Why Psychedelics Might Be the Breakthrough That PTSD Patients Need (Kevin Ryan, The Godfather of NYC Tech)

Often called the godfather of NYC tech, Kevin Ryan is one of America’s most influential entrepreneurs and investors. He co-founded MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, and Transcend Therapeutics, and continues to build and back new companies each year through AlleyCorp. Earlier in his career, he led DoubleClick from a 20-person startup to a global leader, taking it public before its acquisition by Google. In this episode, Kevin shares his insights on two surprising pockets of the future that he’s betting on: psychedelics for mental health and AI-powered materials science. He unpacks how psychedelics are showing remarkable success in treating depression and PTSD, and why AI may discover revolutionary new materials, from helicopter blades to smartphone glass, that humans never imagined possible. We explore: • The promising results of psychedelics in treating depression, PTSD, and addiction • How AI is accelerating materials discovery by exploring combinations humans wouldn’t try • The challenges of building successful incubators and why most attempts fail • How MongoDB lost $1 billion before turning a profit (and why it was worth it) • Why e-commerce businesses like Gilt Groupe often struggle against physical retail • How AlleyCorp plans for the future when shaping its investment strategy • What it really costs society to imprison someone for a year • The hard truth about Europe’s tech ecosystem and why it struggles to compete with the US — Thank you to the partners who make this possible Enterpret https://www.enterpret.com/mario: Transform feedback chaos into actionable customer intelligence. Auth0 https://a0.to/mario: Secure access for everyone. But not just anyone. Persona https://withpersona.com/generalist: Trusted identity verification for any use case. — Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/why-psychedelics-might-be-the-breakthrough — Timestamps (00:00) Intro (04:30) How Kevin collaborated with Scott Adams (07:11) The origins of AlleyCorp (08:33) The challenge of incubation (10:00) Why intellectual flexibility matters (10:54) What made MongoDB a breakout success (13:49) How shifting market dynamics hurt Gilt’s business (16:22) What Kevin would do differently if he built Gilt again (17:45) Juggling AlleyCorp’s long-term vision with day-to-day demands (20:26) How to make boards more productive (22:25) Why Kevin believes investors should also found companies (24:18) Future spaces Kevin is excited to invest in (25:52) Kevin’s interest in psychedelics and founding Transcend (28:20) Psychedelics for mental health (32:03) How psychedelic therapy is being conducted (34:11) Transcend’s work and the path to approval for methylone (37:47) The challenges of psychedelic research (40:28) How the Trump administration aims to accelerate psychedelic research (41:50) The size and growth of the psychedelic market (44:28) Materials science: What it is, its design tradeoffs, and how AI speeds discovery (49:02) Radical AI’s work creating new compounds (50:34) The industries Radical AI is targeting (52:50) The state of European tech and why it still lags behind (58:26) Final meditations — Follow Kevin Ryan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinryan3/ X: https://x.com/alley_corp — Resources and episode mentions —Books— • How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence: https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Mind-Consciousness-Transcendence/dp/1594204225 • Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future: https://www.amazon.com/Breakneck-Chinas-Quest-Engineer-Future/dp/1324106034 • Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144324 https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144324/ — Episode resources continued at: ⁠https://www.generalist.com/p/why-psychedelics-might-be-the-breakthrough⁠ https://www.generalist.com/p/why-psychedelics-might-be-the-breakthrough — Production and marketing by penname.co https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Everyone is tempted because if you start a company for very little money, you might own 50% of it, which makes it seem easy. But on the other hand, can you get the right entrepreneur? Can you build it up? Can you build the team? Can you do the right things?

• 0:10Mario Gabriele?

  You mentioned finding the right entrepreneur. Is that sort of the hardest part of the equation in your experience and where most folks fall foul of it?

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Look, at the end of the day, a company is very simple. You need an idea and a great team. It's doing it that's hard. So there aren't that many great ideas. There aren't that many great teams. So you have to get both of them right.

• 0:25Mario Gabriele?

  What are some of the themes that you are excited about when you look at 2035 that are top of mind for you right now?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Clearly, we're not the only people who think this, but AI ripples through every single thing we do. Even our robotics practice, which felt like a mechanical engineering project six years ago, is now largely an AI-driven product. And so using AI tools correctly, making sure we're doing a good job on sourcing. If AI has an impact on jobs, what does that mean for retraining companies? What is going to be protected? What isn't?

• 0:57Mario Gabriele?

  Hey, I'm Mario and this is the Generalist Podcast. As the saying goes, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. Each week, I sit down with the founders, investors and thinkers who are living in the future to help you see what's coming next and capitalize on it. Today, I'm speaking with Kevin Ryan, the founder and CEO of Ally Corp. Kevin is arguably one of tech's most successful serial entrepreneurs and a legendary figure in the New York venture scene. He famously led DoubleClick to a $3 billion acquisition from Google, co-founded MongoDB, which grew into a $25 billion public company, and has incubated dozens of other ventures from Zola to Business Insider.

• 1:40Mario Gabriele?

  In our conversation, we explore two surprising pockets of the future that Kevin is betting on: psychedelics for mental health and AI-powered material science. Kevin shares how psychedelics are achieving unprecedented results in treating depression and PTSD and why AI may discover revolutionary new materials, everything from helicopter blades to smartphone glass that humans never imagined possible. We also dive into why e-commerce turned out to be a worse business than physical retail, what it really costs society to imprison someone for a year, and the hard-won lessons of building successful incubations. If you enjoyed today's episode, I hope you'll consider subscribing and joining us for some of the incredible ones we have coming up.

• 2:24Mario Gabriele?

  Now, here's my conversation with Kevin. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret is a customer intelligence platform used by leading CX and product orgs like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, Strava, Hinge, and Linear to leverage the voice of the customer and build best-in-class products. Interpret unifies all customer conversations in real time, from Gong recordings to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads, and makes it available for your team for analysis and action. What makes Interpret unique is its ability to build and update a customer-specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback and connects that customer feedback to critical metrics like revenue and CSAT.

• 3:05Mario Gabriele?

  If modernizing your voice-of-customer program is a 2025 priority, like it is for customer-centric companies such as Canva, Notion, Perplexity, and Linear, reach out to the team at interpret.com/mario. That's E-N-T-E-R-P-R-E-T dot com slash Mario. This episode is brought to you by Auth0. Auth0 is an easy-to-implement, adaptable authentication and authorization platform. Think easy user logins, social sign-on, MFA, and robust role-based access control. With over 30 SDKs and quick starts, Auth0 scales with your product at every stage. Auth0 lets you implement secure authentication and authorization for your preferred development environment.

• 3:48Mario Gabriele?

  You can use all your favorite tools and frameworks to manage user logins, roles, and permissions. Auth0's new offering, Auth for GenAI, is currently available for developer preview. Secure your AI agents and integrate with the GenAI ecosystem using features like user authentication, token vault, which calls third-party APIs on a user's behalf, async authorization, and fine-grained authorization for RAG. What typically takes 50-plus lines of code is reduced to just a few, so you can focus on building the AI apps yourself rather than worrying about how to secure them. If you're a developer looking for an easy and powerful way to secure your applications, get started for free now at a zero dot two slash Mario.

• 4:31Mario Gabriele?

  Kevin, I've been super looking forward to this. I started my tech career in New York Venture, in which you are kind of a mythical creature in many respects. You know, I remember knowing that you were the godfather of this tech ecosystem and have played such a huge part in it. So it's really a privilege and a great pleasure to have you.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  I think it's just that I've been around for a long time. And so that's, that's a big, a big part of it. But I'm still having fun. And it's been extraordinary to see, you know, how much has developed over 30 years.

• 5:03Mario Gabriele?

  I can only imagine, yes. Well, we're gonna jump into all sorts of different topics today, particularly psychedelics and material science, which are two areas that, you know, I think are really interesting pockets of the future that a lot of people are, are not thinking about, but that you have thought about deeply. But before we jump into those, I wondered if you might reflect on what your favorite Dilbert comic might be, because I believe you have quite a storied history with that franchise.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  The classic one is the, the, the person who wins first, first prize was going to be lunch with his boss. And, you know, the second prize was going to be two lunches with his boss. I think Scott Adams, you know, hit a real moment in time in the 90s, where, tech workers were just coming out. And he was incredibly funny. And what I always appreciated when I was working with him on, on a website is I could send him a paragraph that I had written that was really not very funny. And literally 10 minutes later, he'd send it back. And it was hysterical. I mean, just on the spot. He was, he's very talented.

• 6:08Mario Gabriele?

  Wow. How, how did that happen? You were working at United Media, but how did that sort of combo come together?

• 6:15Speaker 00

  What happened was that we own the rights, we were a syndicate, which doesn't exist as much anymore, but we own the rights to all these pieces of content that were sold to newspapers. So crossword puzzles, columns, comic strips. And that was our business. But we launched a website and the website, the most popular by far of all the comic strips, even though we own Peanuts as well, was Dilbert. And part of it was because tech oriented people knew Dilbert and they could access things before browsers.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  And so Dilbert became by far the most successful comic strip out of the 40 we put on the website. And then we created merchandise, we created advertising, all of that in, created in 1995. So it was very early and that led to me thinking that the internet was going to be a huge thing, which is sort of obvious in retrospect, but at the time wasn't. And that everyone would be buying things, selling things, and that I should devote the next 20 years of my life to working in internet related things.

• 7:11Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, amazing. Maybe you can tell us how that sort of, you know, bridge the gap from Dilbert to Ally Corp, so to speak, because there are a lot of chapters in the middle.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the quick summary is that the company I was working for wasn't committed to investing in the internet yet in 95, 96. So I decided I was going to go off and start an internet company. I went off, the internet was very, very small at that time. So in New York, there'd be maybe 50 people getting together. And I ran across two guys who had started DoubleClick. I contemplated going out to San Francisco because a lot of things, more things were happening there. But I really wanted to stay in New York. I was very bullish on New York. So I ran across these two guys and then they convinced me to join them at DoubleClick, where I started as a CFO, became the president, and then became the CEO over time, and built that up over nine years from 10 people to 1,500 people publicly traded.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  And then eventually Google bought it for about $3 billion. Then for the next decade, I started companies and started investing in companies. So I started MongoDB, which became a $25 billion publicly traded company. I started Business Insider, very successful news. I started Zola, a wedding registry company. I started Gilt Group, did about $500 million in e-commerce. So, you know, just evolved into starting and investing in companies. And that was, eventually became Ally Corp over the next decade.

• 8:34Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, I always think, you know, Ally Corp is one of the few organizations that really seems to understand both how to invest successfully and incubate successfully. I think you see a lot of firms, hopefully they're good at one. But often the folks who are good at the investing side think at some point in their strategy, hey, this is, you know, we should bolt on some incubations and we'll be able to figure this out. And it seems to be much, much harder than, than people recognize from the outside.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Absolutely. The vast majority end up failing. It takes more patience. It's harder. It's more risk. Everyone is tempted because if you start a company, you know, for very little money, you might own 50% of it, which makes it seem easy. But on the other hand, can you get the right entrepreneur? Can you build it up? Can you build the team? Can you do the right things? That's a real skill and not that many people have gotten it right.

• 9:21Mario Gabriele?

  You know, you mentioned finding the right entrepreneur. Is that sort of the hardest part of the equation in your experience? And where most folks, you know, maybe fall foul of it?

• 9:29Speaker 00

  Look, at the end of the day, a company is very simple. You need an idea and a great team. It's doing it that's hard. So there aren't that many great ideas. There aren't that many great teams. So you have to get both of them right. But yeah, both are hard. Both are hard. But I think any CEO would say finding a great head of sales or a great CFO is also difficult. Find the definition. You know, the Brooklyn Nets have trouble finding great, great NBA players. You know, they're trying. It's if it were easy, everyone would do that and they'd all win the championships. But it's hard.

• 10:01Mario Gabriele?

  To what extent at this point is Ali Corp's approach to incubation like quite systematized? Or is, you know, so much of this variable, depending on the idea, depending on the team, that you actually sort of need to be much more fluid with it?

• 10:14Speaker 00

  You need to be pretty fluid because one, you, as you know, we do things in very different industries. So, you know, when I started an e-commerce company selling women's fashion at a discount, that's pretty different than a database company. You're different people, different skill, going after different investors. So you have to have the intellectual flexibility to not just have a standard playbook. Are there some things that you share at the end of the day? You need a great team, need to raise money from the right investors. You need to make the right decisions in spending enough money to be successful, but not so much money that you run out. All those things are part of building a business and they're not easy. But no, I think you have to adapt to each business.

• 10:55Mario Gabriele?

  You mentioned that, you know, MongoDB obviously had this truly remarkable outcome. And there have been, you know, so many other successes when you talk about Zola and so on. What was it, do you think, about MongoDB? Particular that meant it had maybe an order of magnitude bigger or or let's say, close to that than even the other successes. Was it, you know, just that the market was so much more interesting? Was it sort of the team, maybe both of those two factors?

• 11:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, first of all, we were going after an incredibly large market. I mean, even though Mongo is a very successful company, think of how big, you know, Oracle still is today. SAP, you know, think of Snowflake, there's all these different companies that have different database structures. So it just turns out that data became from 2008 till today so much bigger and more important. You know, when we started, John Deere didn't have databases. And now every tractor they sell has to have a database to capture the amount of fertilizer. Let's say that they're doing by row. That's something that was just unimaginable, you know, 30 years ago. You know, we have, we have clients that are train companies that put sensors on every single wheel on a train.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  Whether it's going to break or not, because sensors are so cheap now, that's something that just didn't occur. So we were right, lucky or smart, seeing that the market we were going into was going to grow dramatically. It's a hard product, databases are not easy. And so my two co-founders, Elliot Horowitz and Dwight Merriman, you know, were truly technically brilliant. And came up with a great product. We did a lot of great recruiting, built a good team. And so, but it was hard, you know, for three and a half years, we had no revenue. That is not easy to raise your second or third round of financing. We were giving away the product. It wasn't good enough for prime time in the very beginning to do mission critical functions. But tens of thousands of companies were using it.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  It was getting better and better. People started paying for it. So it did take time, you know? When we started Mongo, we didn't know that we were going to lose a billion dollars before we had a profitable quarter. And I believe that in 2008, I don't think another company had lost a billion dollars before having a profitable quarter. So luckily, the, the financial markets saved us and became more open. And Uber probably lost five billion during that time, 2008. You know, Tesla, other people. And that's what's so remarkable about the, the financial markets, pretty much uniquely in the United States. Yeah. And they're not being dumb. If they can see the numbers are happening, they will fund things and create big companies. A billion dollars seems like a lot of money to lose,

• 13:39Speaker 00

  but you think about it, we created a $25 billion company.

• 13:42Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  I asked you, would you put in a dollar if you get $25 worth of value all day long?

• 13:48Mario Gabriele?

  Of course. You know, the other company that you or one of the other ones you mentioned there was Gilt, which, you know, I think has such an interesting story. I remember being, you know, in New York, in the tech scene at that time, and really feeling like, you know, this was almost the future of e-commerce. And it did have, you know, quite a height and, you know, still achieved great things, but maybe didn't reach the the pinnacles of what people thought it might. When you reflect back on that, like, what were the pieces of that model or the timing that just like maybe didn't line up in quite the right way?

• 14:18Speaker 00

  No, I talk about this this example in business schools because

• 14:21Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, really?

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Imagine I run into you and it's 2010. So I'm two years in. You asked me, hey, Kevin, how are your how are your companies doing? And I say, well, Mongo has zero revenue again this year. And Gilt, just remember this, did $175 million of revenue in year two.

• 14:39Mario Gabriele?

  Wow.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  I don't believe any company in New York City has ever done that.

• 14:43Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Last 25 years. And if you had said to me, which company is getting more valuable? I would have said, I mean, what are you talking about? Obviously, Gilt. This is a phenomenon, as you remember. But the industry changed. And so what happened was that in 2010, you couldn't buy Marc Jacobs at 50% off on the Marc Jacobs website because they didn't even have a website. They were a business to business, you know, brand that sold to Bloomingdales and Saks and people like this. They didn't have a lot of stores. And then, within a couple of years, you could buy Marc Jacobs at 50% off on Macy's, on Farfetch'd, on 10 other websites, on Marc Jacobs, on Theory. I mean, there was, I mean, there are so many

• 15:26Speaker 00

  brands. So we didn't have a differentiated enough product. And pretty soon, you know, people would just shop the internet and find the right price, which was great for them and it was bad for us.

• 15:36Mario Gabriele?

  Yes. Okay, interesting. The competitive dynamics just changed so much.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  Which is why it turned out that most people didn't anticipate that e-commerce, for almost everyone, is a worse business than running a store. And the reason is, if you walk into a store today and you see a jacket you like, and it's $150, You know, maybe you can get it for $10 less 10 miles away. You're not going to go do that.

• 16:01Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  One, you don't even know. Even if you did know, you're like, I gotta drive 10 miles. I'm not going to do that. But online, it's one click away. Boom, you're going to go for the cheaper jacket. And that $10 is the entire margin of the entire business. And so the guy who loses the $10 loses 100% of his profits.

• 16:22Mario Gabriele?

  With the benefit of hindsight, were there moves, you know, within the realm of what that business was, you know, not without saying like, actually, we would just become Shopify, you know, whatever, you know, we keep, we keep the frame roughly the same that you think would have made a difference? Or was this just, hey, you know, we're hitting a new market reality? And actually, there's sort of not much you can do in that situation.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  So on the one hand, what I'd say is the fact that there's no successful company doing what we did, even today, 15 years later, suggests that it's a hard business model to pull off. You know, one of the things I look back on things I did is, you know, did the sector do badly? Or did we do badly compared to someone else? Then you know it's an execution problem. So in this example, no. But if I were doing Guilt Again, and I thought about doing Guilt Again, I make it smaller and more exclusive. I think what we did was a little bit like a nightclub. Let's say you have the coolest nightclub. Every night, 300 people are killing each other to try and get in the door.

• 17:23Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  You expand it to 1,000 people, it's no longer cool.

• 17:27Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  I don't want to go anymore. And so I should have restrained it more, maybe even charged membership, only had the very best inventory. It would have been a slightly smaller business, but maybe more sustainable.

• 17:40Mario Gabriele?

  You know, it's interesting to hear that you, you know, you revisit these ideas and think about them, you know, years down the line. In, in your sort of day to day running Ally Corp, how do you sort of divide your time, get leverage on your time? Are you spending a lot of times sort of living in the future and thinking up these theses? Is it, you know, more tactical on a day to day basis?

• 18:00Speaker 00

  As an organization, we do spend a lot of time, as you said, living in the future. We actually, in our offsite next week, we will put up the date 2035, just because it's 10 years from now. And we want to think about where is each industry going? What are the trends on the B2B side or B2C side that are happening? That we believe are 10-year trends, you know, which is a different way of thinking about things. And that's important. My day to day is threefold. One is I have seven or eight boards that I'm on. I'm generally chairing the company, some of our more valuable companies that I want to, you know, help. And I'm working with the CEOs. So almost every day I'm having two CEO conversations. Then there's a big chunk of time where I'm helping the partners, the principals, the associates at Alley Corp.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Dealing with some tricky issue they haven't dealt with before, judgment call, helping them interview someone, introducing to someone that might be helpful. So just assisting the next most valuable 20 companies in the portfolio. And then the third thing are PR, general things like, you know, I bought a commercial real estate building, which will be in Alley Corp headquarters that we're moving into in Soho in December. I've been, and has its own restaurant, bakery, things like that. I have some time on that, you know, political things. I don't know if you remember this summer, I, for the tech community, I interviewed Mam Donnie in front of 200 VCs and CEOs. Same thing with Mayor Adams. This morning, I met with a candidate who's running for Congress on the Upper West Side.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  So things like that, that I can bridge and help the tech community with the business community. Because I am one of the co-founders of Tech NYC with Fred Wilson, which is the tech lobby group. And I'm the vice chairman of the New York City Partnership, along with, you know, Jamie Dimon and the heads of Hearst and, you know, Lazard and places like that. So trying to play a role, and that's something uniquely I can do for Alley Corp.

• 19:55Mario Gabriele?

  It sounds like your calendar is taking a beating on a, on a very regular basis, but wow, that is a lot to manage.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  And I have four conferences that I own now. So one is in deep tech, one is in longevity, which we was last weekend. One is Digital Health New York, which was a month ago, 380 people in New York City. And then I have an ideas conference, invitation only, called Odyssey, that occurs every year. And so I do spend time on that, which is also another way of meeting interesting people in fields that I'm excited about.

• 20:25Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, that's amazing. You know, you mentioned that you are on some boards and you chair these boards. Something that I hear from so many investors is what a nightmare so many boards can be and how much, you know, if it is not well managed, it just becomes pure venture posturing from the different folks at the table, using it to sort of exert some kind of authority or power and actually ends up being at best sort of neutral for the founder. And so, you know, as someone who's done this for a very long time, how do you make a board really productive? Like, what are the ways to avoid that set of circumstances?

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, one is choosing the right board members. So, you know, in general, I feel really good about the vast majority of board members I'm on boards with. Also, you know, it depends what you like to do. There are people who are VCs who I think are essentially bankers. They don't fundamentally maybe like the operating aspects of a business. I am at my core, an operator, a CEO. And so, I actually, and that's why I'm still doing this, I enjoy working with the CEO, dealing with those problems. You know, my day is mostly operating. It's helping someone figure out who to hire or what to do. And so, I just like that. I mean, I feel like if you asked an artist after 20 years, you know,

• 21:47Speaker 00

  why are you still writing books? And they would look at you and go, this is what I like to do. It's not work. This is what I have to do. This book has to come out. So, this is what I like to do, is help build businesses. And we truly build businesses. And also, when you're chairman and co-founder, it's a different relationship. I often chose the CEO. I want the CEO to succeed. I definitely don't want to do that job. I want them to be remarkably successful. And then, I think about it all the time, how can I help them? I don't want to use their time and just waste their time. Stay out of the way when you need to stay out of the way, but be available if you can, if you can help.

• 22:25Mario Gabriele?

  I wonder to what extent working on these incubations has changed the way that you view founders. Maybe change is not even the right word, given that this has been the way that you've been practicing this for so long. But yeah, does it make you feel like the founder is even more important than maybe some of your more traditional venture peers? Or do you actually start to think, hey, it's about putting this whole team together? And sort of the obsession about the CEO or the one person is maybe overdone?

• 22:54Speaker 00

  I do think it's extraordinarily important as an investor to also be founding companies, which most people don't. Why? Because it means you are in the mix all the time. If I'm talking to you as a founder, you know, we are doing the same things. And sometimes we get it wrong. We see the challenges. You can't just put a spreadsheet together and say, oh, you know, on my spreadsheet, you hired a great head of sales. That means nothing. So we are doing it. We're dealing with these things. We are building products. You know, I own a hundred person engineering team that both works. It's an outsourced engineering company that I created five years ago that both works for our portfolio companies when we need engineers, but also works for a lot of other companies.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  It means we're in the mix literally every day on 15 different projects, choosing which tools to use, which AI tools to use. We're in it, doing it all the time. And I think that's very important. And I think it makes us better investors along the way. So I don't think it changes my orientation to what is important for people. You know, it's also humbling because these things are hard. There's a reason only 1% of companies become unicorns. You know, it's like we all played sports in high school and not that many of us ended up playing pro. There are very, very few spots at the top. And so it's important to be humble.

• 24:18Mario Gabriele?

  To the extent that you're comfortable, what are some of the themes that you are excited about when you look at 2035? And you know, that are top of mind for you right now?

• 24:25Speaker 00

  Well, clearly we're not the only people who think this, but AI ripples through every single thing we do. Even our robotics practice, which was felt like a mechanical engineering project.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Six years ago is now largely an AI-driven product. So that's very important. And so using AI tools correctly, making sure we're doing a good job on sourcing, which is one of the things we're going to talk about. Thinking about, we always play and talk about fundamental trends and second order, you know, things that are going to happen. So, you know, if AI has an impact on jobs, what does that mean? What does that mean for retraining companies? We have a lot of companies in the retraining area. What is going to be protected? What isn't? You know, we have a company called Stepful that trains people to be allied workers. So these are the workers that this, the MRI technician in a hospital. So the person is not a doctor, not a nurse.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Remarkably successful business, one that is definitely going to be protected. Because, you know, you had MRI so far, you still have to go into the office and get that. And someone needs to do that. So we're just thinking of all those implications over time. So we will brainstorm on that. Part of it is also just reviewing our portfolio. You know, we happen to have a lot of things going very well right now. The fund is, uh, is, is very successful. And so we are stay on top of that. What are the lessons? What's going well and what do we learn from? What's going badly? What are we learning from? So that, that's important.

• 25:53Mario Gabriele?

  Fascinating. Well, let's talk about one of these trends that you've been involved in deeply for, for quite a long time, which is, you know, psychedelics. How did this interest arise? Was this, you know, something that, I don't know, maybe you had a transcendent experience yourself or you saw its effect on other people's, uh, you know, own mental issues? How did the, how did you sort of come to the space?

• 26:14Speaker 00

  So I, I, I do read a tremendous amount. So I, I, it's an important part of what I do. I'm reading probably easily two hours a day. And some books, some lot of articles, things like that. In 2017, I read the Michael Pollan book, How to Change Your Mind. It was one of the New York Times 10 best books of the year. And I had never been interested in psychedelics before that, never tried it. And I read the book and it actually ironically did change my mind. I came out thinking, oh my God, these are useful. Some of these substances can be extraordinarily useful for what's arguably the most important problem of our time, which is the increase in depression, mental health, anxiety, you know, PTSD.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  And, and the scientific data shows that it works. And so then I was still on the board of Yale at the time. And I didn't even know, but Yale has one of the best practices, academic practices in the world on psychedelics. They did all the original work on ketamine and now I'm doing for the last seven years, a lot of work in psilocybin. So I met with the team there. I'm the, probably the leading donor to the Yale Center for Psychedelic Research. Got to know them very well, so learned more, became more persuaded and became persuaded of something is, you know, if I told you that AI is going to be big, you'd say, thank you, Kevin. I think everyone, including my grandmother, already knows that. You're a thing to the game.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  In 2018, 2019, it was not as obvious. Most VC firms couldn't even invest in psychedelics, excluded from it and thought it was a really bad thing, which of course makes no sense. You know, how can you not invest in something that Yale, Stanford and Johns Hopkins are working on in the lab? So anyway, I thought, you know, there's an opportunity here because most people don't touch it. Uh, most people don't understand it and it's going to be very big. I think it's going to be a $10 billion industry. So I was active as a nonprofit donor and still am, but I also then in 2020 started a company called Transcend in psychedelics, which so far is looking very, very successful.

• 28:18Mario Gabriele?

  So interesting. You, you mentioned, uh, you know, the use of ketamine and psilocybin.

• 28:25Mario Gabriele?

  Is there a growing consensus about when is the right time to use one versus the other, or which is more effective? How is that perceived at the moment?

• 28:34Speaker 00

  I think it's too early to say there's a consensus. What we're seeing is that these things work. So if you read through 300 academic studies, you would come back to me and probably conclude the following, that it looks very definitive, that psychedelics can work for the things I mentioned, PTSD, depression, anxiety, addiction. You would probably conclude that it looks very promising in things like traumatic brain injuries, anorexia, OCD. And you would conclude that if someone is bipolar or has psychosis, you should not use psychedelics. As of right now, there are isolated cases where it can make it worse, and we just don't have a good solution.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  All of these things may evolve over time, but the first four categories, or five categories I mentioned, probably hit 80 million people in this country. I mean, it's not solved. I mean, it's one of the most interesting things to think about. If I asked you what causes depression, you can't even answer. We don't even know that it's really genetic. We know there's an environmental influence, but on the other hand, maybe your brother has deep depression and you don't. You grew up in the same household, you had the same things. Why is that? You don't know. Depression's been around for 200 years. We just don't understand the brain that well. What we do know is that generally, these psychedelics do work. And by the way, don't work 100%. Nothing works 100%.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  MDMA, in their phase three trials, 66% of the people who had treatment-resistant PTSD, which means they'd had it, I think, on average for over 10 and a half years, were cured of PTSD after six months. That is so staggering. We've never had anything that has achieved 30%. And in fact, everyone on this podcast knows that depression's a big issue. Name something that has come through the FDA in the last 20 years that's helpful. Nothing.

• 30:30Mario Gabriele?

  As I recall, its ability to help treatment resistant ailments is actually sort of like broader even than the PTSD, right? Like treatment resistant addiction. Like it seems like, you know, for these extremely hard cases, it, you know, there's just this different modality almost that is opened by, by this, this path.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I mean, for example, if, if I had a relative who had a severe addiction problem, let's say heroin, and I, they don't have a heart issue, I would absolutely recommend that they use Ibogame. It's a long process. It hasn't been fully, fully, fully tested, but the results that we're seeing in so many cases are amazing. So, yeah, very excited. But your earlier question, do we know what works best for which? We're getting there. We're getting, you know, not fully solved. And some of them work for multiple conditions. I mean, psilocybin tends to work for almost everything. Ibogame is a particular use in addiction and traumatic brain injuries. And we're still figuring out why. I mean, we

• 31:36Speaker 00

  know that, that in general, that psychedelics increase the neuroplasticity in your brain. That we can measure. I could look at your brain before and after psychedelics. And the first looks like a map, an internet map of Africa, meaning that there's some areas that don't have connectivity. And afterwards, it looks like an internet map of Europe where it's condensed connections everywhere. Things have grown. We know that's helpful. That's, that's an important part.

• 32:05Mario Gabriele?

  For folks to help sort of wrap their minds around this, how is this sort of traditionally administered? You know, is this over a certain, you know, you mentioned certain timeframes? Is this, you know, something where you're, you're taking a pill, you're going to a clinic? All, all those sorts of things?

• 32:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, almost every case here is someone going to a clinic, or there's a big underground economy right now. Guides who, you know, they're

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Today, this weekend, there'll be 100 guides working in New York City, and you'll do a one-on-one session with them, get a big dose of MDMA or MDMA and mushrooms or something else. There are group ceremonies that occur all the time where there's maybe 30 people in the room. So that's how it's given. You don't generally do it on your own. You do it with a professional. It doesn't have to be a doctor, but it'll be someone who has experience, who's done this many times, because you can have some difficult moments. You know, you may revisit a challenging bullying incident you had in high school, or a sexual abuse case, or things like that. And so it's helpful to have someone there who can comfort you.

• 33:09Mario Gabriele?

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• 33:54Mario Gabriele?

  verifying age, onboarding businesses, or automating KYC. It's fully configurable, so you can launch in days, not quarters. Want to see for yourself? Generalist listeners get a free year of the starter plan. Head to withpersona.com/generalist and check it out. You mentioned this company, Transcend, that you founded in this space. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what it is that Transcend exactly does and the progress it's made?

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Transcend, we worked very closely with some of the Yale faculty to go through to the list of 300 psychedelic compounds. All of us know that the five that are the most well-known because people take those recreationally, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other ones that have particular properties that haven't been fully researched. So meth alone is one of those. It's basically an MDMA analog, so it's not a hallucinogenic. If I gave it to you right now, you don't see anything different. You feel a little warm, you feel different, you feel better, you feel more open. But it can be very, very valuable. And so we have a patent for that, for PTSD, for anxiety and depression. We've taken it through phase one and phase two trials.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  We've spent about $50 million to date. The results have been published in papers. They've been extraordinary. So you have a double-blind study. So one group doesn't know what they're taking and they're taking placebo. One is taking it. And then you compare the results. And if the results are different, because there's always an important placebo effect. So 20% of the people feel better, no matter what they took, even if it was a sugar pill. But if there's a big difference, that means that the drug was working. And so that's what's happening. And then we will start phase three in the first half of next year. We will be going out. We need to raise probably 80 or 90 million dollars. We're going to start that process in the next two weeks. And that's, it's just an exciting biotech company, essentially.

• 35:50Mario Gabriele?

  Wow.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Which happens to be in this space.

• 35:52Mario Gabriele?

  What will phase three involve? And, you know, as you think about the journey of this company, what do the, you know, maybe next three, five years look like, hopefully?

• 36:01Speaker 00

  So what happens is a couple hundred people will be part of a phase three. So it'll just be bigger than phase two. Phase two was about 60 people. So we'll really, phase three will be very similar to phase two. And so we'll give it to a larger study. We've run that by the FDA. And so gotten comments for the FDA to make sure they are on board. The FDA has a designation. They can take certain projects and call them breakthrough status, breakthrough designation, which is essentially their way of saying, we're super excited about this. Not guaranteeing that we're going to approve it, but we want this to happen. We want this to move forward. It's very helpful. So we got breakthrough designation. And so this, the phase three will take about two years.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  And then, you know, once it, assuming it does pass and it's going well, it'll be legal to be prescribed by doctors. And then then there's a rollout for the whole country. So the goal is that tens and tens of thousands of people will get this and be better off. And we created this as a public benefit corporation. So 10% of the equity will be given as donated to nonprofits that are in the psychedelic space. So I really do hope that this this company is very, very valuable because it'll have a big impact on the whole industry and on these people. There's over 10 million people who have PTSD. Most people tend to think of war veterans first, but actually the biggest category are sexual assault victims.

• 37:30Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, gotcha.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  So majority are women, obviously, you know, super difficult problems. Uh, many people walking around who are friends of yours, you don't even know what happened to them five years ago or 25 years ago. But they're still dealing with it and it's it's a real challenge.

• 37:46Mario Gabriele?

  Wow. When you look at the broader psychedelic treatment landscape, are there other approaches that you've started to feel, you know, are are very promising? Maybe just on another avenue. Uh, and on the other side, where are the spaces that you hope, you know, the next set of great biotech founders and founders in general, maybe, you know, really devote themselves to?

• 38:08Speaker 00

  I know spent a lot of time in biotech outside of this area. In this area, yeah, we're really trying to just move all of them through. What the biggest challenge I would say in biotech, but in psychedelics, it's so expensive. You know, our phase three will cost $150 million just to to put this in front of 300 people.

• 38:29Mario Gabriele?

  Okay, to explain that to me, how did, why is that the case?

• 38:33Speaker 00

  It's the case because recruiting is very difficult. First of all, you want to, you know, make sure that someone has the condition you're talking about. But also doesn't have any any other condition that could get in the way. So you know, if you have diabetes or you have suicidal thoughts or all kinds of things, you're probably going to get excluded. So it's the recruitment process is expensive and hard. Some people drop out. They have to be willing to do it. They have to be willing to do something. When there's a 50% chance they're going to spend four months and have taken a sugar pill. And so the FDA makes this process very expensive. Now, part of that is good. If I told you this product was approved by the, you know,

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Somali FDA, you're like, I'm sorry, that means nothing. It means nothing to me. Everyone in the world respects something approved by the FDA. But they are very conservative. They make it very expensive. And so very few things go through. And so the trade off is, you know, maybe literally tens of thousands of people have committed suicide over the last decade. Because they didn't get these products that eventually will be approved because it was so expensive. And this is, by the way, one of the reasons that, you know, why do rare disease drugs not get through the process? Because if it's going to cost 300 million, and by the way, there are people who spend 500 million or a billion to get a product through.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  If the, if the market's going to be a couple hundred million dollars in revenue, you're like, forget it. Those people are just going to die. So somewhere there, we have the wrong trade off. I will say that, you know, I disagree with a lot of the things that the Trump administration is doing. But on psychedelics, they are really trying to move the ball forward and trying to accelerate it. And RFK is really trying to do that. And, and on nuclear as well. I think they're doing a good job in trying to accelerate that.

• 40:28Mario Gabriele?

  What are they doing on psychedelics that is valuable?

• 40:32Speaker 00

  You know, it's early because, you know, the team has only been in place really for like three months. I know they're looking at ways to accelerate the process I just talked about. They're looking to see if there's public, private partnerships that could be put together to get money to move these things forward. They really want to, you know, get the science done and make, make them legal. And, and, you know, get the boundaries out of the way.

• 40:54Mario Gabriele?

  And do you just attribute that to the fact that RFK is sort of? So high openness on any alternative?

• 41:02Speaker 00

  Look, I don't know him personally, but he has had personal experience, has tried psychedelics, had good experiences. And there's a bunch of people in the administration. But I would say in general, don't forget that, you know, the United States is in a different place than it was eight years ago. I'm sure you or anyone you know, has many, many, many more friends who have tried psychedelics in the last three years than, you know, did 10 years ago.

• 41:28Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  It's just become much more mainstream. We see that in the numbers. We see that in all the positive articles in the New York Times and the traditional media. So it's just a different time. So I think any administration today would probably be more positive, but they definitely are. The Biden administration and Biden himself, you know, not particularly passionate about this area. And so could have been more aggressive here.

• 41:50Mario Gabriele?

  You mentioned sort of earlier that when you were starting to learn about this space, you sort of came up with the, you know, researched it or came to the opinion that this could be a sort of $10 billion industry. Is that sort of roughly the magnitude that you think of today?

• 42:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it just depends on what timeframe. It'll be bigger than that over time. But already ketamine is selling one to $2 billion a year. And that's the only one that's legal. And it's also growing at, I think, you know, 40 or 50% a year. Five years, 10 years from now, ketamine could be there on its own. And I assume that, you know, psilocybin will be approved. Psilocybin is already in phase three trials. They're a year to two ahead of us. MDMA might get approved in the next year. And then methylo, those are probably the litty ones. LSD is in the process as well. It's much longer acting. So you have to be with someone for probably 11 hours. And that's, that's a disadvantage. But yeah,

• 42:49Speaker 00

  and Ibogaine is in early stages. So many, many years away from that. But I think a lot of these things will get approved.

• 42:55Mario Gabriele?

  And do you expect there to be sort of markets and uses for, for each of these, for ketamine and Ibogaine? Or is it the case that, you know, we will eventually see that one or two sort of are, you know, clearly the best choice?

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Look, I'm hopeful that we have many different compounds for many different conditions approved. Then there'll be a lot more data coming out, and then we'll see, oh, You know, Ibogaine is particularly good for this. I think, you know, GLP-1 is a good example. That's been around for 20 years.

• 43:26Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  We discovered, literally in the last 18 months, that it's good for mental health and for Alzheimer's. And we could have found out that it really wasn't and it had a side effects, but it turned out as the opposite. So yeah, we're still in the early stages of figuring out what works, what works really well. Look, here's where I think we'll be in 20 years. A person walks in, we take a brain scan, and we say, okay, for your particular brain, I think we need a cocktail of a little bit of compound number three, you know, psilocybin, and a big dose of compound number seven, and just a touch of compound 13. Because at that point, we will understand how the brain works, why this is doing it,

• 44:10Speaker 00

  and we'll be able to fine tune what we're doing. In the same way that we can actually alter your genes today, and we couldn't do that 20 years ago. You know, the brain, we are probably two decades behind the body, but I think we're on our way.

• 44:25Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, we're just sort of scaling the sophistication with which we can sort of understand these things and apply them. Switching gears, material science is sort of this other space where you're spending a lot of time. And it's interesting, I feel like from a lot of smart people that I respect, a growing interest or, you know, intrigue in what's happening in this space. For folks that are, you know, brand new to it, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what we mean when we say material science.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  What people don't realize is how impactful material science is on everything. Obviously, in aerospace, it's extremely important. You need a new helicopter blade. That has to be made of something. And so is it a combination of aluminum and carbon and this? You actually have like, you know, 50,000 different choices. It has to be very resistant to heat, because it goes very fast, cold, because it might be high up in the sky, incredible wind pressure. You'd like to not use any, you know, expensive items that are controlled by China. They need to tie together, and it can't be too difficult, too expensive to manufacture. That's a complicated model.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Today, how many people are actually working on, you know, helicopter blade, you know, compounds?

• 45:39Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Twenty? I mean, it's a tiny thing. The odds that they've come up with every combination, and by the way, when you test it, let's say you come up with an idea right now. We have to test it in a wind tunnel. We have to test it in a specific facility that goes to a hundred degrees below zero. That in and of itself is expensive. So if AI can come up with recommendations that are much better and save you so that you don't have, get one out of every ten right, but one out of every three right, saving you millions and millions of dollars in years. You know, if you, if you ask, why do some of our missile systems take twenty years to develop? It's because of this. But that's true on an industrial side, but you know, your computer, your iPhone

• 46:22Speaker 00

  has a specific type of glass that did not exist twenty years ago. That's incredibly resistant and you can see through and it's really great and touchscreen. That's a material science problem. You know, even my, I have a teacup here that didn't exist twenty years ago when you and I were growing up. That hot tea keeps it on the inside, but on the outside is completely cold. That's a material science. The fact that my shirt, you know, does not sweat and is now wrinkle resistant is a material science problem. They actually put some substances into the fabric that make it better. You know, my couch, this, what I'm sitting on right now is not flammable. And by the way, you, many people don't realize there are so many fewer fires today in New York City than there were thirty years ago

• 47:07Speaker 00

  because the, it's a material science problem. Every couch now, every, is not flammable. The things on your walls are not flammable. So fires don't spread. So it's everywhere. This is a trillion dollar industry and we need to do it better and faster and cheaper to move things forward.

• 47:27Mario Gabriele?

  Is the right way for folks to maybe think about this? You know, when you talk about how AI is impacting this, you know, just in the same way that AI is searching through a million different, you know, proteins for, for different interventions in the pharmaceutical industry or, you know, whatever that might be. It's sort of searching through all of these different materials to say, hey, like this combination for this purpose has some promise. Is that sort of roughly the right heuristic?

• 47:51Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I mean, you know, the ideal person or AI machine would have read and remembered all 25,000, you know, research papers in detail, which obviously, you know, the human brain can't do, that would put things together. You know, there's a very famous example we all cite, when the first time DeepMind beat the world champion in Go. And don't forget, there was 500 million people have played Go. 500 books have been written about Go. It is a studied subject. Yet, move 19, the AI chooses something, every world expert says that's insane. I mean, that's just a terrible move. It's hallucinating. Makes

• 48:32Speaker 00

  no sense. And 10 moves later, everyone's like, oh my God, that was a brilliant move that no human had come up with. And so the thesis here is if 500 million people had not come up with something, then what are the odds that those 20 people working on a helicopter blade have come up with every possibility already?

• 48:52Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, yes.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  Or frankly, even just, you know, how many people are working on shirt technology right now? They have a lot of good things. Have they come up with everything? I'm not sure. And so that's what we're doing. And so the company I started here, Radical, I actually had the board meeting yesterday, you know, is going after this problem, is creating an autonomous lab, is really, their goal is to create new compounds. And they're in conversations with, you know, companies in many different areas to create those models. And the goal is next year, we'll have created some innovative new compounds. And so we started a year ago, we raised $55 million, one of the largest seed rounds in the history of New York City. We have a fantastic team of 23 people, and we're off to the races.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  And the CEO who worked at Alacorp before was about six months away from his PhD in material science. So he had a perspective on this industry that most of us didn't, and came up with the idea. And I'm very, very excited about it.

• 49:53Mario Gabriele?

  Really interesting. So that sort of maybe gave a hint of it, but was your intellectual journey essentially, you know, you fell down the rabbit hole because of this person who sort of showed you the opportunity?

• 50:03Speaker 00

  Oh, it was, it was his idea. And there were actually two people. So he had a material science background. His co-founder Jorge also worked here, had as a computer science background. This is essentially material science meets computer science.

• 50:15Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  And so the two of them, you know, really brought it together. And we had the idea. And then we normally go out and find the CEO. But it turns out that we said, you know what? You guys are the right people to go do this. And so they spun out of Ally Corp and have been running this company and are doing a great job.

• 50:34Mario Gabriele?

  When you talk about, you know, spinning up this, this lab, you know, going after these, these new materials, are there sort of certain spaces where it makes sense to begin, you know, maybe electronics or defense or whatever it might be? Or is it, you know, actually better to try and cast a very wide net and see sort of almost what, what comes up organically is probably not the right word, but computationally?

• 50:56Speaker 00

  No, it's, it's important to specialize a little bit because there are learnings. So that was one of the things in the beginning, eventually this will be applied to everything. So we have been, you know, we've been contacted by large consumer companies like the Nikes of the world.

• 51:08Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Also care about material science for their next shoot. But, you know, right now we are mostly focused on aerospace, alloys, you know, semiconductors, places like that, just to, just to focus. You can't do everything.

• 51:23Mario Gabriele?

  And that's just because the demand's there?

• 51:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a big space. We also need things that don't take, you know, 10 years to develop. We think there's real demand and enormous companies, you know, who have, and so, yeah, those are good, good areas for us.

• 51:38Mario Gabriele?

  And so you mentioned this automated lab. Candorably, what does that end up looking like?

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it looks like a robot that's making all the decisions, you know, taking the model and actually creating a compound. And so we'll be moving into Brooklyn on the first part of next year. We're renting a huge space and we'll have a world-class, fascinating laboratory to see there in the Brooklyn Navy Yards.

• 52:05Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, fascinating. That is really cool.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  One of the most best parts of my job, and you've just highlighted is, you know, these are two of the companies I'm involved with, obviously completely different industries. You know psychedelics and this, you know, I'm also on the board of a voila, which is a mobile bank in Argentina, which is the most successful probably private company in Latin America. It's worth billions and billions of dollars. Started seven years ago. I've been involved since day one. So that's what's so fascinating about our business is I'm not necessarily an expert in anything, but diving into these various spaces and helping CEOs build the companies.

• 52:43Mario Gabriele?

  Well, obviously, as a generalist, that appeals to me hugely. You're just doing it at a, you know, a different order of magnitude and altitude here. But, you know, that that makes me wonder a little bit. You mentioned at the start of this conversation, how we were talking about Mongo, going through this period where it had a billion dollars of spending before it turned to profit, and how that was sort of such a uniquely American asset class in a sense, or, you know, quirk of this asset class. I know that you're also, you know, a Francophile and have a lot of ties to France. Do you see some of that dynamic beginning to appear more in the European ecosystem? Do you, you know, spend much time in that part of the asset class?

• 53:25Speaker 00

  No, I do spend a lot of time there. You know, I spent half of my childhood growing up in Europe, and then business school there. Two of my three kids live in Europe. So lots of ties there. The key number is there are 241 Decacorns created in the United States over time, 14 in Europe. So I love being in Europe, but they have been way behind in developing technology. And are they doing better? Are they catching up? Are there lots of very smart people there? Absolutely. Do they have the same, you know, risk tolerance at the, in the VC system? Not yet. Everyone in Europe knows, and our companies in Europe know that when they need

• 54:07Speaker 00

  to raise $5 million, yeah, Europe is great. When they need to raise 25 or 50, and they are years away from breakeven, that is a tough sell in Europe. The other thing is that we just have a better ecosystem of universities in the research. I mean, we have tens of billions of dollars being spent at our top 30 universities that have real science breakthroughs. You know, AI is great. Where was that discovered? Most of those algorithms were at Dartmouth in the late 50s. So many things were really discovered. You see every Nobel Prize, vast majority are not necessarily Americans, but they were done at American universities.

• 54:44Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  That leads to a venture capital industry that, that the core research. So Oxford and Cambridge are great. There are a couple of places in the UK that are great.

• 54:55Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  But, you know, name discoveries coming out of Germany, Germany at universities, very few, don't have the money. It's a huge advantage that we have and, and they also have a more fragmented market. So there are some disadvantages, but I, you know, when I'm over in Europe, a lot of the top entrepreneurs still want to come to the United States.

• 55:14Mario Gabriele?

  You know, I, I'm sort of maybe a bit like you in that respect in that I, you know, American or half American parentage, the other half Italian and grew up in England. So, you know, there's sort of this, I think a lot about Europe. I now live in London and in many ways, there is certainly, you know, maybe these differences in funding, certainly a much less mature venture ecosystem. Once you hit the growth side, but one of the biggest pieces to me feels just like purely cultural almost. And I wonder to what extent do you think like that can change over the next, I don't know, 10, 20 years? Like, do we, you know, there, there's sort of a almost shamefulness about being too ambitious in Europe. I'm at risk of talking about this too much on this podcast and in the generals, but it's really like a bit of a bugaboo of mine.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, I think there is, there is, there is some of that. You know, we've seen countries over time develop different skills, like you Copenhagen. How did Copenhagen become a food capital of the world? They don't have a lot of farming.

• 56:17Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  They don't even have a tradition of Danish food. I mean, did you grow up eating Danish food? No.

• 56:21Mario Gabriele?

  No, no.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  And yet they had a great restaurant, Noma, that then moved, you know, people moved.

• 56:27Mario Gabriele?

  Seated ecosystem.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  Seated and the ecosystem is incredible.

• 56:30Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  So it is hard. I mean, in theory, it's easy to do, it should be anywhere, but it's, it's hard and the US has a lot of those things and I don't see us losing our, our position right now because, you know, let's do like a Mongo. Mongo, most people hadn't even heard of Mongo. The reason is it's probably tech company number, I don't know, 80 in the United States or 50, and so at 25 billion. France still has never created a company in the last 30 years that's worth half of what Mongo is.

• 56:58Mario Gabriele?

  Oof, that is tough.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  I don't think Spain has. I don't think Italy has.

• 57:03Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, Italy, no doubt, yes.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  You know, the UK, other than Revolut.

• 57:09Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, Revolut is a real outlier. Uh, some of the other neo-banks are maybe not that far off. Maybe Monza is a $10 billion business, like, yeah, something like that.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  Fintech has worked outside of that, you know, so little.

• 57:20Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  And, and that's, we're still talking about, we just named 200 million people. Comparable to the United States, little smaller. And, you know, and yet, you know, Mongo, as I said, is number 50 or something. So there is a big difference and I'm, I love spending time in Europe. Uh, and they do a lot of other things very well. You know, in biotech, they have incredible companies. Switzerland has amazing companies. But in this particular area of real innovation and really taking big risks, Europe is still behind.

• 57:52Mario Gabriele?

  Yes. Well, I hope the, you know, the, the gap closes. Uh, I obviously want America to continue to, to thrive and, and be at the forefront of this, but I would love for, for Europe to, you know, do a little bit more itself as well.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Oh, by the way, the talent is incredible. I mean, people, look, the people are the same. Europeans and Americans are essentially the same people. Just because a couple of people came over two generations ago, it doesn't change genetically. We are the same. So it is about the ecosystem, the incentive structure, the, the most recent history, funding, uh, things like that.

• 58:25Mario Gabriele?

  Really interesting. Well, uh, I always like to wrap up with a few more philosophical questions. And so if you'll, you'll indulge me. If you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what's an experiment you would like to run?

• 58:39Speaker 00

  It'd probably have to be something with public policy. So, you know, uh, giving money to people in a better system. We've done some small studies. Sam Altman did some, uh, in, in actually just giving cash out. Uh, I would like to see the results there. I'd like to see what happens if you give, uh, free childcare to people. It's been proposed in New York City recently. I really want us to measure the cost of putting someone in prison.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Here's what I mean by that. You have two twins. We arrest them both. One of them goes to jail for a year. The other one doesn't. We just didn't have the evidence. What happens over the next 30 years? We know that we spent, I don't know, $80,000 putting him in jail, but that's not the cost. Is he going to be able to get a job after that? No. He, no one's going to hire him. So he's going to make $5,000, $10,000 a year less than his brother for 30 years. Studies show that the odds of his kids going to jail are much higher than his brother. Because I don't want to be embarrassed about my father. He's a cool guy. He went to jail, whatever.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  The odds of him being on welfare, on unemployment, I think the cost to the state of putting someone in jail for a year is going to end up being like 500,000.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  If that's true, then why don't we actually solve his real problem? Which is, he has an addiction problem, or he didn't have his GED, or he is really autistic and needs some help, or has a mental health issue. And so we're not willing to spend $10,000 to help him. Because we think it's welfare, it's really bad, but we are willing to spend $500,000 to put him in jail. That's dumb idea.

• 1:00:27Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, I can totally appreciate that.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  And we don't, we don't want to just, we don't have unlimited money to give to everyone, but you know, sometimes we underestimate the long-term implications of things we're doing, and we're spending more. I'll give you another micro example. In France, you may notice, they don't repair the roads all the time. In New York City, they're repairing the roads all the time. Why? Two reasons. One, they spend more to build the roads and build it once and spend twice as much. It lasts five or six years. We have a light coating and it gets destroyed. The second thing is they invested at one point and moved things from under the street to under the sidewalk. You never see them digging up water pipes in Paris.

• 1:01:11Mario Gabriele?

  Ah.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  That is an upfront cost that pays off in the long term. And I think there's a fundamental problem in our government that we're just not willing to make some of these long-term investments that will save us money.

• 1:01:24Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm. That's really interesting. I never knew that about France.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  And so most are experiments that I'd like to see done.

• 1:01:29Mario Gabriele?

  Those are great ones. I don't think anyone's ever suggested those or anything particularly close to them. So I appreciate that. What is a tradition or practice from either another culture or another era that you would like us to adopt more widely?

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  Well, actually, I'll give it away. I do think that the use of psychedelics in Native American tribes, in Latin America and in the US, was actually positive. And we've discovered that through backdoors in the United States. But especially, you know, and I'm not talking about going to a rave, I'm talking about in a ceremony, in connections with family. And so, and you know, everyone I know, including myself, who is, let's say, done MDMA with a brother, or a parent, or a child, you know, or a wife, has had an incredible connection and feels like one of the best days of the year for their relationship. And I think

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  the Native Americans understood this. And, you know, and we lost that over time a little bit.

• 1:02:33Mario Gabriele?

  Do you think too many people do ayahuasca in that sort of a setting and too few MDMA? Because in some ways, I feel the seriousness with which people approach these different drugs can be super different.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:02:47Mario Gabriele?

  And the intent that people go into an ayahuasca ceremony is definitely not, hey, let's like, you know, be at a rave versus MDMA. But on the other hand, that, from everything I've ever, you know, heard from people who have done it, can be almost so intense that, you know, you, you're, you're really maybe taking on a different level of risk, or, or, you know, the difficulty level on it has turned up a lot higher.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  I'd put it a different way. Just use the word enjoyment.

• 1:03:12Mario Gabriele?

  Okay.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  And I've tried all of these things. And no one comes out of ayahuasca saying that was really enjoyable. But many times, not always, they come out saying, this was very profound. I am so happy I did it. It's one of the most important days of my life. And I think that most people don't realize that MDMA, which can be very fun to take at a club, can be incredibly deep and introspective to take. It's an utterly different experience if you do it with music playing, with a guide, with a blindfold. And it's just hard to imagine. Because if you did that, for example, with alcohol, alcohol can be fun in a party.

• 1:03:49Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  If you sat on your couch and got drunk. Nothing good happens. You're not having great experiences. And so you don't realize how different it is to use MDMA and how positive it can be in that environment. So it's easier to use in a club. So people do it. And you're right. It self selects the people who use ayahuasca because they really have to be committed. And I think more people should do MDMA or mushroom ceremonies.

• 1:04:15Mario Gabriele?

  Okay, final question. If you had the power to assign a book to everyone on earth to read and understand, what would you want to assign to them?

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  We actually have a book club here. And so I read about 30 books a year, 32 books a year. Combination of fiction and nonfiction. So wide varieties of things. So we just read Dan Wang's book, Comparing China and the United States. But we'll also, you know, read tons of, we went back and read, we'll read a Solomon Rushdie book or something else or upcoming fiction. So I don't have any book that's gotten to the level where I think everyone on earth should, should read it.

• 1:04:52Mario Gabriele?

  What might be in your favorite books, let's say, what would you put in your, you know, maybe a couple that you really loved?

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  Well, the ones I've given out the most to people, 50 of them, but they're more practical books. One is the Walker book on why we sleep.

• 1:05:08Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, interesting. I haven't read that.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, you should definitely do that. It'll just, it, it, you know, I think in the last five years, we've learned how important sleep is and we prided ourselves 20 years ago and I only get six hours of sleep. And you're like, oh my God, what are you're a cool guy. And it turns out that that's just a really bad idea. So I do prioritize sleep a lot more, influenced partly by that book. And How to Change Your Mind is a book I've given out to many people as well over the last 10 years. So those are, those are two I've given out the most. By the way, this year, this year, I think the Peter Attia book, Outlive,

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  is a very good book that reminds you of the current thinking on both the big risks for any one of us. You know, the three biggest ones are going to be Alzheimer's, cancer and, and heart problems.

• 1:05:58Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, interesting. Okay. Since you mentioned that you read a lot of fiction and I'm sneakily always looking for book recommendations. Are there any in, in that camp that you, you know, just always find yourself coming back to or particularly loved?

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean,

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  Burnham Wood is a very good book that we read last year that I really, I liked. I reread The Odyssey, which I think everyone should go back and reread. You may have read it in high school. I just reread Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, which I think is good. I've been reading James Baldwin, which I think is good. I thought on the public policy side, I mean, everyone's reading it, but Abundance was a good book.

• 1:06:38Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  So I thought that was good. I read The Optimist, which was a book about Sam Altman, which is reminding you of how that process occurred in the, in the beginning. For those of us that lived in New York 30 years ago, The Gods of New York just came out by Jonathan Mahler, which talks about 1985 to 1990 in New York.

• 1:06:58Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  It's a reminder to everyone, you know, it's crazy to think that there were 2,200 murders in 1990, and this year will be 275.

• 1:07:08Mario Gabriele?

  That is insane.

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. 85% drop. And that is just unprecedented. You know, that's, that's a really amazing thing to, to have seen there. So yeah, there's so many, so many good, so many good books out there.

• 1:07:24Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, no kidding. Well, you've added some, some great ones to my Kindle wishlist. So thank you for that. And thank you so much for this conversation. I really, really enjoyed it.

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you. This is great. I'm glad it worked out.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions. So if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at degeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.