#428: Ronan Levy Gives An Overview of Psychedelics

Ronan Levy is a pioneer in the medical cannabis and psychedelic industries. He is the co-founder and Executive Chairman of Field Trip, along with a partner at Grassfed Ventures. In this conversation, we discuss a psychedelics overview, mental health, microdosing, psilocybin, legalization vs decriminalization, and how Field Trip is attacking the space. ======================= Want to sell your wonderful internet business? Tiny partners with founders to give them quick, straightforward exits that protect their team and culture. We’ll make an offer within a week, close the deal within a month, and keep your business operating for the long term. Get in touch at http://www.tinycapital.com, and we’ll let you know within a couple of days. ======================= Harvested Financial makes options incredibly simple. They’re the first options robo advisor, where you can build and customize a personalized trading plan that gets automatically executed. Options help you speculate in capital efficient ways, diversify your holdings with market neutral strategies, and generate passive income by selling premium. https://www.harvestedfinancial.com/pomp ======================= Diginex is the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the US. That exchange, EQUOS, has been built to institutional standards, but is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot, as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and get a 5% discount on all fees, by signing up using http://www.equos.com/pomp

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Ronan Levy is a pioneer in the medical cannabis and psychedelic industries. He is the co-founder and executive chairman of Field Trip, along with a partner at Grass Fed Ventures. In this conversation, we discuss psychedelics overview, mental health, microdosing, psilocybin, legalization versus decriminalization, and how Field Trip is attacking this industry. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ronan and I learned a ton. I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:55Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:40Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's get in this episode with Ronan. I hope you guys enjoyed this one.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:09Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Ronan here. I am super excited to do this. We are going to do a complete deep dive on psychedelics and the psychedelic industry. Thank you so much for doing this, sir.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Happy to have a chat.

• 4:23Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Let's jump right into your background. You've had a very kind of storied entrepreneurial career. Maybe just walk us through kind of what you've done up until this point.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So I started my career actually as a lawyer, working on Bay Street. For those who don't know what that is, it's kind of the Canadian equivalent to Wall Street, working at a prestigious firm. Quickly realized that was not the life for me. I was I was once described as being too creative to be a lawyer, and I take that with a badge of honor. So I was actively involved in various entrepreneurial startups all along, and quickly left the private practice of law, working in various businesses as a lawyer, until I really got my chops in entrepreneurship. That was about 2011, when I opened my first business, which is in the gold industry. It still operates to this day, actually, but it was never my lifelong ambition to be in the gold industry. So I went back,

• 5:15Speaker 02

  started working with startups, really as a lawyer, but with a view to kind of getting involved on a deeper level. And through those activities, I found my business partners, Joseph and Hanan and Ryan, in this current business, in Field Trip Health, actually.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  They were looking at doing something in the Canadian medical cannabis industry. This was late 2013, and, you know, they were trying to figure something out, but they're a little bit hesitant because of the stigma. And just through my path and my career, being a lawyer and various other activities, I was like, there's no stigma here, guys. This is legal. This is like the greatest opportunity. How often do you get an opportunity where like a multi-billion, if not trillion-dollar black market turns overnight into a legal market? You know, how can you miss this? And so after cajoling them for a little while, we all kind of joined forces. And we started two sister companies, one called Canvas RX, one called Canadian Cannabis Clinics. The latter grew to the largest network of cannabis

• 6:14Speaker 02

  specialized medical clinics in Canada. Thirty locations have helped well over 100,000 Canadians access the legal medical cannabis system. And Canvas RX, we sold to a company, fledgling cannabis company called Aurora Cannabis, Inc., recently got licensed to produce cannabis, but had big ambitions and a really amazing CEO, Terry Booth, whose energy was just boundless. I've never met a guy who worked so hard and was so caring and thoughtful at the same time. And so we joined Aurora, helped Aurora grow from a small CSC listed company with a $65 million market cap. When we left in 2018, it was a $10 billion New York Stock Exchange listed company. So it was a fun couple of years there. And after we left, we kind of were

• 6:59Speaker 02

  looking for something new to do. And that's when we learned about what was happening in psychedelics. We didn't come from a background in cannabis or in psychedelics being like, you know, being super cannabis advocates, or being psychonauts, or anything along those lines. And I think that's really what has enabled us to excel in both industries is we kind of came in objective, thoughtful, professional, and really brought that level of focus and discipline to both industries. And that's kind of helped us to do what we do. So in 2018, started looking into all the research. We saw that Peter Thiel had just made an investment in a company called Compass Pathways. The magic of LinkedIn enabled us to chat with the CEO. Usually LinkedIn is a big waste of time, but in

• 7:41Speaker 02

  this instance, it actually worked out well for us. You know, we got connected to Rick Doblin, we spoke to Michael Pollan, who had just published How to Change Your Mind, and started learning and became fascinated with the science and the evidence coming out around psychedelics. And quickly got to the point where like, holy shit, this stuff is going to be legal way sooner than anybody could imagine. This is coming, and it's coming fast. And what can we do? We had had this amazing experience with cannabis, kind of going in a little bit agnostic to the therapeutic potential of cannabis, but seeing a great business opportunity, and then being truly blown away and moved by the impact it had. You know, almost uniformly, all of the physicians who now work at Canadian cannabis clinics

• 8:24Speaker 02

  refer to cannabis as the most effective medicine they've ever prescribed to their patients in terms of quality of life. And so, you know, we had a, we had a great exit when we sold that business. And so we kind of looked at psychedelics as being a really great opportunity to create a new incredible business, but create massive impact. You know, this is kind of the opportunity. Of the scale of Elon Musk and SpaceX and what he's trying to do or Jeff Bezos. And you know, this is massive scale, massive impact opportunity when you look at the evidence around psychedelics. And so we kind of dug in, learned as much as we could, spent about a year trying to figure out how to build a business in psychedelics. Because what are you going to do? All of these are still scheduled by and large, crafted our business plan and

• 9:08Speaker 02

  launched Field Trip about a year and a half ago. And that's kind of the path here.

• 9:11Anthony Pompliano?

  It's awesome. Let's start at a very high level. What is a psychedelic? Right? Everyone hears that they kind of, it used to be very, very fringe. Now it's less fringe in terms of when people are talking about it. But just from your understanding, after having done all that research, what is a psychedelic?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, and there's still ongoing debate as to what is a psychedelic? It's not a defined answer. I will tell you how we think about it. We think about a psychedelic as anything that slows the ego or tunes down the ego, slows the default mode network in the brain, which is kind of the parts of the brain that operate as the operating system that keep you going, even when you're not thinking about things. Anything that tunes those down, slows those down, and opens you up to change, is what we consider a psychedelic. And so that can be psychedelic drugs, like LSD, or psilocybin, or it could be meditation, or breathwork. If you haven't tried breathwork, it is a super cool experience how you could

• 10:11Speaker 02

  induce an almost tripped-like state just through different breathing techniques. So to us, any of those are psychedelics, and because they enable the capacity for change. But for other people, if you want to get more focused on the chemistry, typically psychedelics refer to molecules that engage the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor in the brain. So that's LSD, that's psilocybin, that's DMT, that's 5-MEO DMT, which are known psychedelics, that's peyote, just about anything you can sort of think of when you think about the counterculture and hippie movements, those are classically psychedelics. MDMA is lumped

• 10:53Speaker 02

  into that category as well. MDMA is not conventionally a psychedelic in that respect, but it offers very similar experiences, and it really does the same thing of slowing the default mode network, tuning down the ego, and enabling change. So that gets put in the category as well. But it is a pretty fluid definition.

• 11:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And so, one of the things that's really interesting to me is there's kind of two use cases, I think, that now are presenting themselves. There's like this medicinal type use case, and then there's more of a recreational or wellness type use case. It mirrors, I know you've talked about it before, a lot of what happened so far in the cannabis industry. Maybe talk about that framework and how you think about each one of those use cases developing, whether it's from a legal structure standpoint, or from an actual just development of the industry.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Sure. So, when we got excited about psychedelics, certainly, you know, the evidence around the treatment of depression, and PTSD, and anxiety, and all of these clinically diagnosed mental health conditions was incredibly exciting. You know, that's incredible impact. But it's kind of focused on, and it's a function of the entire modern, western allopathic medicine approach, which is you focus on what's wrong and try and sort of come back to baseline, right? So, people who are sick, you give them medicine, and they come back to baseline to be quote-unquote "normal." But, you know, the five guys behind Field Trip, all of us kind of have a little bit of a, we're not super biohackers, but we're always focused

• 12:24Speaker 02

  on optimization, and increasing our creativity, and empathy, and awareness. And I know I've spent 15 years working with meditation, and metaphysics, and self-exploration, independent of psychedelics, really just trying to have a better life, to be happier, to be a better parent, be a better partner, all of these things. These are just part of personal growth. And so, that was the part of the industry that probably excited us more, just personally. And inevitably, when you start a business, usually you build a business to satisfy your own desires. And so, what we see happening, what happened in the cannabis industry, as many people know, is that most programs started off as a medical program, which means you needed to go to a doctor, get a diagnosis, you know, whether it's back pain, or migraines,

• 13:08Speaker 02

  or you had HIV/AIDS, which is where a lot of the movement started, and you wanted something to help manage the symptoms around that. But you needed a doctor, you needed a diagnosis, and you needed a prescription, and then you can access medical cannabis. And then eventually... That involved two adult use cannabis where people can just buy cannabis like they they can buy alcohol and and that's fine. And I think, you know, philosophically, the war on drugs never made a whole lot of sense. So it it kind of is is totally rational and coherent that that happened there. In psychedelics, what we see happening is a little bit different. You know, when we looked at the the evidence and where things were going, we thought it was certainly wonderful that there was a path through FDA approval and clinical trials to create new medicines using psilocybin and MDMA to treat depression,

• 13:53Speaker 02

  to treat anxiety, to treat PTSD, certainly. But we always felt that that would be a little bit, a little bit less than ideal outcome, right? Because psychedelics can help just about everybody. You know, there's certain kind of contraindications where people shouldn't be taking psychedelics. But for most people, psychedelic experiences can be very illuminating. They can help you process traumas. They can help you be more well, self-sustaining, creative, empathetic, all of these wonderful things. And so what we saw emerging and what has now happened with the passage of measure 109 in Oregon is that two systems are now clearly in place. One is going to be purely medical and these drugs are going through FDA trials. They're phase three programs.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  And once they get approved, they're going to be prescribable by doctors for the treatment of mental health conditions. And that's great for people who are suffering with these conditions. But for anyone else who's not sick but could potentially benefit, they get excluded from that program. And so what we saw happen in Oregon and what we expect to see on a state by state basis, much like we saw with cannabis, is programs that are really accessible to all people. You don't have to be sick. You don't have to have a diagnosis of a mental health condition to access it. But what will differentiate it a bit from cannabis is that it will be more controlled. It's not going to be that you go to a dispensary and buy mushrooms or whatever and take them home. You'll have to go to a licensed facilitator or clinician. You won't have to be sick.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  You won't have to be depressed, but you'll have to go to a controlled environment. And it'll be accessible to anybody who wants to use it. And the great thing about that program is there's greater access. People who can benefit from psychedelics without being sick will have access. But the benefit of being within the medical program, if you want to talk about it in terms of benefits, is that there'll be insurance coverage, right? These will be FDA approved drugs, they'll have indications. And if you fit that indication and you get a prescription and you want to seek treatment, there'll be a lot more robust insurance coverage, so it won't be as expensive. But we think both of those are going to emerge. And that's great, because the sick will have better access to programs. The people with mental health will have better access and lower cost access to programs. But the people who don't need it but want it will be able to access it as well.

• 16:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk to me a little bit about the science and kind of how far along the industry is. So in preparation for this, I read a whole bunch of different things. And it seems like there are now many, many studies that are starting to show the efficacy, whether it is for PTSD, whether it is for other mental trauma. It just seems like now we're getting close, if not already, to this point where like the evidence is overwhelmingly positive that like this works, specifically around the medicinal side. How do you guys view that scientific data and some of the studies that have already been done?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  I mean, I think it's essential. And I think the reason that the psychedelic renaissance is happening so rapidly, especially as you compare it to cannabis, is because that evidence is so robust and so persuasive. You know, you look at, this movement really started about 20 years ago when ketamine, which is a legal and prescribable drug in most countries around the world as an anesthetic, was shown to have very positive effects on the treatment of depression. So much so that Dr. Tom Insal, he used to be the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, that said it was the most important breakthrough in the treatment of depression in 50 years or something along those lines. And that sort of kicked off this interest in psychoactive drugs.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  For the treatment of mental health. And then probably 10, 15 years ago, you had some very enterprising researchers from Johns Hopkins and Imperial College in London, who started looking at psilocybin again for the treatment of mental health conditions. Now, what's really interesting is, you know, I don't know how old you are, but we probably had very similar high school experiences where we were taught about like how terrible drugs are. This is your brain on drugs and all that kind of stuff. But the history of most psychedelics actually starts in either cultural, spiritual uses, or in the modern Western context, in research. You know, this was Harvard University in the late 50s and early 60s, advancing the research on LSD for mental health conditions, which showed

• 18:12Speaker 02

  profound, profoundly positive results. But the LSD kind of left the lab and went into the mainstream, the counterculture, and you had the whole political backlash. So the researchers who picked it up in the last 15 years or so were really working off a base of evidence. And that evidence shows incredible efficacy. You know, when you look at psilocybin for the treatment of depression, you know, there's a study that came out from NYU a couple of months ago, that showed that a single psilocybin assisted therapy session, and it's important to note that when we're talking about psychedelic therapies, it's really the interplay of the drug with the therapy. It's not just given the drug like we think of antidepressants or antibiotics or anything along those lines. It's really

• 18:53Speaker 02

  the interplay. But there's a study out of NYU that showed a single psilocybin assisted therapy session could provide antidepressant effects for up to five years. One session, five years. You know, when you compare that to antidepressants, which you have to take every day, this is like, it's almost crazy that we would be considering using antidepressants going forward. Or you look at the studies with MDMA and an organization, a nonprofit called MAPS, which is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which has been doing this for 30 years. You know, God bless Rick for his discipline and drive to see this through after all that time. You know, in their phase two clinical study,

• 19:34Speaker 02

  FDA approved clinical study, they showed that close to 70% of people with chronic severe PTSD PTSD were no longer categorized as having PTSD anymore. You know, you're talking about an effective cure of PTSD and some of the most rigorous and robust clinical trials you can you can imagine. And it's it's crossed the spectrum, you know, with anxiety, you see similar results. We'll be hosting a trial looking at MDMA for the treatment of anorexia at some point. So any mental health conditions. And the amazing thing is that these molecules are incredibly safe by and large, you know, they're they're non addictive, may even be anti addictive. When you talk about psilocybin or LSD, the results speak for themselves.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  And they also have these pro social side effects, right? You know, people not only report that they have significantly improved depression or anxiety. They also report that, you know, they have increased creativity, increased empathy, more openness to other people's viewpoints, which is something that seems sorely lacking around the world these days. As well as like greater connection to nature and the planet. So not only are they being cured, they're actually their lives are being improved over and above treatment of their condition. So the research is is quite profound. The safety profile of these molecules is pretty well established. And it's just growing, you know, there's a few major studies that have been given breakthrough therapy status by the FDA,

• 20:59Speaker 02

  which means not only has the FDA decided that, you know, these show incredible promise, but they meet an urgent need. You know, it really is quite the platform that we're working from with a lot of research and support behind it.

• 21:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, one of the things that's really interesting to me is you shared the kind of this chart around the harmfulness of various drugs and things like MDMA, LSD, you know, other types of psychedelics, or some of the least harmful drugs you can put in your body, right? If you compare that, you know, to alcohol or whatever it is. And so it almost begs the question of like, whether it's through medicinal or recreational purposes, what's the downside of this, right? So it's kind of, was it just a side effect of the war on drugs? And this got lumped in with everything and therefore kind of it took a detour, if you will, for a couple of decades and was deemed, you know, illegal and bad because the government said so?

• 21:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Or are there other things that you guys kind of look at and say, look, we know that there are specific side effects that could be negative, but the positives outweigh those negatives?

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean with any drugs, there's always gonna, with anything, you know, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. And that's certainly true with all drugs and as well as psychedelics. But I think you hit on the key point, which is the benefits, particularly with psychedelics, far outweigh the downsides. You know, the biggest risks around psychedelics, by and large, you know, most are anti-addictive or non-addictive. So you're not going to get hooked on them like you could with other drugs like cocaine or heroin, if we're talking about illicit drugs. There's with psilocybin and LSD, at least, there's no LD50, which means you really can't overdose to the point of death. You know, there was a study, it was an N of one, but a

• 22:51Speaker 02

  woman took something like 10,000 micrograms of LSD, which is like 40 times a significant dose of LSD. And she was sick for a couple of days, but it seemed to cure her bipolar disorder. And she was fine afterwards. So, you know, it's, you're not going to die on these, by and large. So, you know, they're relatively safe in that regard. The biggest risk is there's two risks around psychedelics. The biggest risk is people having bad trips. You know, we probably heard all of the urban legends of someone having a trip and launching themselves off a building. And the truth is, that has happened, but not with the frequency by which, you know, we may have learned in high school. But bad trips, you know, the current belief is that there's

• 23:36Speaker 02

  no such thing as a bad trip. There are hard trips and there are easy trips. A hard trip can still be incredibly therapeutic when supported by the right therapy. But if it doesn't have the right container around it, it can turn into a bad trip. And a bad trip, much like a nightmare, can create its own instance of PTSD. So there are potentials for negatives, but generally, the risk is relatively low. It's not zero, but the risk is relatively low. And especially with the right supporting context, it's much lower. And that's about it. There's also reports of a condition where people have taken a psychedelic, and like the experience takes a long time to go away. I forget exactly what the acronym is, but it's essentially a persistent trip that lasts for a long time. And that does

• 24:20Speaker 02

  happen in rare instances as well, but it does seem to subside after some period of time. But that can also be probably very unpleasant for those people who experience it. Outside of that, though, the risks are fairly minimal, and the upsides are obviously quite significant.

• 24:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. I'm assuming that you've taken the psychedelics and kind of experienced this for yourself. And so can you maybe describe to people what the actual experience is, right? I think people hear the psychedelic, you know, they read about it. But if you've never actually taken them, is it something where you can attribute it to like being drunk? Is it more like, you know, being high on marijuana? Is it like cocaine? Is it something completely different? Like, how would you describe the actual experience?

• 25:09Speaker 02

  It really depends. I mean, I haven't tried all psychedelics, so I can't speak from personal experience on all of them. But, um, you know, it, uh, if, if I was going to speak to psilocybin, which is where my personal experience is. And I talk about it quite extensively, actually, on our podcast, which is called Field Tripping. The, the experience is kind of like, it's a little bit like cannabis. You know, you kind of feel the voices in your head, all of the thoughts kind of slow down a little bit. And so you become more aware of what's going on around you. Depending on the drug, that can also come through in very colorful expressions. You know, they've, they've taken people who have, who are on psilocybin and put them in an FMRI machine to see what's happening in the brain.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  And what they've found is that when you're on a psychedelic, parts of your brain that typically don't talk to each other, you're talking to each other quite frequently. So that's why people experience a much more robust sense of the world, right? They can feel music more, they can taste music more, or art is more colorful. And, and there's actually a neurological reason for it is that the parts of your brain are talking to each other more. So your experience is actually more integrated. And so on psilocybin, you know, you kind of feel like a little bit of spaciness, but you're still coherent. You're still very conscious. You're not reckless, like you're drunk. You know, your judgment is still fairly well intact. But if you close your eyes, you will typically have an incredible visual experience.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  You know, a lot of the tropes about the 1960s and LSD, a lot of those kind of experiences and those color experiences do happen when you, when you take psilocybin. If you take it and go inward, you know, you'll often experience past moments in your life. You'll be able to see them with a degree of objectivity. You've never seen them with before. You'll have creative ideas, you know, a lot of these things are pretty comparable to cannabis or drinking in some respects, but they land more, they they're you're easy, it's easier to hold on to them more. They don't just dissipate. They're much more meaningful to you. That's probably how I'd describe the experience. I've never taken ketamine personally, but a lot of people talk about ketamine and have an experience whereby, you know,

• 27:23Speaker 02

  they just feel like, you know, they're a little bit in outer space or underwater and can see the world in just a much different way, you know, still very much themselves. It's just kind of like being in a little bit of outer space and or an out of body experience as well. It can still be colorful. It can still be very vibrant, but it's a little bit more objective. That's, that's how I would describe it. You know, I think everyone's experiences are personal and then they can definitely go dark. And, you know, as a nod to Michael Pollan in his book, How to Change Your Mind, he goes into depth about what his trip experiences were like when he did LSD and psilocybin, and he's probably much more eloquent and poetic about it than I am. So if anyone wants to, you know, get a deeper sense, that'd be a good place to look.

• 28:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I apologize in advance. I'm probably going to ask a bunch of really naive elementary questions. So stick with me. The experience you just described is very positive, right? Almost like this thing where you're ingesting something that unblocks a lot of the blockage in your brain. And so you can see that either from a kind of internal, you know, review, right? And it would make sense as to things like PTSD, you know, therapies and things like that. That would make a ton of sense because you can actually get somebody to kind of go through that experience, talk through it and things like that. But also there's this external component. You just see the world differently. We can kind of sum it up like that.

• 28:49Anthony Pompliano?

  That is in stark contrast to maybe something like an Iowaska, right? Where people basically describe.

• 28:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Vomiting and diarrhea and kind of a much more like cleansing type activity. Does the psychedelic community consider things like ayahuasca to be part of it? Is it kind of, there's a gray area and it just depends where you draw the line? Like, how do you think about something that I think people look at as much more like cleansing the body versus almost like this like mental trip that you just described?

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, ayahuasca is certainly part of the psychedelic experience. You know, a lot of people have ayahuasca experiences. Ayahuasca, the active drug in ayahuasca is DMT, which is actually something that our body naturally synthesizes just in very small proportions. But it's thought actually that the experience that people have when they die, you know, you've heard of like the white light and seeing all of your family. It's thought that that may be a big release of DMT in your body. So, so the ayahuasca experience, you know, there's a lot of physical purging. A lot of people associate that physical purging as emotional purging as well. You know, you're getting rid of the demons, you're getting rid of the trauma. But it's not unique to ayahuasca. It's much more physical and visceral.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  But, you know, one time when I had an experience with psilocybin, I felt my body moving. I felt like I was retching, like I was throwing up, but I wasn't throwing up. And it feel like I was throwing up, but my body was doing that activity. And it very much felt the same way. So it depends on the depth of the experience, but that's not unique to ayahuasca. The intensity of the fact that you actually throw up is typically unique to ayahuasca, but not exclusively. But that processing, it really does feel like depending on the experience, you know, your body is purging held emotions. And if you look at, you know, some of the theories of what drives depression and anxiety, a lot of it is repressed emotion.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  You know, we don't, we're, as a society, we're terrible at feeling our emotions and expressing our emotions and processing our emotions. And that takes energy, that takes effort and we tend to bury them into our subconscious. Subconscious. And so one of the thoughts is with psychedelics is that it unpacks that. And I've certainly had that feeling as well, that like when I was on psilocybin, you know, I felt like a part of my brain that was closed off and not accessible. You know, very feminine kind of energy came out and started helping me like work through all of these things that I've held on to for my entire life. And so I didn't throw up, but my body actually made the motions like I was going to throw up. And, and just as a, as a quick side note, just if people are interested about

• 31:40Speaker 02

  why it's believed that psychedelics can be so therapeutic and so effective. It's really thought that there's three kind of interactions that are happening when you ingest a psychedelic. One is there's almost an immediate antidepressant effect, whether it's ketamine or psilocybin or MDMA. As soon as it hits you, most people report a lift in mood. And so it kind of takes you, if you're in a depression or in a funk, it will pull you out of that immediately. Secondly, it helps you see old experiences and old traumas more objectively. So you can start to process the emotions and move them through your body as well. So you start to process the traumas, very similar like to talk therapy, but on a hyper expedited basis, right? Like it just gets right down to the business.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Instead of taking years, you know, your brain is just like forcing you to confront those issues and start processing them. And the third way that psychedelic therapy seems to have such incredible impact is that there's a period of neuroplasticity that happens after you take a psychedelic. Michael Pollan referred to it as like, if you imagine cross-country ski tracks, a fresh dump of snow kind of landing on top of it. So you have a new opportunity to create new paths, quite literally in your brain. And so when you pair that with psychotherapy, when you have a therapist there with you, you know, using different techniques, you're actually much more able to adopt those habits, those changes into your lifestyle, into your brain. And so you have this lasting kind of actual change.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  It's kind of like, you know, when you take Play-Doh and warm it up with your hands and it becomes much more malleable. That's literally what's happening with your brain. So you can reshape a lot of things in a positive way. And so that's kind of what's believed to be happening when you have a psychedelic experience and why these effects are so profound and so lasting.

• 33:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you mentioned kind of at the point of death, there's this belief that a ton of DMT gets released. One of the questions that somebody sent me on Twitter that I know nothing about and found fascinating was this idea of basically at the point of death to administer a psychedelic to somebody, to almost make it a less painful, I guess in some weird way, a more enjoyable experience. Is that something that is more on like the fringe and kind of a one-off idea? Or is that something that is being taken seriously by the scientific community and kind of the psychedelic community?

• 34:04Speaker 02

  I can't speak for everybody. It's not something that I've heard a lot of personally. There's a lot of interest in using psychedelics as part of palliative care because some of the more interesting studies, like the one I mentioned from NYU, it was actually giving psilocybin assisted therapy to people with terminal cancer who were facing end of life distress. And those people reported a significant improvement in their anxiety around dying because one of the other experiences that people often have is like a sense of connectedness. You know, I've been reading The Immortality Key, which is a book that kind of looks to, you know, psychedelic use in ancient Greece and how that actually translated into early Christianity and all that kind of stuff. But one of the things it talks about was that

• 34:47Speaker 02

  in ancient Greece, there was a ritual called the Mysteries of Eleusis. And all of the great ancient Greek philosophers had this. And almost uniformly, everybody who went through the mysteries reported that they no longer feared death because they actually saw that life, like this was literally just a shell. Your body is just a shell, but your life continues well afterwards. And the people report that experience to this day. So that's where a lot of the interest is specifically to DMT or other psychedelics right at the kind of moment of death. I haven't heard of that. But Erwin Perlman, who's the gentleman I've been working with for the last 15 years and kind of my meditation and metaphysical practice, metaphysics practice, kind of talks about, most people when they die actually

• 35:31Speaker 02

  look very relieved and pleased, right? Like, it is actually, the moment up to it is actually terrifying, but the actual moment of it is actually quite relieving. At least that's what he talks about. And that may be in part triggered by the DMT. But beyond that, I don't know specifically any research that's happening on it.

• 35:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's just fascinating to kind of think through, you know, there's the medical in the legacy sense that you can treat terminal cancer, you know, things like that. But also then there's this mental component to it. And if you can almost make the experience less acute for somebody, you know, there's a lot of benefit to that. One of the other questions that I got, but this probably the most popular one was all around microdosing. So maybe just start with like, what is microdosing? And then I think from the questions, I was surprised at how many people at least claim that they microdose on a daily basis. And so what exactly is that? And kind of why would people be doing it on a more frequent basis?

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when we talk about the research around psychedelics, it's typically using macro or transformational level doses. So if you were to equate it to mushrooms, it'd be like five grams of mushrooms, which is a significant dose of magic mushrooms. Microdosing would be the equivalent of taking 100 milligrams or 200 milligrams, and it's supposed to be sub perceptible. So you don't really notice it, but you're really treating the psychedelic much more like an antidepressant, taking it on a daily basis or a frequent basis to improve mood and creativity. And the challenge with microdosing is that there's a lot of anecdotal evidence of its

• 37:13Speaker 02

  effectiveness, but there's really no substantive research that's been done on it. So it's really hard to say whether it's effective or not, at least on a scientific basis. From what I've heard, there are some studies that have been going on recently that haven't been published, but they suggest that microdosing is no more effective than placebo. So suggesting that microdosing is not effective, but it's really unknown right now. But the whole idea is taking small doses on a frequent basis to enhance creativity and what you hear people in Silicon Valley doing and all that kind of stuff. And a lot of people swear by it and that's great. And if it's working for them, that's fantastic. One of the risks, and we didn't really touch upon this when we talk about the risks of psychedelics, because

• 37:58Speaker 02

  It's typically only a risk if there's a very frequent high use of psychedelics, but drugs like psilocybin, they're promiscuous. You know, they primarily engage the 5 HD 2A serotonin receptor, which means that's the psychedelic receptor that causes a psychedelic experience, or at least it's believed so. But they can also engage or agonize the 5 HD 2B receptor in the brain, which has been associated, if it is agonized too much or too frequently, with potential cardiac issues, heart valve fibrosis and issues like that. And so that's one of the concerns around microdosing is that if you're taking frequently, you may be wandering into what's called the 5 HD 2B liability.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  Unknown, you know, and a lot of people like Paul Stamets have been microdosing for years and years and seem to be okay. So, but it is one of the things you want to be conscious with if you are engaging in a, in a microdosing practice is it's, it's probably, it's probably got a higher risk profile than doing the very occasional high dose experience, just given the frequency of use and that potential risk. But I don't know how significant that risk is. It's just something to keep in mind.

• 39:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, what's interesting about this is microdosing seems similar to somebody who takes Adderall every day. The difference being that the Adderall almost speeds up the thought process, speeds up the focus and makes somebody more of a kind of, I don't know, called like a rigid machine or like just you can just knock out work for hours and hours and hours versus this, which is a much more frequent, you know, kind of consumption of it, but it has the opposite effect almost, right? It's like a more creative, slowing down, more laid back type approach. And so, you know, if that framework is accurate, it's almost like, well, Adderall is legal through a doctor and kind of has a specific effect.

• 39:55Anthony Pompliano?

  It would make sense, I guess, that kind of the opposite intended state could be achieved on a daily basis, but it sounds like that may not actually even be necessary, right? You could almost just do it periodically and have some lasting effects there as well, it sounds like.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, your brain, the experience of psychedelics when done properly with therapy is that you actually have change. You have neurological change, you have emotional change, and it's lasting and it's substantiated. But comparing microdosing to taking Adderall daily, I don't know enough about Adderall to really speak about the experience, but it can be used in that way, but probably with different intent and different effect. And truthfully, there's something about that that appeals to me logically. I have a stepson who's 19 years old, and he went to university, and he's asking what he should study. And I said, "The most important two features, the two most important skills in the future are going

• 40:57Speaker 02

  to be the ability to concentrate, because in our digital phone era, concentration and like attention levels have dropped so much. And the second thing is creativity. Math and science and engineering, all of that's going to be done by computers. Anything that's logical can be done by computers way better than it can be done by us. Creativity, where you have to like jump the gap, where there's no logical answer, and you have to fill in the gap through creativity, that's going to be the most important skill set in the world. And so to the extent that psychedelics, either microdosing, transformational doses of it, are going to facilitate that, I see them having a significant impact beyond just mental health treatments in the future as well.

• 41:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. No, it makes complete sense. Talk to me a little bit about the strategy for Field Trip is this like set and setting type approach. And so for most people, when they think of psychedelics, they're thinking about the actual thing that is being consumed, and then the impact that has on your mental or emotional state. This idea that you guys have around like, well, a big part of the experience is driven by the environment in which you are in, and what can kind of be done there. Just walk us through like, what is the strategy and kind of why is that so important?

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when we started with Field Trip and we started doing the research and we spoke to everybody, the consistent theme we heard is there's going to be no money in the drugs. There's only going to be money and a business to be made in the delivery of psychedelic therapies. And that kind of resonated with us because we had just spent a couple of years building a whole clinical infrastructure for cannabis. So we're like, okay, well, we're extremely well positioned to do this for psychedelics. And what we realized is that psychedelics don't fit into conventional medicine. You know, you can't go to your family doctor and expect him or her to administer psilocybin and have you hang out at their office for six or eight hours while you go through a trip, right? They don't have the space, they don't have the staffing, and they're not interested in doing it.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  So there was, there is going to be a real need for this new clinical infrastructure. So that's what we started with. But then we realized that because so much, and there's an incredible amount of evidence around this, so much of the therapeutic experience comes down to the set and setting, which refers to the mindset of the person. So what preparation they bring into the psychedelic experience and what their intentions, you know, what do I want to get out of this? Some people may come in and just be like, you know, I spoke with Alex Icon, one of the guys who founded the Five Minute Journal, and he said, "I went in and just said, 'Universe, show me what I need to see.'" Other people will go in and be like, "I need to get over the breakup with my boyfriend," or something along those lines.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  So the mindset is the set and setting, and the setting is actually the space, the physical space. There's evidence to show that if you're in a warm, safe, naturally inspired environment, typically you're going to have better therapeutic outcomes, as opposed to being in a hospital setting with fluorescent lights and white walls. And so as we were building up Field Trip, knowing that you needed clinical infrastructure, you needed new space, you needed new operations, you needed new protocols to actually make this scalable, we also focused very heavily on the setting as well. So if you go into any of our clinics, we are currently operating in New York, Toronto, Chicago, and LA with plans for many more, you'll notice that these do not feel like doctor's offices.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  They feel much more, and I don't like the term, I don't... Why, but it feels very spa like. I think I don't like the term piece. It kind of diminishes the impact and the importance of what we're doing, but it feels that way. It feels very warm. It feels very comfortable and we've invested heavily in that. And what makes Field Trip really unique is our focus on both aspects of it. We're focused on both developing the drugs. So we are in preclinical stages and we'll talk about this more with FT104, which is a novel synthetic psychedelic molecule. It's actually been derived from known psychedelics, as well as we're doing advanced cultivation research on psilocybin producing mushrooms on one side of the equation, but we're focused on doing that in parallel with developing the

• 45:06Speaker 02

  know-how and understanding of what aspects of set and setting matter. You know, we know it's important to feel like you're in a safe, warm, comfortable environment, but we don't know specifically what music matters or what lighting matters, or you know, the chair, or how you're sitting, or what's on the walls. You know, all of these things can have an impact, but no one's really got objective data on exactly what differences they make. So with Field Trip Health Centers that are rolling out, we're focused obviously on delivering care using ketamine assisted therapy right now, but also collecting the data on what dynamics really affect the outcome. So when we come to market with a new product, you know, not only are we going to have best in class psilocybin producing mushrooms or best in class approved drug, we're also going to be able to

• 45:51Speaker 02

  support that experience because if you're doing one without the other, then you leave a lot to chance, right? You know, if you've developed like a new, you know, it's got approval for psilocybin, but the doctors who are administering it or doing it in hospital settings and people are having terrible experiences, you got a great drug, but you're not creating the outcomes that you may have hoped for. And so we didn't want to leave that to risk. We don't think it's the best for therapeutic outcomes. And we certainly don't think it's the best for business model either. So we took an integrated approach with it.

• 46:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk a little bit more about kind of the set aspect of the set and setting. So this whole idea of like the mindset, what do people normally do beforehand to kind of prepare? You talked a little bit about kind of like, what are they trying to get out of it? But what can they do? Or what do they do to kind of almost condition themselves to be in the best position to kind of have the best experience?

• 46:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, we actually, we launched an app too called Trip, which is on iOS and Android. And that kind of takes you through a very simplified process of both the preparation as well as the after-integration work after you've done a trip. And there's cool music and generative music built in there. But really, what you want to do is try and tap into like your inner emotional network. What's going on, you know? Because most people don't take time to stop and reflect, why am I feeling anxious about this? Or why am I angry about that? Or, you know, anything along those lines. So if you have an intention, if you have a known subject that you want to go into, reflecting on it and doing a little bit of the work to unpack the emotions or just

• 47:27Speaker 02

  recognize the emotions that are around it is important. Or, you know, if you're suffering through depression, you know, just taking some time to breathe and open yourself up to just acknowledging that and having compassion for yourself, being like, you know, this is a function of a whole bunch of circumstances that I'm not to blame. You know, I'm maybe nervous about going in and trying ketamine or psilocybin for the first time. So can I process that nervousness? Can I breathe through it? And can I open myself up to the experience? Because within the context of set and setting, there's this, there's this idea of surrender, which is the more you can let go and just lean into the experience, the more therapeutic it's going to be.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Whereas if you're anxious, if you're worried, you know, you don't want to let go of control, you know, which is a lot of people, a lot of people don't do drugs because quote unquote, they don't want to give up control. And if you're going to resist the experience, you're not going to have this therapeutic outcome. So preparation and trying to like let go of the anxiety and lean into the experience can also be very beneficial as well.

• 48:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I was reading about FT104, which is this kind of synthetic compound that you guys are working on. Maybe help people understand first the natural psilocybin, kind of what the understanding there is, what the importance of a synthetic compound, and then what the advantages of the FT104 compound specifically is.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so psilocybin is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. I probably should have clarified that earlier. It's a tryptamine. I don't know specifically what that means in terms of chemical structure. I'm not a scientist by background. And a lot of the, a lot of the research and a lot of the excitement is around psilocybin. And in part because it's a naturally occurring substance. You know, there's a lot of interest in plant-based medicine. And even though the clinical trial is happening right now, we're using a synthetic form. So a chemically synthesized form, not something that's extracted from the actual mushroom itself. You know, there's a lot of the interest in it because of its natural existence, because the fact it's been used for thousands of years in traditional cultures. And there's known evidence around it in terms of safety, at least anecdotally, as well as efficacy. There's a lot of excitement there.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  So that's really between MDMA and psilocybin. Those are the two drugs that have really been the catalyst for the psychedelic renaissance that's happening right now. One of the biggest challenges with psilocybin, though, is as effective and with such great potential as it has, is it's a long experience. You know, when you take a large dose of psilocybin, you're, you're going to commit, you know, four, six, eight hours to the experience. It's a long time, which is part of the reason we need new physical spaces to actually do the care and why we're opening up field trip health centers. But, you know, that's a big commitment. That's a full day, you know, and that's a lot of therapist time. That's a lot of doctor time. It makes it incredibly expensive. If you talk to people within the psychedelic industry and the community, one of the big

• 50:25Speaker 02

  challenges is access because it's so expensive, not so expensive, but it is expensive to go for a professionally delivered psychedelic experience because it takes a lot of professional time and space to actually go through the experience. So, you know, when we were looking at the opportunities in this emerging industry, we realized that that timeframe makes it challenging to make this scalable. You know, can you shrink the timeframe but not diminish or not significantly diminish the experience and the therapeutic outcomes? And if you can find that right balance with shorter timeframes, but similar efficacy, you know, you've got a really successful product.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  And so, so FT104 was derived from known psychedelic compounds that engage the same receptor, the 5H2A receptor in the brain, but was specifically designed so it's experienced in about two hours. You know, you have peak experience and

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Most of it processed and out of your bloodstream within about two hours as opposed to four, six, eight, or whatever for psilocybin. And what that does is, and it has the same potency in the brain and engages that 5-HT2 receptor with the same binding capacity roughly as psilocybin. So you have an experience that's going to be as intense as potent, but can be done in a morning instead of an entire day. So it makes it more accessible for people who can do this in half a day potentially as a therapeutic option, and you don't need as much time. And that's why we focused on FT104. But chemically, you know, we know it engages the right receptors. There are a lot of known tryptamines out there. And so that engage that receptor.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  And so, you know, it's been derived along that basis from that knowledge that tryptamines engage the 5-HT2 receptor. And so we're quite excited about it. We're still in preclinical stages, but we have a good basis to know that it is safe and efficacious. And so we expect to be able to move through the approval process relatively expediently.

• 52:26Anthony Pompliano?

  What does that approval process look like?

• 52:28Speaker 02

  It's a long one, and it's an expensive one. So the FDA clinical trials typically are three phases. Phase one, phase two, phase three. Phase one is really establishing that it's safe to administer in humans. Phase two is really starting to do dose finding to figure out how much you're going to be administering to people for the therapeutic effect. And then phase three is a much broader study with more people showing that it actually works in the intended way with the given doses. And then there's often phase four and beyond. And, you know, it typically takes Compass Pathways is right now in phase 2B, and they've been at it for four or five years.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  MAPS has been at this for close to 30 years, and they're in phase three. But that's, that's really the exception, not the norm, given that they were the ones who were really building the evidence to get the FDA comfortable with the idea of doing psychedelics. But yeah, so, you know, Compass Pathways expects approval sometime around 2025, 2026, I think, based on their disclosures. So they're in it for 10 years and hundreds of billions of dollars because it's expensive and it takes a long time. And you know, the FDA approval process is rigorous as it should be. You know, this is medicine and we need to show efficacy and safety. But it's also one of the reasons that we've been big supporters of measure 109, which is, you know, psychedelics, from a drug development and investment perspective psychedelics are good investments.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  If you think about it, because we know most psychedelics have been used anecdotally for many, many years. We know them to be relatively safe. We know them to be relatively effective. So you've kind of de-risked two of the biggest risks in drug development of does it work and is it safe? Well, we kind of know that already. So to some extent, we're doing these clinical trials, knowing the outcome by and large, because of all the history that's been out there.

• 54:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. One of the things that's really interesting to me is you described having centers in the United States, these health centers, and we obviously just saw Oregon kind of decriminalize a lot of, what most people consider hard drugs or illicit drugs, but also legalize the use of psilocybin. Maybe talk a little bit about the difference there between decriminalizing this stuff versus legalizing the use case. And kind of how you guys view those two pathways and like, is one better than the other? Or are you agnostic to that?

• 54:56Speaker 02

  We're not agnostic to it. We definitely support legalization and regulation as opposed to decriminalization. Decriminalization, don't get me wrong, is still a step in the right direction, you know, for most drugs that are not harmful, like cannabis and LSD and psilocybin, by and large, I mean, we talked about the harm profile just being low, they're not harmless. But you know, it just doesn't make sense to put people in prison philosophically, morally, economically. It just is, seems to have been a bad decision to conduct this war on drugs. So we support decriminalization, but decriminalization creates new risks, right? Because most people don't distinguish between legalization and decriminalization. They think, oh, it's been decriminalized, it's now legal.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  That's not true. It just means that enforcement in that particular jurisdiction around possession has been brought down to the lowest levels. It may be a fine or not enforced at all, but it doesn't make it legal. More importantly, though, it means that You probably have a lot of people thinking it's legal, going out and accessing it, buying supply from who knows what, you know, you can't confirm the purity or anything along those lines. So it creates a whole bunch of risks. And, you know, I think Rick Doblin said it best, that the most important thing we can do as part of the psychedelic industry right now is not fuck it up, right? And so when people go out and start self dosing and self administering, buying supply from who knows where, you have the risk of bad

• 56:23Speaker 02

  outcomes, you have the risk of bad trips or bad behavior, and that can really set it back. So, you know, decriminalization is good because you don't want to be putting people in prison for it. It's expensive and it makes typically people worse, not better when they, when they leave after a prison experience. But legalization, making sure that there's safe access, controlled supply, tested supplies, so people know what they're taking, they know the purity, they know the dosage, they know they have the right therapeutic support around it, just makes a lot more sense to us, you know, at least at these early stages to show that we can integrate psychedelics back into our society in a thoughtful way without creating many unintended consequences. Maybe once we've done that, it makes sense

• 57:04Speaker 02

  to enable broader access. I don't know, we'll see, but doing a legalized, regulated framework exactly like proposed and or now approved in Oregon is smart. It ensures access, it ensures that people who want it can get it. But the people who are administering it still have to ask the right questions because, you know, if you, if you do have schizophrenia, taking a psychedelic is probably not a wise idea. And so you have people responsible for asking the right questions and really being a bit of a gating step to make sure that people who shouldn't be accessing it aren't, and that, you know, they're responsible for making sure people have good and safe experiences as well. And I think that's definitely the right approach.

• 57:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. If somebody is in the United States, you know, California, New York, Texas, just pick a state, and they say, look, I want to start down the path of the experience with psychedelics, what's legally available to them today, right? So Oregon is kind of an outlier, but can somebody walk into a field trip health center and take ketamine, MDMA, you know, something else? Is it something where they need a doctor's subscription? Like, just how does that work in terms of what's legally available?

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, right now, the only legally prescribable psychedelic outside of clinical trials, you know, generally available is ketamine. It was approved by the FDA, actually in 1970s. It's been around for a long time. It's known to be very safe by and large. If your kid breaks a bone and you take them to the emergency room, if the doctor is going to prescribe something to help manage the pain, especially if they have to reset the bone or something along those lines, it's ketamine that's often prescribed. So it is that kind of safe and known commodity. So ketamine is the only thing that's currently prescribable. MDMA and psilocybin are still scheduled in the US. And so they're not accessible, at least legally speaking.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  If you come into a field trip health center, it does depend on the jurisdiction. So in some states, it's more restrictive and we could only prescribe and administer to people who have, say, treatment-resistant depression. In other states, you know, the bar may be lower. There'll still be some sort of medical need that has to exist right now. So it could be as simple as dysthymia or adjustment disorder, which basically means I'm stuck in a rut, something that most people probably ordinarily would go see a therapist for or something along those lines. You know, in some states, we can prescribe and administer for that. In other states, we can't. But there's always got to be some sort of medical need right now.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  If you just want to come in to go for a trip, typically, that's not enabled or permitted in most states. But, you know, by and large, people who are coming in typically have a need. You can usually establish some degree of medical need in our centers. And what will happen is, depending on the need, whether you have treatment-resistant depression or something sort of less significant or impactful, there'll be a treatment program developed. So the typical treatment program for someone with depression is six ketamine sessions with six exploratory therapy sessions, so back-to-back, over the course of a few weeks, with three integration sessions interspersed kind of thing. And that's what it typically looked like. But if you're coming in for dysthymia or adjustment disorder, or just having a hard

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  time with life these days, you know, it'd probably just be two ketamine sessions with exploratory therapy and integration work afterwards.

• 1:00:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. You guys are obviously not the only player in the space. It seems like everyone that I've come across is taking very different approaches, right? And some of that's because they're actually solving for different things. Some of them are more kind of the compound and drug focused. Some of them are more the physical space and kind of the setting. You guys are taking kind of this hybrid approach. Talk a little bit about just how you see who the other large players are in the space and kind of your view on what they're doing.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  Sure. So obviously, there's Field Trip Health, which we're on the Canadian Securities Exchange and publicly listed right now. The biggest player in the industry is Compass Pathways. They recently went public on the NASDAQ. They are in Phase 2B of FDA-approved clinical trials for psilocybin for the treatment of treatment-resistant depression. They are taking a very pharmaceutical biotech approach to psychedelics, just focused on the drug. They're not focused on the set and setting, or anything along those lines. They really want to just be a pharmaceutical company within this context. At least, that's the path they're taking. I've spoken at length with some of the founders, and they're all really great people, really thoughtful people, and see the

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  broader context of the psychedelic industry, but they're focused on taking the specific path right now because I think it's the most expeditious and appropriate way. They are the biggest player, the biggest investor in Compass Pathways is a company called Thai Life Sciences. They're essentially a holding company or a VC, depending on how you want to look at it. They own or have invested in a number of different pharmaceutical companies, early-stage pharmaceutical companies that are developing different psychedelics or mental health treatments. It's not always psychedelics within the Thai Life Sciences, but mental health more broadly. You know, very credible players as well. Not surprising, they were instrumental to the creation of Compass Pathways, and so

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  they have very similar outlooks and operations. Those are the two biggest players. There is a company called Mind Medicine, which is on the NEO Exchange in Canada. They just announced an intention.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  List on the NASDAQ. They started off with an interesting approach. They were moving forward with clinical trials with a molecule called 18MC, which is similar to LSD, but it doesn't cause the trip. And that creates actually some philosophical discussions within the community of, do you need the trip? Do you need that psychedelic experience to actually have the therapeutic outcomes? Or can it be achieved just on a neurochemical basis? And the 18MC, they're advancing for the treatment of opioid addiction and it doesn't have the trip. It's really a classic pharmaceutical product in that respect. But they're also doing work with LSD and microdosing and attention deficit disorder in adults.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  So they are progressing as well. There's a number of other smaller companies out there.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Most focused on doing drug development, so pursuing the clinical path and just that side of the equation. I think that's what makes Field Trip really unique is the integrated approach that we're taking because we think both elements are so critically important to the therapeutic outcomes that you can't leave the other one just to chance. And so that's what we've taken the path that we've taken.

• 1:04:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And how do you guys see this developing, right? So if we kind of zoom out from an industry standpoint, is this something where what just happened in Oregon is kind of a broaching of what will happen on every single state level in the United States? You'll eventually get FDA approvals. This will look like the cannabis industry, but just be on a larger scale, the same size scale. Like, how does this kind of play out in terms of what people can expect moving forward from an industry level?

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I should know, I mean, we've drawn the parallels between cannabis and psychedelics quite a bit. And there are some parallels, certainly. I mean, obviously they're stigmatized medicine and they're similar in that you need a new infrastructure to really deliver this. The existing medical infrastructure is not well suited to it. What does distinguish psychedelics from cannabis is cannabis by and large is an industry for itself. You know, there's people who use cannabis. There's people who will start to use cannabis, but you know, it's not. Displacing anything except maybe some, some alcohol consumption psychedelics. On the other hand, are a much larger potential from an industry perspective. Because when you look at the evidence, when you see that MDMA can effectively cure PTSD.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  When you can see that psilocybin can effectively cure depression for months or years at a time. Psilocybin therapy and MDMA therapy. You know, what you're talking about is a fundamental displacement of most approaches to mental health. It's a much bigger opportunity than, than just cannabis in terms of business potential. What I see happening over the next few years is, is pretty much the path that we're already on. You know, Oregon was the only state to approve access to psilocybin therapies this year. But California had efforts underway that were really derailed by the, the pandemic. You can expect California to be at it again.

• 1:05:55Speaker 02

  You can expect Colorado to have a ballot initiative in two years. New York State potentially, there are going to be a number of states that look to roll out these programs and, and a wellness kind of approach, very similar to Oregon. We really think Oregon has set the foundation for what this is going to look like. And I think that continues. And I think that continues in parallel with the FDA process. Because I think you're going to see both the medical need with synthetic products and insurance coverage. And you're going to see the more wellness need for natural products and, and broader access for people who don't necessarily have clinical diagnoses with mental health conditions, but see the benefit of accessing psychedelic therapies. You know, and, and more broadly and philosophically, and what excites me about the psychedelic renaissance

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  that's happening right now is that I think it really changes the conversation around mental and emotional health. You know, for me, the psychedelic drugs are not the important aspect of it. The important aspect of it is that I think the conversation around psychedelics is going to make mental and emotional health proactive. We're going to start thinking about our mental health like we think about our physical fitness. We all know we should go to the gym. No one's going to argue that going to the gym is good for you. We don't always do it, but we know that. You know, could you imagine going to the gym only once you've broken your ankle or pulled a Muscle like that's not, it doesn't make sense. And, and I think we need to start thinking about our mental and emotional health that way. And I think psychedelics are going to be the platform where people are going to be much more proactive about ensuring their mental health is, is well

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  established and they're constantly working on it, just like we're constantly working on our physical fitness. And that's really what excites me. And so I think psychedelics are really just the catalyst for a much broader conversation around all of this kind of stuff. And so there's going to be incredible opportunities within psychedelics and psychedelic drug developments and cultivation of psilocybin and the peyote and all the natural products as well. And I think they'll operate very nicely in tandem and parallel, much like you see adult use cannabis and medical cannabis operating in parallel. They're, they're set up, you know, so that there's broad access, but people have different paths to get there.

• 1:07:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. It's fascinating to me as I kind of went down this, this rabbit hole, if you will, and you were kind enough to send me a bunch of information to, to kind of read up on, where would you suggest other people who are listening to this and interested, want to learn more, where can they go? Or is there a book? Is there specific resources that you say like, this is the best place to kind of get started on, on the educational side?

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I always give the nod and you won't be surprised by this to Michael Pollan, Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind. It is a very thoughtful, great read about the history of psychedelics, the, the modern movements, you know, it gives you a good flavor of what the experiences are like. It's, it's a really good overview of, of everything that's going on. I'm also a big fan of the Harvard Psychedelic Club. If you like history, if you like knowing the narrative of the experience, which was written by Don Latin, talks about the experience with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass, and a lot of the seminal figures that are still present today, at least in the story, even though Timothy Leary is dead, because, you know, we have to learn from our past experiences and the mistakes that were made along the way to make sure that we

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  don't create similar circumstances. Those are two great, great resources. Maps, you know, has a newsletter and tons of information as well. That's, that's a great resource. Those are the, typically the places I point people, but you know, it's, it's growing so quickly.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  That you know, there's things popping up. If people are interested from an investment perspective, there's resources like psychedelic finance or psilocybin alpha that are tracking the publicly listed companies right now. They're they're great resources as well.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  Can't think of anything off the top of my head beyond that, but I'm sure other things will come up.

• 1:09:49Anthony Pompliano?

  You said that you guys have a podcast. What do you talk about on there?

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's called Field Tripping: Epic Trips in Psychedelics. And really, my goal is to mainstream the conversation. So have people talk about their psychedelic experiences, what it meant to them, and how it changed the course of their life. So we've had people like Dr. Andrew Weil on, we've had Director X, we had Alex Icon. We've had really incredible people come on and talk about how psychedelics has has really altered the course of their lives in a positive way, and talking about their experiences. And and we also had Humble the Poet, whose episode, you know, I've had many people reach out to me, talk about how it brought them to tears, because it was so emotional, and it's resonated with them so much. Because one of the things, going back to my comments about psychedelics being the platform that really changes the

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  conversation about a mental and emotional health. One of the most important things is that we actually start talking about our emotions and our mental health. And so it's a platform for people to talk about that. And we kind of go into their experiences and what, you know, it showed for them. And having done a lot of work myself on exploration and metaphysics, you know, I try where I can to offer insights, saying like, Oh, had you ever considered that this may be something that that psychedelic experience was showing you? And so, yeah, that's, that's the podcast. If you're interested in Field Trip Health Centers, you know, the website is fieldtriphealth.com. If you're interested from an investment perspective, we have a website, our corporate website, which is meetfieldtrip.com. And then if you're

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  interested in our app trip, you can always go to tripapp.co, which is where you can download that. And that was really designed for anybody doing consciousness expansion work, helping them set intentions, providing them with really impactful soundscapes and music to support the experience, and then doing the integration work afterwards. Which is something we haven't talked about much, but that's where most people will say the real magic in psychedelics happen. It's like you have the psychedelic experience, but what you take from that experience and how you integrate that into your lives is where the real sustained meaningful change happens. And so Trip gives you a fairly simplified way to start doing that integration work, reflect on the experience and trying to understand

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  what it means. So you can actually change, you know, your habits, your behavior, your outlook, all of these kinds of things as well.

• 1:12:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Before we wrap up, I ask everyone the same two questions and then you'll get a chance to ask me one question. The first question is, what is the most important book you've ever read? I feel like you may have already answered that, but any other books that you want to add in there?

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, Michael Pollan's book is great, but it's not the most important book I've ever read. I think the two most impactful books I've read, actually, I'm going to say three because I always flip back and forth. Tom Robbins is my favorite author. If you listen to the podcast, you'll hear me quote him all the time. And it's not Tony Robbins, it's Tom Robbins. People get that confused. And it's not Tim Robbins either. It's Tom Robbins. He wrote, most people have heard of Even Cowgirls Got the Blues, but that's not the book I'm going to reference. Jitterbug Perfume or Still Life with Woodpecker are just fascinating. They're, you know, his, his prose is the most eloquent I've ever read. And his philosophy and his creativity are just mind blowing and they inspire me every time. I remember reading Still Life with Woodpecker

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  one night, sitting up in bed after reading a particular passage and just being like, that is the most insightful, thoughtful, inspiring thing I've ever read. And it actually inspired me to do something stupid in a good way, but that's how impactful it was. So Jitterbug Perfume and Still Life with Woodpecker. And then also, there's a book, it's probably 20 years old now, called The Rebel Cell, Why the Counter Culture Can't Be Jammed. It just takes like a really honest approach about capitalism, its benefits and its limitations. And it was written as a response to Naomi Klein's No Logo, I think, which was a really, I think impactful.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  Book back in the day in the anti capitalist movement and it was just a response to that. And it's so thoughtful and I think well grounded that I always go back to it and just remind myself about how to think about things from a more logical and intuitive perspective as opposed to a black and white perspective. Those are, those are the two books that I would recommend.

• 1:14:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Those are great suggestions. The second question is more fun. Aliens. Are you a believer or a non believer?

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  I'm a believer that there is life in this universe. You can't look at the size and scale and everything that's going on. In fact, I took a course in university called Life in Other Worlds and I thought the professor did a good job of answering that question. He said, is there life on other worlds? In a word, yes. In two words, yes, probably. And then he kind of strung it out and it's like, it's true. You know, it's, it's hard to believe that there's all that space, all that potential and, and we're the only planet with, with life on it. So, so yes, I'm a believer. Whether they've come to visit us or not, I'm a little bit more skeptical.

• 1:14:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm, I'm right there with you on all of that. And I wish I had a class in college that would have, would have put me down that rabbit hole. That's pretty cool. You could ask me one question to wrap this up. What do you got for me?

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  All right. I mean, it's going to be straight up. Have you ever tried psychedelics? If so, what was the experience? And if not, why not?

• 1:15:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So, no. And more so just a lack of access and education, probably, right? Like I think of just the whole idea of like, if I want to get drunk right now, like I know exactly where to go, right? Like go right to the liquor store, go right to buy some beer, right? And it's a pretty easy exercise of open up whatever the bottle or can is and drink. And so I think that that's probably been like the biggest barrier. And the second thing also is like, I don't want to say it's misinformation, but definitely this idea, or maybe like the stigmatization of like, oh, that's like for this group of

• 1:15:50Anthony Pompliano?

  people that's kind of like on the fringes of society. And with most things, what you realize is like, one, no, that's not. True to everything seems scary or different. If you don't know anything about it, right? You know, I deal with that. I come to Bitcoin side all the time. People like all that. That's for drug dealers and, you know, terrorists. Then you learn about it. You're like, oh, maybe not. Right? And so I think that that's probably the, and I'm assuming for most people listening, like, that's the two biggest barriers, right? It's like, what is this stuff? How does it work? Why is it important? You know, what am I putting in my body? All that kind of stuff. And then two is just an access thing, right? And I think what you guys are doing from like the health center standpoint, just drastically reduces that barrier. And you could easily see that being an inflection point from an adoption perspective.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  Totally makes sense. And in part, like, that's, that's the reason for the podcast is when you hear of all of these incredibly successful people and also a nod to Donna Carey, who has a documentary on Netflix called Have a Good Trip, where he talks to like incredibly famous people about their psychedelic experiences, really just trying to mainstream it. So it's not, people don't think about it as like, oh, it's the people out there on the fringes. It's, you know, very successful, very impactful, very normal people who have these experiences. And then, yeah, on the access side, certainly, what's, you know, Canada is a bit of a liberal haven and it's kind of nice, especially given my philosophical and political leanings. But back in 2018,

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  beyond the fact that we learned about Michael Pollan's book and we, you know, maps had been given breakthrough designation and really what inspired us, the other piece was that we got alerted to the fact that in Canada, there's now probably 50 online stores openly selling psilocybin producing mushrooms. And interestingly, as far as I know, only one has been shut down. And it wasn't shut down by, you know, the police raiding it. It was shut down because Health Canada sent a polite letter saying, you're selling an unauthorized medicine for treatment of, you know, conditions that's not authorized. You know, and that's what it was. And so, you know, in Canada, even though it's still very much illicit and illegal. Accessing supply has become much easier and it's not dark web.

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  You know, this is WWW kind of stuff and, and, and so, yeah, you know, that kind of access, I think, has helped mainstream it quite a bit in urban centers as well.

• 1:18:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Canadians are so much nicer than Americans. Americans would have sent the SWAT team with machine guns and, you know, you would have thought that a murder was happening and Canadians send the letters.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 1:18:22Anthony Pompliano?

  That does not surprise me one, one, one bit at all. Listen, Ronan, I really appreciate you doing this. This is fantastic. I've learned a ton, both in preparation for this and then obviously in this conversation. You mentioned a couple of websites where people can go find out more about Field Trip. Where can they find you on the internet if they've got questions? Or can I want to talk to you more about some of this stuff?

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, Twitter. It's Ronan D. as in David Levy, L E V Y is my Twitter handle. Instagram is the same thing. I'm on LinkedIn. Facebook I don't use very much anymore, so probably Twitter and LinkedIn are the best places to find me. Field Trip, if you want to follow us, it's at Field Trip Health on Twitter and Instagram as well. And the websites again are meetfieldtrip.com for our corporate and IR sites. Fieldtriphealth.com, which is for our Field Trip Health Centers. And tripapp.co if you're interested in the app trip.

• 1:19:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for doing this. We absolutely are going to have to do this again. And hopefully after I make my way to Canada or somewhere else and then we can, we can talk a little bit more in depth.

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say that the pitch for like all the online stores would only have enhanced things for a lot of people had Donald Trump on the election, but I think a lot of people are a little bit seated these days with at least it looking like Joe Biden will be the next president. So that's good news, at least for the population of the US who were terrified by the alternative outcome.

• 1:19:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right, sir. Thank you so much. We'll do it again in the future.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me.