Even as both medical and adult use cannabis legalization has continued across the United States, growers and resalers have faced a number of challenges, like how to standardize and regulate a product that isn’t always easy to measure. In the CBD space in particular, it’s easy to end up with “hot” product where THC levels are too high to be legal.
Rick Kimball is tackling this issue head-on. He’s the president of Rymedi – a tech company building a trusted, secure, and compliant track and trace platform designed to meet the specialized regulatory needs of the hemp industry. Before founding Rymedi, he spent over 30 years as an investment banker and venture capitalist at firms including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Millennium Technology Partners.
Today, Rick joins the podcast to talk us through the issues facing the CBD industry, how Rymedi works to help everyone along the supply chain, and the emerging innovations in this field that have a lot of people excited right now.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The legal differences between hemp and CBD – and why the FDA does not view CBD as a supplement, but as an OTC pharmaceutical product.
- How Rymedi benefits everyone along CBD supply chains with technology designed to track processes and ensure compliant data capture.
- Why testing is so difficult, such a big industry, and a lucrative opportunity – and why blockchain and AI are crucial to Rymedi’s business model.
- The reason Rick is currently staying in the CBD space and partnering with companies in THC cannabis instead of working directly with the product – and who are on track to become the dominant players after legalization.
- How Rick’s technology has helped to eradicate Hepatitis C in Mongolia.
- Why Rick believes federal repeal is further away than we might think it is – and why full federal legalization right now could lead to chaos.
QUOTES
- “We’re turning a blind eye to a $50 billion public health crisis. We have all these fentanyl deaths, and all these issues, and we’re allowing kids to buy marijuana on the street corner or in their apartments. It’s not acceptable.” – Rick Kimball
- “The entire $460 billion US pharmaceutical industry has been mired in the dark ages.” – Rick Kimball
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TRANSCRIPT
Rick Kiley: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Green Repeal. We’ve been on a little unplanned break since the beginning of 2020. But we are getting back on track with some interesting interviews with individuals and organizations that are driving the cannabis industry forward. We’ve got some great guests coming up so you’ll want to tune in. Today, we’re sharing our conversation with Rick Kimball, the President of Rymedi, a technology company, which provides a trusted, secure, and compliant track and trace platform designed to meet the specialized regulatory needs of the healthcare industry. Rick has over 30 years of experience as an investment banker and venture capitalists at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Millennium Technology Partners. Rick was a partner at Goldman Sachs, where he was head of global healthcare investment banking, before being recruited into the healthcare and cannabis industry. Rick is extremely well-spoken and owns a plethora of knowledge about investing, healthcare, cannabis, and much, much more. Enjoy!
[INTERVIEW]
Rick Kiley: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Green Repeal. It is 2020. I am here with my co-host Jeffrey Boedges. Welcome, Jeff.
Jeff Boedges: Thank you, Mr. Kiley. It’s good to be back. Happy 2020, everyone.
Rick Kiley: All right. It’s a little late to be saying happy new year actually, I think. We’re in February.
Jeff Boedges: Happy February, everyone.
Rick Kiley: Nice.
Jeff Boedges: Happy Valentine’s Day.
Rick Kiley: Cool. We’re going to be talking with Rick Kimball today who’s joining us. He is the President of Rymedi, which is a technology platform that’s solving problems in life science and global health. That’s how he described it to me. I hopefully got that right. And a little different connection to the cannabis industry and I think, Rick, we’re just going to start and I say welcome to our show. Welcome to The Green Repeal and just wonder if you could elaborate a little bit more on what Rymedi does and how you are connected to the cannabis industry just to get us started.
Rick Kimball: Okay, great. Well, thanks for having me, Rick and Jeff. Nice to be here. So, to give you a little bit of background as to how I got here, I spent 30 years as an investment banker, retire from investment banking some years ago. I had been a healthcare investment banker so I’ve spent the last 25 years focusing on big issues around fixing our broken US healthcare system. I retired from Goldman Sachs from investment banking. I went out to Stanford University. I was working on new models around physician reimbursement trying to solve healthcare problems. I was there living in the Bay Area when I met Steve DeAngelo, one of the early marijuana activists. Steve has been pushing for legalization of cannabis for some 40 years and Steve started Harborside Health Center, one of the first dispensaries in Oakland California. At one point it was the largest cannabis dispensary in the world. And Steve really schooled me in the opportunity to stop the war on drugs, get rid of the $50 billion marijuana black market in the United States, do the clinical research, and build a $100 billion industry from the ground up.
And I said, “Wow.” I was not paying attention to this being on Wall Street for 30 years. I’m really tired of breaking my pick trying to get United Healthcare to do the right thing. This looks to me like a mission in a package that could really use somebody like me who’s got a lot of experience at high levels in business as well as public policy. I’m on the Brookings Institution board in Washington. And so, I decided to throw myself in and work on all things cannabis for the last five years really working on those issues.
Rick Kiley: That is awesome. So, you are five years fully committed to the industry then. And it seems that mostly from taking the medical approach to the industry, right? I mean, is that…
Rick Kimball: No, not necessarily. So, I took a wide range of view. I became a student of the industry. I just became passionate to learn everything about the science and the public policy and the regulation and all the issues, the war on drugs, and understanding how we have destroyed our communities, particularly of color consciously for the last nine years because of the war on drugs. And as I looked at all that, I thought, “Wow, I got to work on the whole thing.” In fact, specifically, it’s important to move to adult-use legalization because only with adult-use do you get rid of the black market. And I think that the prohibition of marijuana is the abdication of regulation. We’re turning a blind eye to a $50 billion public health crisis, really. We have all these fentanyl deaths and all these issues and we’re allowing our kids to buy marijuana on the street corner or in their apartments and it’s not acceptable. And so, this isn’t just medical for me. This actually starts with the war on drugs and I think it’s exciting what the medical advances are that can come from the cannabis, but in fact, the bigger issue than the medicine is the war on drugs and the social issues and how cannabis has been used to put down groups of minorities in this country. And that’s much more important, in fact, than the healthcare issue.
Rick Kiley: Yeah. We’ve talked to several people about that throughout the earlier episodes. It’s something I think we’re both passionate about as well. So, can you talk to us about Rymedi? How is this technology company then relating to the world of legal cannabis? How are you guys working with people? What’s the connection between the organization and what you do from a technology standpoint toward moving the industry forward?
Rick Kimball: Right. So, I’ve been looking at companies as an investor and advisor for the last five-plus years in cannabis and one of the segments there is ancillary services and particularly the technology solutions for cannabis. And as an investor is the so-called picks and shovels play. So, I’m an investor in headset that does data analytics for cannabis. I’m an investor in work, which does payroll for cannabis, and employee compliance. And so, I was very interested in this whole area of seed-to-sale technologies in cannabis. And I looked at all the companies in the space and all the startups as an investor to see where I thought there was potentially interesting value. And MJ Freeway which is one of the early players and has a big install base has had lots of technology problems and people have generally been unhappy with the early players in the seed-to-sale space. And as I looked at it, I started to realize, “Wow, all these seed-to-sale guys have built technology to stop the flow of product to the black market for inventory management and point of sale.” They are not thinking about the pharmaceutical perspective and the federal and international perspective as a regulatory matter.
So, you have all these facilities for making cannabis products being built in these legal states within the state-by-state markets, but because it’s federally illegal, there are no FDA regulations or USDA regulations that are applying to the THC cannabis. It’s the state laws, but hemp CBD is federally legal. And so, that product is having the federal regulators get involved, the USDA, the FDA, the DEA, and international players, international regulatory organizations, and then the buyers as they start to organize are the big distributors, McKesson and Medline who are getting ready to distribute CBD products to the broad line retailers, CVS, Costco, etcetera. So, they’re all getting lined up and all ready to start distributing these CBD products as soon as the regulations come down. But these are all big national and international players that have standards that are at the federal level.
And so, these are quality standards for how the product is manufactured, there are regulatory compliance standards. They may be export standards and export documentation and they are compliant labeling standards that, again, the state-by-state players are not having to deal with but if you’re playing at the national and international level, you need to do all these things. So, I realized that the seed-to-sale guys were constrained by their state-by-state markets and so they were not going into the hemp CBD space with their technology. And so, we were able to come from the pharmaceutical industry into hemp CBD and bring the technology effectively making the hemp CBD supply chain pharmaceutical grade and regulatory compliance, any regulatory regime that comes down the pike, dietary supplement, over-the-counter schedule for Schedule 5, full prescription pharmaceutical or export. And we know what the standards are from the pharma industry. So, even though the regulations haven’t dropped, we know for a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, what are the practices to produce the CBD oil at a Schedule 4, Schedule 5 level, for instance.
Jeff Boedges: So, you think CBD is going to follow very closely the existing sort of regulatory guidelines that are currently guiding what I would call mainstream pharma?
Rick Kimball: I do. And then there’s going to be some specifics, of course, as it relates to hemp and cannabis because of the THC and needing to be under 0.3% and maybe there’s limitations on dosing. And so, there are going to be some specific regulations certainly for the hemp CBD, but we show our clients, for instance, a graphic that shows a spectrum of regulatory regimes and not only are we uncertain exactly what the regulatory frameworks going to look like but most likely, all different regimes will be in action all at the same time. So, there will be products being created for the dietary supplement channel at that standard. There will be products being made at the OTC Schedule 4, Schedule 5 level and sold as, for instance, if the CBD oil gets mixed with menthol to be in a bomb, that menthol is Schedule 4. And so, the CBD oil needs to have been manufactured at a Schedule 4 level and often these manufacturers, the CBD manufacturers don’t understand that. And we’re explaining that to them and showing them how our technology allows them to move from one regulatory regime to another.
Jeff Boedges: That’s crazy. That’s a lot. I had no idea that it was going to be so different, well, frankly, between cannabis and then between hemp and CBD.
Rick Kiley: And this is a really big deal, Jeff, because what’s happening is you’ve got this now $15 billion legal cannabis industry that’s barreling along and growing and growing and everybody’s thinking about federal legalization at some point. And that entire industry is not being built with the national and international buyers in mind. And so, I believe that CBD is going to be how the big consumer products companies and pharma companies get into the THC business. They’re going to build products in the CBD channel because it’s federally legal and then they will turn on the THC state-by-state.
Jeff Boedges: As it comes online. Can you move CBD from state-to-state?
Rick Kimball: Yes.
Jeff Boedges: Yeah. Okay.
Rick Kimball: As long as it’s not below the 0.3% of THC, which is an issue because a lot of the product is hot and we have one set of regulations that have dropped from the USDA but those are interim final rule of waiting for the actual regulations from the USDA. We’ve heard warnings from the FDA and we’ve heard that the FDA is worried about toxicity and they think the CBD oil is a drug and one of the things that is going to surprise everybody in the CBD industry is the FDA does not think it’s a dietary supplement. The FDA thinks it’s a prescription or over-the-counter pharmaceutical and they’re worried about it and they think we have to do the clinical research and understand the toxicity and the drug interactions before they can approve the products.
Jeff Boedges: Interesting that they would go to that rigor against CBD, but then you can go and buy vaping pens that do these.
Rick Kiley: Well, it must just be because the federal legality, right? So, CBD is legal federally, and that must be why they’re involved at this point. They’re just not even looking at THC.
Rick Kimball: Correct. That’s right. It’s federally illegal. And so, this is exactly the point, Jeff, which is the vape pens that are being sold legally and even in New York City under the medical marijuana program, those are not compliant generally speaking to the federal regulations. They could be being produced at that level, but generally, they’re not.
Rick Kiley: The pens themselves or the cartridges that go in the pens?
Rick Kimball: Both. The pen is a medical device, right? So, it has to be tested as to whether the metal is leaching off into the oil, which in fact it is and there’s some of the black market products. And then what the FDA requires is stability studies. So, you actually in order to be CGMP compliant for over-the-counter products, you need to have at least six months of stability studies. So, people actually need time to see what happened to the product and since it’s just been legalized, people haven’t had the time to do all this.
Jeff Boedges: That’s a package good thing that I think is really out there. I mean, we worked a ton in wine and spirits and we’ve got a couple examples of brands that we’ve worked on in the past where we’ve actually seen the enclosures rust. They put them out on the shelf and the enclosures rust or the product which is theoretically shelf-stable turns into sticky feet after six months. So, yeah, I feel you, the duty to make sure you’ve got time to let this stuff run its course.
Rick Kiley: I want to ask about the technology but before I do, I guess what I really think I want to clarify for everyone who might be listening is who are your clients? Who are the people that you are helping? So, is it growing organizations, people that are growing hemp, and CBD plants that don’t produce high THC, are they your clients? Are you working with the extractors of these plants that are extracting the oil like who are the companies that your technology is helping the most guide through this regulation process and everything else that you’re talking about?
Rick Kimball: So, what we want to be doing is we want to work with everybody along the supply chain. We want to work with the seed companies and have their seed genetics. We want to work with the growers and be tracking the planting, the sampling during the grow period, the harvest. We’re tracking the product during that period of time. We then want to work for the extractors which is where our biggest clients are because the big step-up and value in the product from the hemp to the CBD oil but for the extractors, that’s where we’re doing the deepest work where we are tracking not just the flow of the product through the pharmaceutical manufacturing facility making the CBD oil but we’re also tracking all the processes that are being conducted within the manufacturing facility and we’re demonstrating compliance by virtue of tracking processes against the relevant regulations, and then we put in place various controls. So, for instance, if somebody goes to use a machine and the machine isn’t properly calibrated and validated, then you can’t use the machine. If the operator isn’t trained or certified to use the machine, the machine won’t work. If a certain step has not been done properly or sign off has not occurred, the product can’t move further along the supply chain.
So, we’re using technology to track all of the activities of movement as well as chemical and thermal reactions that are being done to the product and we’re recording all of that using automated data capture that we’re then writing to a blockchain in order to secure that data, so that we have an immutable genealogy of the data. The data can’t be changed and we have timestamps of when everything happened, so that we can then share that data with different parties and everybody trust that data because we did automated data capture and wrote it to a blockchain and then we also do that in a compliant manner, a federally compliant manner.
Jeff Boedges: Are the governmental agencies sophisticated enough to test this stuff if you weren’t doing it yourself? If you weren’t self-policing, and I said, “Yeah, this is definitely cogent, man. This stuff is ready to go. It’s under 3% and goes out the door. Can they test it? And are they doing so? Do they have the manpower to do that?
Rick Kimball: Yes, they are testing it and there is an issue with testing in that the interim final rule requires that the labs be DEA registered and there’s not enough DEA registered labs. They also require the testing to be done on the plan 15 days prior to the harvest and that’s going to create a bottleneck where everybody’s going to need testing at the same time. So, the industry is very concerned about that but there is going to be testing of the product and there will be regulations around all of that.
Jeff Boedges: How do you feel about investing in mine and Rick’s new testing company that we’re going to launch?
Rick Kimball: I think testing is actually a really interesting field. There’s a tremendous amount of demand for it. It’s operationally difficult. It’s a lot of processes but the testing pricing is about $500 per sample and these labs are doing 300 to 500 samples per day. And so, it’s a big and very lucrative business.
Rick Kiley: And so, do the testers have to come to the actual growing facilities or is it we’re sending samples?
Rick Kimball: A sample of the product and send it to a third party testing lab.
Rick Kiley: Got it. And what you’re saying is there are not enough for those labs to keep up with the demand?
Rick Kimball: That’s the concern that the industry has. And when the rule just came down two months ago, and the industry is commenting right now back to the regulators trying to get that eased up.
Rick Kiley: Okay.
Jeff Boedges: Wow. It’s time to put up the want ad for some chemists.
Rick Kiley: Yeah. And so, I mean, it sounds like this process and just is as rigorous as it would be to bring any pharmaceutical drug to the market today, right?
Rick Kimball: Exactly. And that’s the key point really is that we’re exactly taking the processes from the pharmaceutical industry and bringing them to hemp CBD. And then there are various different grades of processes as I mentioned, ranging from dietary supplement to full prescription pharmaceutical. And even for export, there’s a different set of processes that are required in handling the product.
Jeff Boedges: How unique is the machinery and the process that you guys are applying to validating these machines and processes at the grower level, if you will, or the extractor level? It seems to me to be like a whole new science like you guys have to be up inventing stuff almost.
Rick Kimball: So, we don’t have to worry about inventing the extraction equipment. We are just tracking, I think. So, we’re going in and we are seeing these different technologies and for instance, people are working on solvent lists, industrial-scale extraction, which is going to be a game-changer for the THC guys and for hemp CBD. All this ethanol and co2 and butane all goes away and you can separate out the cannabinoids organically without assault. And they’re doing this in the pharmaceutical industry, in the food industry, and they’re bringing in that tech to cannabis and hemp. It’s going to be extremely disruptive.
Rick Kiley: Wow. All right.
Jeff Boedges: That’s like a whole another show.
Rick Kiley: So, I just want to talk for a second because you mentioned blockchain. And I think it’s really an interesting application because most people when they think of blockchain if they know what it is, it’s for Bitcoin and other e-currencies. Can you talk about why blockchain is the foundation of your technology? And then maybe a little bit what I’m curious about is if blockchain didn’t exist if that sort of technology wasn’t there to support you guys like what would be the alternative? What are other people doing and what must be the pain points associated with doing it the old fashioned way?
Rick Kimball: Well, so for starters, the old fashioned way in the pharmaceutical industry is pencil and paper and spreadsheets. So, the entire $460 billion US pharmaceutical industry has been mired in the dark ages. It has not been digitizing all of that data.
Rick Kiley: Are they all with like that really scribbly doctor’s handwriting?
Rick Kimball: They are which means that the data quality is important. So, not only is it in filing cabinets, so you can’t run AI against it because it’s in paper form. But then the error rates are so bad, you also can’t run even if you had it digitized. So, I was talking to the former chairman of Bristol Myers, talking about my company and he said, “Rick, I feel your pain. I would walk into the Bristol Myers labs and there’s post-it notes everywhere. And that’s the data that they’re using and they’re not using IT systems.” So, only six years ago did Congress finally step in and passed the Drug Supply Chain Security Act which is legislation that provides a 10-year horizon running to 2023 when the pharmaceutical industry for the very first time has to adopt track and trace technology to the lot level, so to be able to identify individual lots all the way back to the raw materials. So, if there’s a contamination, they know which lots to destroy, and they know where the contamination started. At the moment, it takes them weeks to figure out where even after the Tylenol scare having happened so many years ago, they still don’t have consistent track and trace systems in order to verify the integrity of the supply chain to stop contaminations, counterfeiting, diversion to the black and gray markets.
And so, we built this technology initially for that in the pharmaceutical industry. And then what we quickly found was track and trace for this drug supply chain Security Act became a commoditized product quite quickly in the market. So, what we did was we thought, what’s really interesting is what do you do with the track and trace data, which we think is quality control, quality assurance, regulatory compliance, export readiness, and GS1 compliant labeling, at least for the hemp CBD space. So, those are the value-added activities that you do with the track and trace data. So, that’s what we have focused on for our business. And David Stefanich, our co-founder, and CEO is a software engineer, chemical engineer, MBA and he was working in the pharmaceutical industry as a technologist CIO, and he saw this gap. And so, he started working with traditional technologies to solve this problem for pharma companies and then he started learning about crypto and blockchain. He actually was an early adopter.
He had a crypto mine. He was mining Bitcoin and so on. And so, he started learning about blockchain and I’ll get to the blockchain piece in a second and realized that blockchain was the perfect tool to solve problems in supply chain management, particularly in a highly regulated environment where the data is being regulated by the FDA and how you handle that data. And you’ve got HIPAA and GDPR and FDA compliance with the data. So, he developed technology for pharma and found that blockchain allowed an immutable genealogy so that multiple parties could trust the data. And in fact, interestingly, just six months ago, the FDA began to accept data sets for drug approvals and this is a breakthrough area referred to as real-world evidence. Real-world evidence is data that has been secured in a compliant manner that has two-factor authentication and you are able to demonstrate to the FDA the integrity of that data. They will then allow that data to be used for virtual clinical trials. And there have already been a couple of drug approvals on that basis. And so, that’s really where we’re heading to is to be able to secure all this data from seed genetics all the way through to clinical trials in an FDA compliant manner, so that all that data end-to-end gets used in clinical trials.
Rick Kiley: Okay. But those are mountains of data.
Rick Kimball: That’s right. But that’s where AI comes in. And so, we’re doing automated data capture and ensuring the integrity of the data going in. And then we’re writing it to a mutable blockchain so it can’t be changed so it’s perfectly set up to be able to run AI and ML against it.
Rick Kiley: So, when you say it’s automated data capture, what are you arming your clients with in order to secure that data?
Rick Kimball: In-line sensors, RFID tags, QR codes. So, we are initially mapping out schematically all the workflows and then we’re figuring out how we’re going to get the data in with the minimal amount of human involvement and that is generally RFID tags, QR codes, and in-line sensors. We also integrate with Internet of Things. So, for instance, we’re out in the fields of the grows, and we’ve got GPS and air, water, and soil sampling, all of that is going off the lab and then being recorded on our blockchain.
Rick Kiley: So, the individual plants would have an RFID tag like literally on the plant?
Rick Kimball: They could and some people are doing that. Generally, the RFID tags are being associated with a sack, a super sack filled with hemp, but the container size and form factor will change depending on the use case.
Rick Kiley: So, you mentioned this and just the number stuck with me, this 15-day deadline, prior to – explain that part to me.
Rick Kimball: Fifteen days prior to the harvest is when the farmer has to test their product to demonstrate it’s not over the point 0.3% THC threshold.
Rick Kiley: So, they would presumably clip a sample from the plant, put it in this sack, the sack would have the tag, then they scan in it.
Rick Kimball: Yep. And in that case, that’s a sample bag, which is going to be a very small bag and yes, it’s going to have a tie on it that secures it. It’s going to have a QR code or RFID tag on that and that’s going to get sent to the lab and the lab will log in that sample. And we’re integrating with lab so we’re getting all that lab data in as well.
Rick Kiley: Got it.
Jeff Boedges: Has there been any like attempts at fraud? So, you know what, I’ve got a whole grow house full of stuff that’s at 4% so I’m going to send in some 3% leaves and I’m going to basically make it look like it’s all good even though it’s probably not.
Rick Kimball: So, that type of thing is happening all over the country. So, we just scaled up the growing of hemp in the last year to 240,000 acres were planted last year up from 17,000 acres two years prior. So, this huge explosion of growing and then the market, broadly speaking, doesn’t have stabilized genetics in the seeds and so a lot of the seeds that people planted ended up creating a hot product with over the…
Jeff Boedges: Right. So, hot product is ending. It’s over. You mentioned…
Rick Kimball: Over 0.3% THC.
Jeff Boedges: Right. And I had another question about seeds and this is something I’ve asked other guests we’ve had and I really haven’t found anyone who actually knows the answer. With this being still a Schedule 1 drug and federally regulated, how are they getting seeds? So, let’s just say that it’s legalized in New Jersey tomorrow and all of a sudden 100 people want to grow. There’s not like a warehouse of seeds sitting someplace inside New Jersey. Those seeds have to come from someplace else.
Rick Kimball: Yeah. Those can move across state lines, yep, because the hemp and hemp seeds and the CBD oil are all federally legal. We’re still waiting for the regulations on the CBD oil so it’s a gray area at the moment but it’s going to be federally legal and specifically they permit interstate commerce. So, you got these big seed companies out in Oregon for instance, Oregon Seed and HGHU have huge seed stocks.
Jeff Boedges: They have huge seed stocks. Where they get them? Are they buying them from the guys that are growing them?
Rick Kimball: They are growing the seeds so they are growing hemp that is seeding and they are collecting the seeds and the seeds are selling for the general small volume is $1 per seed. The discount to $1 per seed actually only goes when you get more and more seeds. So, the seed guys have an incredible business and they’re killing it at the moment. And they’re important.
Rick Kiley: That’s the other company?
Jeff Boedges: Testing and seeds. Well, you know, I’m from the Midwest and I actually have a lot of friends that work, believe it or not, in crop science but this is with the major suppliers that provide the grains and the corns and all that stuff for Midwest farmers. I don’t think they’re doing cannabis seeds yet.
Rick Kimball: I don’t think so either but I’ll bet they’ve got stuff in the lab and they’re ready to do it when they – I’m sure Monsanto and all those guys are all ready to jump in as soon as they feel it’s federally legal.
Jeff Boedges: Yeah. I think they need the money right now after the lawsuits.
Rick Kimball: Yeah.
Rick Kiley: I just want to touch on one thing and I think I know the answer to this but I’m not sure. The way that you’re talking it feels like that the compliance and restrictions and regulations on CBD and hemp, not THC cannabis is almost like stricter than what’s going on for medical cannabis and even adult-use cannabis at the state level at this moment. Is that just because the federal regulations are there and they apply to that industry and not to the state industries? Is that really just the reason?
Rick Kimball: Yeah. That is the reason. That is the reason that the federal regulations do not apply to the cannabis markets state-by-state. They are in direct violation of federal law.
Rick Kiley: Right. And so, the state-by-state regulations that let’s say, you know, we look at a mature state like California or Colorado, do they not align with the same level of scrutiny that the FDA would impose?
Rick Kimball: They do not. They are generally at more of a food safety type standard and not an over-the-counter pharmaceutical type standard. And so, they’ve been more worried about pesticides and heavy metals but they do have good testing requirements state-by-state, but they are not requiring products to be built at the CGMP, Good Manufacturing Practices.
Rick Kiley: Even for a medical dispensary, like that’s operating at the medical level with pharmacists and the added level of scrutiny, I would say there, you don’t think it’s still…?
Rick Kimball: In general, I do not. I’m sure there’s a lot that I don’t know about this and I’m sure that the administrators of the medical programs say that they’re as strict as they need to be. But I think that there’s a fundamental difference of opinion here which is much of the movement around the legalization of cannabis has been this is plant medicine and this is not a pharmaceutical product and this should be able to be accessible through a dietary supplement channel. This should be prescription pharmaceutical long-term and I think is reasonably that the medical marijuana is a steppingstone into adult-use legalization. However, this is medicine. So, if you have a compromised immune system, if you have cancer, you absolutely need to know how does this product interact with your other drugs in your body. And we don’t have that analysis yet. We don’t have that research. We have a little bit but not enough. And so, all that has to be done. So, what that really means is that these medical markets state-by-state are operating without that basic research that the Feds will require.
Jeff Boedges: Right. As far as like right now, recreational cannabis, how would you say compares to, let’s say, the one in spirit world? Are they more stringent? Because it feels like they actually are even though they’re not as stringent as pharmaceutical but does feel like they actually apply more standards and rigor than you would at one in spirit. I’ve never been to a liquor store and ask the guy behind the counter, “Which one of these boozes is going to make me a little happy and not so hungry?” You know, it just seems like there’s a lot more sophistication in the recreational cannabis world right now than there is in wine and spirits per se.
Rick Kimball: I would argue that the wine business hasn’t been around for so long. It’s actually quite nuanced and complicated and I would say even more so than the cannabis market. Just because cannabis is new, we’re all figuring it out. I think what you’re referring to there is the differences of effect that in cannabis you have effects versus in wine you talk about the nose and the mill aroma and the taste, the palate, and all that. It’s a little bit of a slightly different but same concepts, I think, really. And I would just argue with thousands, I mean, we do with thousands of years of experience with the marijuana as well but with much more sort of homegrown stuff of course back millennia with people in India and so on and the product now as you know is so sophisticated and understanding the cannabinoids and bringing out those very high THC, CBD, and other cannabinoids.
Jeff Boedges: And I think a decent understanding of the effects so which you’re right. It’s just a line of reasoning that I’ve not really – I haven’t really thought about before because we do frequently compare the budtenders basically to wine experts because they are so knowledgeable but it’s clearly where the difference comes in is where you have a sommelier talking about wine, he’s talking about or she’s talking about the food that it goes well with or its nose and its finish whereas a budtender is really not necessarily talking about taste. They’re talking about effect. So, it’s, again, just an interesting level of sophistication and really in my mind two different areas. So, it’s not a question per se. It’s more just commentary as I think out loud here.
Rick Kiley: And then I think champagne or lighter wines do give a little bit of a different intoxication. In fact, I was at a French restaurant one time and the sommelier was pointing out the different tables. They said, “Those guys over there drinking red Burgundy’s and those guys are having Bordeaux’s,” and he was suggesting that the Bordeaux people were much sort of heavier in their tone.
Jeff Boedges: Oh, I know there’s a difference in tequila.
Rick Kiley: There you go. Exactly. Yeah, there you go.
Jeff Boedges: You don’t drink tequila just to lay around and watch TV.
Rick Kiley: It’s a different episode though that we’re going to start recording in a second.
Jeff Boedges: Sorry. Again, I’m the rabbit hole guy. Rick is the guy that keeps us on track.
Rick Kiley: I just try to keep it from moving, you know. So, what I didn’t know is you started saying earlier, you’re talking about CV products and the level of rigor being associated with different sort of, I guess, pharmaceutical grades. Is that fair? There are a lot of these. Can you give me an example? Like you mentioned the bomb would be Schedule 4.
Rick Kimball: That’s right.
Rick Kiley: So, it’s for the highest? Like it’s for the lowest?
Rick Kimball: So, that you have food safety, and somewhere in there, you actually have pet products. In fact, pet products apparently standards are slightly higher than food safety.
Jeff Boedges: God bless, America.
Rick Kimball: So, you have food products, you got pet products, then you have dietary supplements, then you have nutraceuticals and those can be used interchangeably or you could do the nutraceutical as a little bit higher. And then you have over-the-counter schedule for Schedule 5. Then you have full prescription pharmaceutical and then you have EU GMP. Europeans require a higher level of standards than we do and some additional standards. And then you have international common harmonization Q7 and Q9 and that’s the emerging markets regulatory framework. So, what we educate our customers about is you need to understand where your end market is and who your customer is. And that will determine the regulatory compliance that you need to abide by in your manufacturing and you can see there’s quite a few different levels.
Rick Kiley: So, do you have clients right now that are exporting to work?
Rick Kimball: We’re working with a number right now to produce the product to export. So, we’re sort of getting ready for that.
Jeff Boedges: If you’re a Q7, do you automatically qualify all the way down through Q4?
Rick Kimball: No. It’s a different set of…
Jeff Boedges: Totally different sets. So, what’s good for the goose is not good for the…
Rick Kimball: With overlap, but there are different regulations you need to be abiding by.
Jeff Boedges: Okay.
Rick Kiley: That sounds complicated.
Jeff Boedges: It sounds like a good business to be in is what it sounds like.
Rick Kimball: Well, the one thing we’re doing is we’re going to the folks who run hemp benchmarks who are publishing prices on hemp and CBD oil. And we’ve offered to supply them with the data. First, educate them as to the different grades and then supply them to the data as to the sales that are occurring at these different grades and the prices that our customers are getting for those sales so we can bring transparency to the fact that these prescription grades are trading at a substantial premium to the non-prescription grades.
Jeff Boedges: So, it’s futures. You guys are…
Rick Kimball: That’s right.
Jeff Boedges: You’re getting and buying selling futures.
Rick Kimball: Exactly. That’s what hemp benchmarks is trying to do. They want to trade futures on cannabis and hemp and so they’re right now getting the data going, and then price transparency on their way to trading futures.
Jeff Boedges: So, our next idea, Rick, we’re going to do redo Trading Spaces, but it’s going to be about cannabis instead of oranges.
Rick Kiley: You mean Trading Places?
Jeff Boedges: Places. Sorry. Watching too many home fix-it-up shows. We’ll edit that out in post.
Rick Kiley: All right. So, you might also be able to I guess people would know by where the prices are set where they feel like their business opportunity is, right, like they will then say, “I want to make sure that I’m filling this void.”
Rick Kimball: That’s right.
Rick Kiley: That’s probably interesting. Do you think that there’s going to get to be a point where if you’re using this blockchain and the data is so immutable, do you think that will ever be that the data will be just taken at its word without ever really having to see the samples?
Rick Kimball: Yes. So, one of the great functionalities that’s enabled with blockchain is what’s called zero-knowledge proof. So, the example here is you go to a bar and the person says, “Show me your ID.” That person just needs to know that you are of age to go into the bar. They don’t need to know your name, your address, the color of your eyes, all that information that you give to them when your hand over your ID. They just need to know are you of age. They don’t even need to know your age. Are you of age? So, what blockchain allows you to do is to query the data without actually seeing the data but get the result. And so, this is phenomenally valuable in the pharma space, for instance, where people can monetize their data set without actually giving up the data.
Jeff Boedges: Right. IP protection.
Rick Kimball: And so, we do this here in hemp CBD where the consumer shoots the QR code on the product and it pops up that this product is a valid product that was grown on this date in this field that was harvested on this date, it was extracted on this date, and expires on this date. And those are the things that as the consumer, you’re allowed to know about that product. Now we have all the B2B data underneath that and we have a data exchange that allows the extractor to monetize their data to selling it to other parties who want to see that B2B data. That’s not the consumer. So, the consumer has zero-knowledge proof on the things they need to know about the integrity of that product, and no more. And so, it’s one of the really neat aspects of launch.
Jeff Boedges: And so, you guys launching a consumer app as well that will be like this buy smart?
Rick Kimball: So, we want to build a brand around Rymedi, Rymedi meaning authenticity, quality, integrity. And so, as we grow and we do more deployments, we will be building that brand association with our name. And then we already have the ability for somebody just take their smartphone and right now shoot a QR code and it pops that information up.
Jeff Boedges: Right. So, any QR code reader will take you right to…
Rick Kimball: Just the camera on your phone. You just shoot the camera and it takes you right to the right place.
Rick Kiley: Got it.
Jeff Boedges: Cool.
Rick Kiley: That’s great. So, the products of the clients that you’re working with, they’re not then sold in dispensaries at this point?
Rick Kimball: No, they’re specifically not sold in dispensaries. It’s interesting. At least a year ago, the California cannabis control board said, “If a licensed cannabis dispensary in California is seen to be selling a hemp CBD product through their dispensary, they’re going to be charged $500 per day per item for having that into their dispensary.” And so, they specifically are saying they don’t have a regulatory framework yet for the hemp CBD and they don’t want to suggest that they do by having the products be sold through the dispensary. Further, it gets really complicated because the dispensaries are operating on the basis of the state legalize program when it’s not federally legal but the hemp CBD is manufactured and sold on the basis of this federal legalization so they intersect in an uncomfortable way for the lawyers.
Rick Kiley: So, we’re seeing these products then at pharmacies, at bodegas, at like those little med spas where they have the bombs and that sort of thing.
Rick Kimball: That’s right and generally not at CVS. And so, it’s generally e-commerce and the independent retailers because the big line retailers are not ready to carry these products until we have regulations. And there has been some movement where CBS was putting some hemp CBD products on the shelves in seven states where there was adult-use marijuana. And they were kind of suggesting that, well, if there’s adult use, then this ought to be legit that we’re showing hemp CBD and the FDA and FTC didn’t agree with that.
Jeff Boedges: Yeah. I know they pulled a lot of stuff because we were getting a couple of CBD sodas here for a while, and then they were gone.
Rick Kimball: That’s right.
Rick Kiley: Interesting. So, the question that’s obviously out there is it seems to me from the other people we’ve spoken to on this podcast in previous episodes, that people that are operating within the legal state framework for THC cannabis, who have seed-to-sale operations or whatnot, they have to apply what sounds to me like very similar levels of rigor at least to track the plant from the point where it’s a seed to the sale to make sure it doesn’t get on the black market. One of the things you talked about at the opening, do you and does your organization have any plan to get involved in that side of the industry I would say?
Rick Kimball: On the THC cannabis side?
Rick Kiley: Correct.
Rick Kimball: So, at the moment, we have held off on playing there directly despite myself having been in the industry for five years. As you know, if you’re doing business with marijuana revenue-producing businesses, that can be an issue for your investors or your banks. And so, at the moment, we’ve specifically stayed in hemp CBD and then we have a partnership with a group called Vanguard Scientific who design and build extraction facilities in the cannabis space. We contract with them. They resell our technology to some of their customers. So, we indirectly access that but we’ve tried to keep ourselves clean, if not being a marijuana revenue-producing business. I think there is lots of opportunity there for sure. Again, I think that those cannabis, the state-by-state cannabis businesses don’t translate very well moving to the federal level. And I think that what we’re going to find is it’s the CBD facilities. When we go to federal legalization, they’ll just turn on the THC and they’ll have pharma grade large scale facilities much larger than you have state-by-state generally. And I think those will end up being the dominant players.
Jeff Boedges: Wow.
Rick Kimball: So, I think there’s a real existential threat, I think, at least for the supply chain for the cannabis, not the brands, they will survive, but the supply chain will get replaced with this larger scale, lower cost pharma-grade type stuff being built for the national market.
Jeff Boedges: When you grow a plant, can you grow hemp and CBD without a plant that’s producing buds?
Rick Kimball: I don’t know the answer to that.
Rick Kiley: All right. I think you can.
Jeff Boedges: I’m just curious and I think I’ve actually asked the question before and I think you can get the CBD from the actual leaves and stems and not from the bud and I think therefore you should be able to get it but I’m not sure.
Rick Kiley: I think that they were growing strains specifically designed to not produce THC that there are specific plants that are non-THC producing and specific plants that are.
Jeff Boedges: Yes. If this were a radio show, we’d say, “Callers, give us a ring. Let us know. Let us know what you think.”
Rick Kimball: But that’s absolutely right, Rick, that in hemp CBD you’re growing a specific strain of cannabis that just happens to have very little THC. Interestingly, the strain of CBG which a lot of people are starting to grow because the CBG is trading at a very high price.
Rick Kiley: I’m sorry. CB what?
Rick Kimball: CBG. So, CBG is another cannabinoid and…
Jeff Boedges: The G is for good.
Rick Kimball: And I don’t know the exact price but CBG trades at multiples of CBD. And so, some people have been wanting to grow and extract CBG and interestingly, the CBG strains don’t have a THC problem, and so it’s much easier for somebody to produce CBG and not have a problem with hot product. And so, some people will go that route. And people were expecting that pharma is going to like the CBG product and that there’s a lot of different things you can do with that. And it’s one of the many cannabinoids in the…
Rick Kiley: Right. So, it’s like the cannabinoid science is evolving, people are starting to understand different strains of cannabinoids have different effects on your health.
Rick Kimball: That’s right. CBN is for sleep and people are very excited about that. THCV is an appetite suppressant. So, there’s a lot of excitement in these other cannabinoids for sure.
Rick Kiley: Interesting. So, I guess my next question is, obviously, your process, your technology probably would apply to things outside of just cannabis. Are there other medical brands that you’re working with to have the same level of rigor?
Rick Kimball: So, as I mentioned, we really came out of the pharmaceutical and global health industry. We saw a unique opportunity in hemp CBD because the supply chain is being built the first time. Everybody is building a new facility and they need the full-stack including our technology. So, the sales cycle in hemp CBD is shorter than we’re seeing elsewhere. In farming global health, we have some incredible projects like the same technology that we’re tracking seed genetics to clinical trials and hemp CBD we’re using in Mongolia to track and validate a program where we are systematically screening and treating the entire country’s population for hepatitis C. Hepatitis C is a terrible disease. There’s a Hep C epidemic in Mongolia, created by the World Health Organization back in the 70s. Some 8.5% of the population has Hep C.
We run a program where we are systematically screening every person in the country. When we find someone who tests positive for Hep C, we get them treated with a generic of Gilead’s Hep C drug that’s 98% effective. The problem is in the United States that retails for $90,000 per treatment, the insurers buy it down to $30,000 per treatment. And we get it in Mongolia for $200 a treatment, because we can prove we’ve given this drug to a person sick with Hep C in Mongolia and that drug is not being diverted back to the developed markets and undercutting their high price. And they will do this in the 100 poorest countries in the world. And so, it’s an incredible program. We’ve literally already screened and treated half the country and they stated they’re going to eradicate hepatitis C by the end of 2020.
Rick Kiley: That’s amazing.
Jeff Boedges: That is great but it’s also completely stunning that we are not moving to eradicate it in the good old US of A.
Rick Kimball: And Health and Human Services have asked us to go to Lafayette, Louisiana to run this protocol where there’s a Hep C epidemic and we’ve been all over the world talking about this and there’s interest to run that program in Indonesia, Australia, Pakistan, where there’s a huge Hep C problem all through Central and South America, Africa. And so, we’re in the process of productizing that solution and taking that to other countries.
Rick Kiley: Forgive me, I’m always like looking at the economic. Is this a philanthropic effort on your part? Who’s covering the costs of the medicine, for instance, and the technology?
Rick Kimball: So, in the Mongolian project, an NGO is funding the medication and generally, we expect NGOs will be the funders for the medication. But we’re deploying the technology solution and ultimately, we’re looking to get paid for the value that we deliver. And so, as we take this to having demonstrated proof of concept at the national scale in Mongolia, now we’re able to take that whole program to we think the next country maybe be Honduras, take it to Honduras, and there we expect to actually get attractive returns for ourselves as we deploy that and participate in the value that we create.
Jeff Boedges: Ironically, it’s $90,000 per patient.
Rick Kiley: It’s crazy.
Jeff Boedges: I’m teasing.
Rick Kiley: God Bless America again. It just blows my mind every time I hear about it.
Jeff Boedges: Well, we’ve discussed it a lot and these guys they have the United States is unique, and it will pay these crazy premium prices, which is what actually drives a lot of the research. At least that’s the argument that the pharma companies make, but yeah, then it’s not just the Hep C treatment. I mean, there are treatments out there for AIDS and the list goes on and on that you pay through the nose for in the US because they basically do a negotiation with the insurance companies. The insurance company says we’ll pay this much and then everybody else get to the back of the line and get your pocketbook.
Rick Kiley: Yeah. So, I mean, the work sounds amazing. Is there another health problem that you’ve got your eye on next?
Rick Kimball: So, we’ve got a new deployment in the gene therapy space, so there’s been incredible breakthroughs in cell and gene therapy. And this is where people’s cells are genetically manipulated and then put back in their bodies.
Jeff Boedges: Yeah. The cancer treatments that are going on.
Rick Kimball: And I mean breakthrough success here but you can imagine the quality requirements to ensure that that process is done properly and the cells don’t go outside of tolerances of heat or anything being done to them. It lends itself perfectly to our technology to track all the processes and the product. So, we’re currently deploying our technology for a company that’s in clinical trials for gene therapy right now and we think that this is a really, really attractive area for us. There’s 200 gene therapy companies and we think this platform will be clickable to all of them. And, again, given the very high-quality requirements, using a platform like ours will be very appealing.
Jeff Boedges: Does it help on the patient side as well? Because you certainly can’t use gene therapy on everybody, especially in cancer. It’s just got to be specific gene markers. Are you using the same tech to make sure that the people who are coming into these trials and treatments are of the appropriate…?
Rick Kimball: Generally, no. That’s not what we’re doing. I suppose there maybe as a role at some point if we better understood sort of all the steps of doing that. But generally, we’re more involved in tracking the product, in this case, the cells and everything that happens to the cells, and the processes, all of the techniques, the modifications, making sure that every one is done properly and within the appropriate specifications and tolerances and so on.
Jeff Boedges: It’s exciting stuff. Now, is there anybody else in your space? Are you guys like a one-stop?
Rick Kimball: So, it’s interesting. We think that we’re very early in doing what we’re doing. The track and trace business has been an attractive business but as I said, it got commoditized quickly. TraceLink is the leader there but what they’re doing is lot level serialization and helping people track the product to the lot level. They’re not then also tracking the processes against the regulations for quality control, quality assurance. Some of the quality management guys they’re at the moment having come out of pharma, where what quality management has been is a set of processes that somebody signs off a paper sign off. Master Control is when the leaders in the quality management space, they are doing document control of the signed documents saying this lot was manufactured properly and it’s good to go. We’re doing the same thing, but with the underlying data, not with a PDF. And so, we think that we’re kind of a next generation of really figuring out how to get the deep data inside an enterprise, inside of supply chain, be able to secure it, and then do things with that data.
Jeff Boedges: Publicly traded, the company?
Rick Kimball: No. Private company. We’ve been around just 18 months. We’re just in the middle of doing our first round of funding right now and we’ve got a very seasoned management team. I’ve got 30 years of experience and everybody’s got 20 to 30 years of experience. So, very seasoned startup team and then we’re off doing our first deployments at the moment. We’ve demonstrated these use cases like Mongolia. We’re also in Kenya where we’re securing the supply chain of pharmaceutical and medical supplies coming into the country. We’re running an FDA pilot. We’re sending medication via drone between hospitals and hospital systems. We’re demonstrating secure chain of custody in medication that doesn’t go outside of temperature tolerances. And then we’re also demonstrating how we can integrate with the workflows at a hospital and secure all this data for the FDA real-world evidence for virtual clinical trials.
Rick Kiley: Wow. It’s impressive.
Jeff Boedges: Yeah. It’s amazing. I’ll be ready for the IPOs. We’re friends, right? So, we know we can get the early warning.
Rick Kiley: Is that the plan, the plan to bring the company to publicly at some point?
Rick Kimball: I generally don’t think so. Having spent 30 years doing IPOs, I know being a public company is a huge distraction and it’s expensive. And there are reasons to be a public company sometimes but I think we prefer to scale this up and sell it to somebody. And so, that’s probably our endgame. And so far so good.
Rick Kiley: That’s great.
Jeff Boedges: Amazing.
Rick Kiley: It sounds like things are going well. So, excited to see how it keeps going and I hope we can keep in touch and keep the conversations going and hear about your work as it continues to evolve. The thing that we want to finish with as we’re coming to the end of our time here, we call this podcast The Green Repeal for a reason. I think you know we come from the alcohol beverage industry. We’ve seen a lot of parallels between this industry and the burgeoning cannabis industry and what happened with alcohol and prohibition nearly 100 years ago now, right?
Rick Kimball: Jeez, Louise.
Jeff Boedges: Yeah. I was there.
Rick Kiley: You were there? You were there and you were there. So, I’m just curious as your thoughts, what do you see for the future of the cannabis industry? Do you think that we’re headed towards the federal repeal, which I think is our position? If so, how long do you think that will take just from your vantage point?
Rick Kimball: So, I think eventually, yes, but I think it’s going to be a longer road than most people think. As I mentioned, I’ve been at it for five years so when I got in five years ago, a lot of people were saying, “Oh, we’re going to be federally legal in five to eight years,” and I don’t think we’re any closer now than we were five years ago to the federal legalization piece. I think that what I’ve really realized is that there’s a lot of experimentation that is going on to figure out how to regulate this product. And so, by legalizing state-by-state, we’re figuring this out step-by-step rather than go through this big bang. I think if we were to go to federal legalization right now, I think it would be absolute chaos. Look at the problems we’re having with the cannabis market in California. It’s just chaotic trying to get this up and going with new regulatory regimes and people very anxious about it. And the country is in different places on this. Well, there’s a 92% approval rating for medical marijuana across the country.
There is still a lot of geographic variation in terms of how people feel about this product, particularly for adult use where it’s more like a 60% approval rating. And generally, in the Southeast and Midwest, people are, in Texas, much more conservative and not really ready for where Colorado, Washington and now California are. And then further, I think what we’re going to find is when we do legalize federally, it seems to me we may do it for medical-only initially, that the country politically may feel more comfortable with it medical only. That’s a little complicated since much of these programs have now merged, the medical with the recreational piece. So, how do you separate that back out? I don’t know. The other piece that’s problematic is the states are getting dependent on these tax revenues. So, Colorado with 1.75 billion of revenues, their tax revenues now are enormous coming from cannabis and California is expecting to ultimately get up to a billion dollars of taxes coming from cannabis.
Once these states getting that money, they’re going to be really reluctant to give up all those taxes and just relinquish this over the Feds. So, exactly how that’s going to work, I’m not entirely sure. And then one of the key issues here as we’ve already seen is tax policies critically important to getting rid of the black market and getting these markets to function properly. And I’m going to guess we’re going to continue to be dogged by that problem, because politically, it’s really attractive to taxes and…
Rick Kiley: Heavily.
Jeff Boedges: Heavily.
Rick Kiley: Well, someone on an earlier episode said that because of the way that these organizations are running, and they’re technically illegal federally that the federal government’s actually getting a lot of tax revenue because they can’t write off their business expenses. So, like maybe the incentive economically isn’t quite as strong as we would think. It’s just a supposition on my part, but I think that a lot of the people who are in this business are saying the federal government is getting their tax money, because they can’t write off anything. And it’s essentially like an 80% effective tax rate on these businesses which is high.
Rick Kimball: Yeah, really high.
Jeff Boedges: Yeah. But I think that’s also this is a very slippery slope. So, you got an 80% tax rate federally. You’ve got a heavy state tax. And so, the legal product that’s going out now, obviously, it’s just more expensive than the black market. And so, by continuing to maintain this federal illegality, you’re continuing to basically drive that problem whereas I feel like and again, this is a question really for you, Rick, is do we not feel that by repealing the federal prohibition that we could I think much more effectively and quickly eliminate the black market and some of the problems that that’s causing in California specifically.
Rick Kimball: I think so. I think it would be a much easier way to go after the black market to be federally legal and then that’s all involved. Again, I just think politically, it’s going to be hard to do it [crosstalk – 1:00:08] and I just see us doing this piecemeal. And the enforcement issue does fall heavily on the western states and getting rid of the black market there and with all that growing and they’re working on it and it’s going to take years.
Jeff Boedges: Yeah. Well, I’ve been doing some informal surveys with everybody that I know in the Midwest, and they’re all terrified.
Rick Kimball: Yeah, right.
Jeff Boedges: They are. They’re like, “Oh, my God, it’s going to be awful.” You know, like California.
Rick Kimball: Right.
Rick Kiley: Well, Rick, I really want to say thank you for coming and talk to us today. You are a wealth of knowledge. Thank you for sharing with us and educating us. If someone wanted to learn more about your company, perhaps there’s an investor listening for the future round or something like that.
Jeff Boedges: We’re a customer.
Rick Kiley: How should they go about finding you?
Rick Kimball: They should give me a ring or an email. My telephone is 646-734-2486 and my email is rkimball@rymedi.com.
Rick Kiley: Yeah. Not Rai-mee-dee. It’s Re-me-dee. There you go. Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s a pleasure having you. Hopefully, we can come back soon.
Rick Kimball: Super. Well, thanks for having me, Rick and Jeff. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Jeff Boedges: Yeah. Thank you for your time. We greatly appreciate it.
Rick Kiley: Cheers.
Rick Kimball: Thanks, guys.