully relates the many outrages allegedly perpetuated upon Catalyst by local and state politicians and bureaucrats he says are intent upon its destruction, and also by colossal cultivator Glass House Brands, which Lewis recently sued claiming wide-scale diversion of product to the illicit market on the part of Glass House and others utilizing “burner distribution” methods, to the detriment of Catalyst and the entire California cannabis market. Glass House responded with a counter-suit accusing Catalyst, Lewis, and fellow Catalyst co-founder and attorney Damian Martin, of defamation, setting the stage for a courtroom confrontation that Lewis argues could (and should) rip the cover off a corrupt political and business culture that he believes is engaged in a coordinated effort to dominate the California cannabis market for years to come.

Responding to a recent outreach by Cannabis Business Executive, the busy manager of this fast-moving cannabis company gave an hour of his time to talk about the qualities that differentiate Catalyst, why he’s retail-only in a very challenging California market that he still believes in, how he is growing the company on fumes, and the extent to which his antagonistic style is both strategic and authentic, but most of all a fight for truth.

Catalyst by Litigation

Catalyst has advanced its retail footprint as a result of aggressive litigation in reaction to barriers put in its way by local municipalities. South Cord Holdings is the parent of Catalyst, which was founded following an aborted partnership with Connected dating back to 2015. Completely unapologetic for doing what he had to do to build Catalyst into the company he envisions it becoming, Lewis insisted he never goes looking for a fight, and that it was the brutal lessons he learned firsthand from his experiences in the politics of cannabis that ultimately stiffened his resolve not to run from fights, but to engage.

“Before I got into cannabis, I thought I knew about politics, but as we’ve applied in all these local processes, we’ve sued like 15 cities,” said Lewis. “A third or more of the licenses that we have come from litigation. It’s been a very successful strategy, because after we didn’t win, we saw that they did something that we thought was inappropriate, and usually it’s been the case that it has been settled by, ‘Here, just take a license and go away.’ But as I’ve seen the processes, it’s grossed me out, and here’s the part that really hurts. Sure, you could say it’s been successful, but to me, it’s not successful. Our workforce is unionized, so they’re very well taken care of, but our executive team makes about the same as our lowest guy, so in what sense are we successful? If they gave us a little tax relief, maybe that would change.”

That said, he has continued to open new Catalyst stores. “We’ve got 18 open now, and starting July 7, we should open one a week for the next six weeks,” he said. “They’re mostly all built out just waiting on a few little snags like ADA, fire sprinklers, that kind of stuff. By the end of summer, our store count should be 24 or 25. Originally, we were built to apply and then build out, but now the market has shifted so much we seem to just be in acquisition mode. But we don’t have any money, so we’re coming up with creative ways [to acquire], like if we hit certain benchmarks for the store, we earn some equity, and then we have an option to buy later…if we ever could get some money around here.”

Making do with nothing has been a pointed accomplishment for Lewis. “One of the things I’m most proud of is that we’ve got to where we got,” he said. “If we’re not the second largest retailer in the state, we will be at the end of the summer, and we did that by spending 10 cents on the dollar of anybody else in cannabis. Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but we’ve been a little train that could with this radical idea early on that we wanted to be a profitable company.”

He paused briefly. “I’m just being mildly sarcastic. So, now the cannabis landscape has changed, and all these guys that were pulling $20 and $50 million [loans] because they had a lot of overhead are being cut off. We raised a tiny bit of money, an infinitesimal amount compared with any of our opponents, and the cool part is we’re used to playing without money. So, in so much as the conditions have got harder, such is life and what I tell the crew is, ‘We’re American Ninja Warriors; do you want to run a 40-yard dash, or do you want to take it to the obstacle course that we call California cannabis. So now a lot of the MSOs are leaving the state, and a lot of people are just shutting up shop. They basically made nearly impossible conditions, and we’ve just been able to work our way through it with nimbleness and just hard work and suffering.”

Lewis refers to suffering frequently, almost as though it is a rite of passage for success in the cannabis industry. “My joke around the office is anybody can acquire a store with money, which doesn’t take any skill,” he said. “But we’re acquiring most of these stores for almost no money. We have to take on the op-ex, of course, so we’re just creatively putting together deals, but I believe in the California market. I think it will one day be the greatest cannabis market on the planet, but our politicians have done a good job of fucking it up.

“And it’s all one market,” he stressed. “There’s the black market and the legal market, and people talk about them like they are two markets, but it’s one market, with one just taxed a little more than the other one. At the end of the day, I believe there will always be a bougie black market. If it’s 70 percent today, I think it goes to 10-15 percent over the next decade, but the politicians are slow to move, and don’t move until they have to, and with a shift of the excise tax to the retailer at the end of the year, that seems to be really knocking people out.”

Catalyst has only benefited. “Not only are we getting new stores that people are opening but they don’t know quite what to do with, and then realize the market is deteriorating,” said Lewis, “but we’re also getting stores from people or companies that are leaving the state, and stores that have failed.”

I asked Lewis how he is dealing with the shift in excise tax payment. “We’re doing our best,” he said. “It gets paid quarterly, so you have got to plan for it. Right. For example, we’re opening six stores, but I have other stores that are break-ground ready that I won’t build out anytime soon just to take a measured approach to try to right-size it. We might raise some capital. I will say that institutional money is at least talking to us. They used to look down on us, and funny enough, some of the people that passed on us – again, I’m under an NDA on another deal that’s in receiver – so I’m having fun with that. On New Year’s Eve, I always hang out with my family – I have four kids and a wife – and we have our own little house party and dance party. After they all went to bed at about one in the morning, and I basically sent everybody that didn’t loan us money an email on our year-over-year performance. I admit it was a little bit of a fuck you, but it was also a little bit of, ‘There’s always another chance.’

I just think people misread the industry and didn’t understand it,” he added. “Policy is terrible, but that’s what excuses are for, and yeah, we’re fighting to effectuate change, but at the end of the day we’ve been staying nimble, and we’ve been lucky that, as the lenders put it, our customer acquisition costs are very low. I think people are attracted to our message, but I think one of the real basic things that we’ve done is low corporate overhead. I’m proud to say I’m the lowest paid CEO in cannabis that I’m aware of. All I take is healthcare, I never made a dollar since we went legal in 2016. I live cheap off a few rental properties, I borrow some money from friends from time to time to pay my bills, and that’s it.”

It is a company-wide ethos. “We got everybody here to buy into that philosophy and believe in the mission,” said Lewis, “and once you work here for a little while, we give you some stock options, because that’s all we really have to pay is equity. We have about 28 people that work at HQ, and half of them started as budtenders, receptionists, or interns. We’ve built up this team of Spartans, and little by little we keep advancing one door at a time. There are a couple of other people out there advancing, but I suspect it’s going to get worse over the next few months barring some massive policy change, because the market is in capitulation in California, and most people are quitting. They’re just caving in and giving up the keys.”

Ironically, the enmity Catalyst generates suing cities never lasts, claimed Lewis. “Every city that we have sued now loves us,” he said. “We’ve actually proven that we are the best operator, and they like our community outreach, which is a big part of what we do, and we spend a lot of money on it. The reason that lenders passed on us were small margins, unionized workforce, high community outreach, and it doesn’t make sense to them. But I actually think the cannabis industry is one of the rare places you can develop a culture where you can monetize goodwill.

“So, am I going to get better pricing than some Chad at an MSO,” he asked rhetorically. “Yes, I am, because the brands are like, ‘We want to see this guy do good.’ Look, I’m not saying that we don’t engage in politics, and that there haven’t been a few times that it’s been useful. But I’m not asking for any special treatment, and we sued a shitload of cities. And there’s a long track record of cities disliking us for suing them, and then when we got in, they love us because we’re fixing up the community, doing great things developing blocks, and we’re paying a ton of taxes into the coffers. We’re some of the largest taxpayers in some cities. With the ones we really had to scrap our way into through litigation, there was some animus at the beginning, but as soon as we open, and we move really quickly on the building projects, we hit the ground running, we’re still there, we’re timely with our payments, even though we don’t like to pay, and it’s been a funny process where we even say, ‘Yeah, they fucking hate us, but they’ll love us later.’”

Expansion by Opportunity

Starting in Long Beach, Catalyst has steadily expanded its retail footprint to include place as far as San Bernadino and Pomona. I asked Lewis if the strategy is planned or opportunistic. “Right now, it’s wherever the opportunity is,” he said. “Basically, I just wanted to get one store in Long Beach. We ended up getting six, but I probably still have one too many. I sold off two at the peak of the market, and that helped fund the rest of it. Our next stop was Bellflower, and from there we just went city by city. We were stronger in LA County, and branched out into Riverside, and now it is really opportunity driven. Marina was an opportunity, Patterson was an opportunity, Watsonville was an opportunity.

“It’s still a about two three-year process,” he added. “The doors that are opening now we’ve been working on since about 2020. Besides the tax problem in California, the local municipal governments are trash, the policy of opening the door is trash, and the hidden tax is ridiculous, with all the building codes and all the other stuff. Basically, we’re driven by where the market takes us, and then it’s also a little Rich Dad, Poor Dad thing, where I wish we had some more money now, but not having the financing originally forced us to be fiscally disciplined, turn a profit, go all in, turn a profit, go all in, turn a profit, go all in. It’s like riding a wave; you don’t want to get too far out front, or you won’t get in the barrel, and if you get too slow you’re going to get thrown over. Always keeping the right pace is hard to do, but it’s been a big part of it.”

The big picture is also a mitigating factor. “It just seems like everything’s tumbling out, and as far as some of these big MSOs go, I don’t think they have a strategy,” noted Lewis. “I think you’re going to see a whole bunch of different players that rise up from the ashes similar to the internet bust, because most of these MSOs – and I won’t name anyone specifically, especially because I’m doing deals with them and have to tone it down a notch – but their strategy is to build up a political wall and live in a padded room, and they’re not ready for a knife fight.

“Sure, there may be federal legalization and Big Pharma might come in and takes us all out,” he added, “but putting that aside, what I think will happen is that everybody who makes it in California – or a good chunk who make it in California – will have the opportunities, and all these guys who built-up moats and pulled-up the castle drawbridges and thought that if you just passed good politics, you didn’t need to actually compete in a fair and free marketplace, we’re going to eat them up. They’re leaving California for a reason. They’re not built for a street fight. They’re not built for a knife fight. But I think there’ll be a lot of brands that aren’t MSOs yet, or maybe they’re barely tapping into some other states, that will come out of California, and slowly be able to march East, because from my perspective, what I see on the MSO side, and this is generalizing a little, is that they’re built for non-competition, and I don’t think that can persist. Eventually, they’re going to have to get in the street fight, and when that happens, I don’t know if they’re built in a way that they can succeed in a competitive environment.”

A Retail-Only Model

Lewis and his team have embraced a somewhat unique cannabis retail model. “We are retail only,” said Lewis. “The reason we did it originally was in 2016, we basically placed a bet, and that bet was that they were giving out these cultivation licenses like hotcakes, and retail licenses are locally controlled, and they’re a little more limited. Yes, we have a big black market and much more competition, but that was our decision at the end of the day. We sold off a few legacy grows, partnered with a big company on one of them, and have a little bit of stock in that company now. Our position was, ‘Let’s grab the retail and capture the supply chain.’

“What I like about that is not having any house brands,” he added. “I’ve actually seen house brands deteriorate people’s retail because they try to force certain products down the consumer’s throat, and I like the freedom of being retail only. Of course, people made fun of us because it was a huge cultivation, but we just kind of predicted in a good way that prices were probably coming down on the cultivation side, so let’s grab the retail. And we’ve always played with small margins, but just having the freedom to carry whatever I want and bring the consumer what they want is a big advantage.”

But the advantage extends beyond freedom. “A lot of guys push house brands, but it’s usually some guy – not a cannabis guy – sitting there looking at a spreadsheet,” explained Lewis. “Our margins are high 30s, and used to be barely 30, but theirs is probably 50, and they look at a spreadsheet and say, ‘If we’re vertical [the margins] will be 73.’ Well, that may be true today, but over time their business is half what it was, so they’re losing. That’s why we’re retail-only in California. We did win a couple [of licenses] in Illinois in the lottery, but I’m slow to get out there. I believe in a California-first strategy, especially since we’re homegrown, and then we’re just little-by-little going to continue to gain a decent market segment here before we travel.”

Managing the nuances of those freedom margins is a constant task, especially with no money to speak of. “We’re shortening the hours in a couple of slow-moving stores,” said Lewis. “I check in with the stores every day, even throughout the day. Even when I get on a long call like this, I might even peek in especially in the new stores. The oldest stores kind of found a rhythm, but with the newest stores, the first goal is to get this thing to even, and then once it’s even, I could worry about advancing some more.

“Obviously we carry all the popular brands,” he continued. “We also do our best to carry craft farmers, legacy brands. There are certain brands we won’t carry, but that’s another conversation. We used to carry 159 brands, but that was getting expensive, because the inventory was kind of beating us up, so we just cut it down to around 125. I’ve made really good alliances with the brands. We have our own distribution that goes to our 18 facilities, so [the brands] get one drop, which is nice, and we do a lot of volume, which is nice. We’re ‘Weed to the People,’ so we pass it on to the customer the best we can, and by buying in bulk and selling a lot of volume, we make up what we can’t get in margins by offering the best product at the best price.”

Catalyst brings other advantages to bear, added Lewis. “I wouldn’t really call them sleepers,” he said, “but we built up a few things that are unique to us and that sell really, really good in our footprint that you might not see as the top sellers on Headset. But one of the hardest things that I have to do is…I probably get a DM a day that says something to the effect, ‘We love what you’re doing, we’re a legacy brand here,’ they’re probably struggling, and they want to get on the shelf. As much as we’d love to get to every single one, it’s one of those sad tragedies. We do try to give everybody a hearing and everybody has a shot to get on, but right now we’re at about 125 brands, which was a lot, and it takes a lot of work to carry that many brands, but we basically carry a variety of everything, and we don’t worry about anybody competing with our house brands, which is a big advantage.”

Summer of Pain at the Catalyst Academy

Still, with expansion comes more suffering. “Internally, I’m calling it the Summer of Pain, but externally I’m calling it the Summer Academy,” joked Lewis. “Scaling is super-hard because I don’t hire people when we need them. I hire them after we need them, which is the effed-up part of it. To open one [store] a week, the crew that’s there has to take it on until these stores get even. That risk requires everybody to go all in and put in those 10-12-hour days to make it work.

“Do we have every blind spot covered,” he continued. “No. Are our displays always perfect? No. Is our online ordering always perfect? No. But I’m not going to overspend, and at the end of the day I’m going to suffer when we open these new stores, and God bless everybody that’s bought into what we’re doing, they’re going to suffer, too; we’re all going to suffer together. And then if we get to a place where we get more people and then calibrate, calibrate, calibrate. It never ends, you got this machine, you’re calibrating every time, and you’re trying to suck as much juice out of it as you can.”

The juice-sucking takes many forms. “We did heat maps for the GM to manage, and then we figured out if we did it internally by the exact hour and the exact amount of people that should be on the floor, there was a savings there,” said Lewis. “We’re working on digital tagging options because we have people that are tagging all these different things. It’s just cutting costs, cutting costs, cutting costs, and we don’t have any high-level executive pay in the company. What we decided to do as a company is take guys that are really smart in the cannabis industry that maybe don’t have as formalized an education as some do and build a company with their will and their grit and their determination and their abilities. Especially when it comes to purchasing and understanding the culture, I’ll take any of my guys over some Chad from the GAP or Urban Outfitters or whatever industry they came from. They don’t know the culture and the plant and what the customer is buying, or why we should carry something and why we shouldn’t. The people that we basically train – our Spartans, I call them – are more valuable anyway. I think a lot of this got lost because people didn’t understand the culture at all, and cannabis is a very unique culture, and you have to respect the game.

“I think it’s a cool message to say as a company that over half the people that work up here came from the stores,” he added with pride. “There’s isn’t exactly a big carrot right now, but you can work your way up, and we always want to promote from within as much as we can. The really hard part of scaling, like I said, is that you have to scale without the people, then you hire the people, and I think most people did it the reverse way. They built the cannabis companies from the top and then went out and got the asset, overpaid for them, and screwed the whole thing up.

“You can’t hire people before you can afford them and hope you run under the football,” he added. “I just don’t think it’s a good way to do business. You could play with it a little bit and watch the new store super close. As soon as it gets even, you can take a deep breath. The hope is that they start cash-flowing. But we’re going to be pushing a lot of stores up the hill through the end of the year, and that’s probably going to suck all the profit from the other side. If we can turn those by the first quarter of next year, we will be in a position where we have more cash flow than we have today, and hopefully we can go out and grab another round of assets.”

I asked Lewis about the current state of pricing, and if the market has bottomed out. “The flower price has gone back up,” he said. “Our pricing stayed the same, and part of the Glass House lawsuit is just that. Look, they’re an easy target because they have former law enforcement and they’re politically connected, and I don’t want to be QANON, but I think this is actually all part of the plan.”

Busting the Matrix

The allegations Catalyst has levied against Glass House are delineated, if not proven, in the complaint, but Lewis feels no compunction to hold back on the subject, as his many videos on the subject can attest. “Due to the burner distribution system where they claim plausible deniability – which we’re going to put on trial – they’re basically breaking even by having a $50 million piggy bank,” he said during our call. “That’s how badly they’re built. So, when they took the cultivation tax away in July, a lot of the black-market growers actually went out of business, because now they had to compete without the cannabis tax, and a healthy black market is better than actually what’s going on now. Ironically, a lot of those guys have gone into flipping Glass House, because Glass House cannabis is all over the country.

“I have solid rumors that it’s [available] all the way from Thailand to Costa Rica,” he added. “It’s just a ridiculous amount of product that they’re growing, and that was the thing. It’s a relief valve that everybody’s using a little bit, but what they basically did in my opinion – and this is where I’m speculating a little bit – is that  they went all in on the black market strategy, which is, ‘As long as we sell to this distributor, he takes the plausible deniability, hands it off to another distributor, it gets to the street and never comes into the retail, so we don’t even need to jar it up.’

“We’ll see if the bulk price of flower comes back down as so many people stopped growing,” he added, “because it really bottomed out last year and it’s seasonal. We’ll see what happens when they harvest in October, November, but this is always kind of the high-price time of year, and I’d say flower is the highest it’s been in two or three years. As far as the stores go, our prices have stayed pretty steady. There is a little bit of inflationary pressure, but our buy prices have stayed the same with all the brands. We have long-term relationships with them, so we haven’t really had an issue.

“It’s the bulk market, which is a fancy way of saying product that’s grown legally is going to end up on the black market,” he said pointedly. “So, if you’re Glass House and you have a million feet of canopy, you can grow with impunity, you have political connections, you have licenses, you can sell to a distributor that then sells to a burner distributor, and anybody with a hustle’s got 10 or 12 of those. They use straw men names, and those straw men don’t care. The CDFA is chasing ghosts, and by the time the DCC comes down on them, they give the guy 10k to drop in somebody else’s name and a lawyer tells them to shut up. The guy doesn’t care – he’s sitting in his mother’s basement – so that’s the state of California cannabis, and the state knows, the BCC knows, and METRC knows.

“In fact, we just subpoenaed METRC,” he added. “Obviously, they’re going to kick and scream and object to the subpoena, but I’m very confident about where the rubber meets the road, and that Glass House will say, ‘We sold it to a distributor, and that’s all we know.’ We believe there is information that is contrary to that, but just basic math tells you they’re not the market share that they claim to be. Everybody knows that, but while other people are under investigation, they’re getting the blind-eye treatment because of their political connections in Sacramento.”

It seemed to be the case from the get-go, beginning with the big lie of Prop 64. The one-acre cap loophole wasn’t a mistake, but something that was done. “One hundred percent,” responded Lewis. “To me, it’s not like a bunch of people sitting in a room twisting their mustaches. It’s just the power brokers having influence on a line here and there in a bill. And then, when you are Glass House and you’re a former law enforcement, and you’re hobnobbing with the Treasurer of the state, Fiona Ma, and hanging out with Gavin Newsom, I don’t know but I’m pretty sure their lobbyists are all buddies, and they’re not going to even look at you. Meanwhile, I know people under investigation for back-dooring an infinitesimal amount of what Glass House is back-dooring, so this whole idea that they’re picking winners and losers based on who their friends are, and then setting policy that’s going to benefit certain people and hurt other people, to me it’s problematic.

“And let me say this,” he added. “Graham (Farrar) and Kyle (Kazan) have always been really polite with me. I’ve met with them multiple times. To me, it’s just blatant disregard, because you know where canopy is going, and then adding a million feet in the face of it? I see where this is going. You’re going to add a million to two million and thee million, and your cronies are going to let you take interstate commerce, and to me that’s just a step too far.”

Public drama is not the point, he stressed. ‘Look, I’ve grabbed eyeballs before on purpose, and suing Glass House is not that, because there’s a part of the industry that sees this as snitching no matter what,” said Lewis. “It’s that you’re letting them reform the whole market, pick winners and losers, and break all the promises of Prop 64. And let’s be honest, if my information is correct, Axiom Advisors worked for them, Axiom is who opened up Santa Barbara County and  threw out the Tier 2 caps, and Axiom has Jason Kinney, who is the guy Gavin Newsom was busted with celebrating his 50th birthday at the French Laundry.”

Lewis claims to be a changed man as a result. “I used to be pretty calm and laid back, but yeah, when I do my Instagram posts, I go into my Macho Man Randy Savage mode, because that was my man when I was growing up,” he said. “I was a mix of gangster rap, punk rock music, and WWF wrestling, so I’m a product of that, but the sentiment is authentic, and the anger is really sadness manifested. You’re in the trenches with guys that aren’t making what they’re supposed to get paid because your only strategy to move forward is to underpay executives, and these are young kids that deserve to get paid more money.”

Catalyst and Beyond

Despite the lawsuits, Lewis appears to save most of his focus on exploiting the things that he believes give Catalyst a decided advantage over the Glass House Brands of the world. “The thing that’s still great about cannabis is that at the end of the day, they still have to lean on the culture, which they don’t have, and they need the customers,” he said. “We build loyalty because people see we’re sincere in our approach. If you’re customer and you had an unsatisfactory experience and you DM me, I’ll fix it myself. If somebody says, ‘I always come to your store and so-and-so was rude to me,’ I’ll talk to so-and-so.

“My rule is you’re always right as the customer, or you’re banned for life, and there’s no in-between,” he added. “If I find out a customer is not satisfied, I take it personally, and the stores know it. If someone had a fucked-up order, I don’t care what the reasoning is unless they call the receptionist a name or a racial slur, then they’re banned for life. But if they didn’t go there, and they were just we’re being a little bit of a dick, it’s our job to just suck it up, calm them down, do your best to get them out of the store happy, and then hopefully they come back. So, my rule is pretty basic: if I haven’t banned you for life, you’re right.”

In addition to the new stores opening, there are a few other bright spots. “One really cool thing that I almost didn’t believe is that I’m going to get about $3.8 million in ERC money in about three or four months,” he said. “And then what we’re working on now is called a Reggae. We’ll see if it works, but you can raise up to $20 million by going directly to people in what’s called a Reggae Offering. My idea is, why are we asking bankers for money? People like us, the brands like us, so let’s just take a Reggae straight to the people. So, we just started working on that, and if we’re lucky we’ll be ready to come to market with that in about 90 days. I don’t know if people want to invest in cannabis or not, but it’s worth a try.

I asked Lewis how he would use that money if he got it. “As fiscally responsible as I am now,” he said, adding that it will include opening more stores. “My goal for California might be 80 stores, maybe 100 stores, and that’s all you would want, so on a good day maybe we end up being five or eight percent of the market, and from there we can move east,” he said. “I hope the company outlives me. I’m not in this for an exit, but that’s not to say that there might not be a time when only an idiot wouldn’t exit because it’s inevitable and you see the writing on the wall.

“The real fuck-you money is not here yet,” he explained. “Everybody is for federal legalization, and it should have happened decades ago, but I’m concerned with the way that it happens. I can see the FDA and Big Pharma getting control over it. Just knowing what I know at the local level and a little bit at the state level, federal legalization isn’t going down without the big players getting in. So, tobacco and alcohol and pharma getting in and just bowling the game could very well happen, and as much as I think the conditions are hard and terrible now, what will the future bring when the fuck-you money gets here?”

I mentioned that there is a plausible argument to be made that the licensed dispensary model itself has a limited shelf-life. After all, beer and wine are sold everywhere, so why not weed? “Look, we’ll stay nimble, because who knows,” replied Lewis. “To me, the big risk is that we could get blown out at any moment. I can’t disagree, but we have a lot of really good allies, and maybe we will link-up in the future. It’s not something I’m thinking about in the short term. I’m just trying to get a footprint if there is an endgame here.

“And look, my goal here is to have a company that outlives me,” he added. “I’m not really in this for the money. I’m not going to get a new house; I’m not going to get a new car; I’m not going to buy any new watches. Catalyst means change, so what can we do to effectuate change, and capital is part of that. But if we can reimagine cannabis, and this unique business model can work in cannabis, maybe this is a little bit of a fantasy, but my hope is that by gaining market share we can continue to effectuate change in these communities not only through community service, but through political engagement. Look, the political system is run by capital, so as we get bigger, we’d love to effectuate political change. I suspect if we were big oil or alcohol, we already got our tax cut, right? That’s lobbying money, but I don’t think anybody in the cannabis world right now has gotten big enough to have that level of political influence.”

I noted that Lewis was easy to talk to, wasn’t rude, and seemed to know his business. It seemed to me that an honest civil servant or politician would want to work with someone who puts in the time and energy and actually does what they say they’re going to do.

“The sad reality that I’ve come to is that they’re almost all corrupt on some level, even the ones that are not legally corrupt but have been influence-peddled so much by having to be elected and the money that goes into the elections,” he replied. “They can’t see straight, they’ve lost who they are, and they just blow the same way as the political winds. I admit I do have my style with the language and everything, but what I’ve come to learn is that at the end of the day, the worst thing you can do in politics is tell the truth. I laugh because that’s all I really do. Yeah, I drop some f-bombs, but I just speak the truth out loud. My lawyer and co-founder will say to me, ‘Was anything you said not true?’

“And the really crazy part is that you’ll get politicians in a private room – I do all the time, get fucked-up with them, have a few drinks – and they’re like, ‘You’re right, it’s all messed up,” he continued. “They know privately, but publicly they put on a whole other face. They’re method actors. Half the shit they say they don’t even believe. And this is just from being in cannabis and interfacing with a lot of politicians and seeing the policy that I’ve come to learn all of this.

“What’s sad is that it’s also getting popular with the consumer,” he added. “Something broader is happening that people can’t quite put their finger on, and it manifests itself in different ways, from Bernie Sanders on the left to Trump on the right, and even Robert Kennedy Jr., who is saying some interesting stuff right now, is coming out against this pure orthodoxy. People have this sense that, ‘I know the government’s fucking me, but I don’t know how. I know the money’s running it, but I don’t know how.’ So, we speak truth to power, and there’s consequences for that. Free speech ain’t free.”