Does this work? Whoops, it does work. Okay, so welcome everybody to this very exciting panel about psychedelics. So before we start the conversation, I just want to check the room a little bit. How many people have done psychedelics or know somebody who's done psychedelics? See, easy, quite a lot actually. These are our friends. There's a middle section. Okay, no, but seriously, this is a very exciting opportunity to have Genevieve and Steve here. And maybe you have a quick introduction also what made you come here to talk about this topic.
Sure. Can you guys hear me? Are these on? I don't think so. They're not on. There we go. Oh, now they are. Quite loud. And please come in, come sit. We're going to try and make this conversation as exciting as possible. So our connection... Yeah, look under your seats, we've brought free samples. Just so the way Steve and I got connected to this work was back in 2018. I was listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast about ibogaine. And for those of you not familiar with ibogaine, it's a very potent psychedelic that's been used for hundreds of years. Its roots are in West Africa, but it's been used successfully to treat opiate addiction. And I had a family member hooked on heroin. Like many Americans, his story is not unique. He broke his neck, got hooked on prescription opiates, and that escalated into a heroin addiction. So I heard about this miraculous medicine and was fortuitously at the same conference as the practitioner a few short weeks later. And I asked him, 'Could you help my family member?' And he said, 'Absolutely. Could you help me with this group of Navy SEALs? Those are some of our special forces veterans in the United States. I want to help them go to Mexico to get this treatment because it's also really useful for traumatic brain injury, depression, PTSD, the whole gamut.' And I said, 'How could I not help these guys in our country? These are our bravest and boldest heroes.' And I was delighted to get involved. Fast forward the clock, my family member was not able to get access to ibogaine and died of an overdose in 2020. And when he passed, I was running a startup and I decided to leave that position to focus full-time on advancing these medicines so that other families could avoid similar tragedies. And thanks to the incredible generosity of my husband, we launched a family foundation focused most exclusively on moonshots and mental health. But have been funding a lot of the pivotal research behind MDMA, ibogaine, psilocybin, you name it. And here we find ourselves today at a really interesting moment in history. Should I just jump into it or do you want me to pause?
Yeah, maybe just keep it or maybe I should let my husband talk.
Oh man's flame. You can just... I mean, how did you get into this? How did your interest in psychedelic study start?
Sure. It was largely working with Genevieve throughout this time period. And as she mentioned, it's mainly been our philanthropic interest. But at Future Ventures, which I do appreciate the name of the conference, taking our brand and taking it to the future in a positive way. Any case, we invested in ATAI, a German company which I would argue is still the leader in psychedelic medicine and therapies with a whole portfolio of different sub-projects across a wide variety of modalities. So I started as an investor. We also started as donors, as you heard, across veterans and special forces as a starting point, but then more broadly and into academic research. We'll get into that later. But I've seen it firsthand. It helped me quit alcohol abuse. I don't know if I was really an alcoholic, but I drank every night a bottle of wine. That feels like a lot to hold on for decades. And after a single episode of psychedelics, I just gave it up forever. So about six years ago. These treatment modalities, I would say, are the most efficacious mental health treatments ever to come before regulatory bodies like the FDA. I'll just start with that one statement and we'll get into it more. There really is nothing like it. It's an absolute renaissance of possibilities and very pan-diagnostic, meaning the same therapy works for scads of different conditions, from eating disorders to anxiety disorders, to of course depression, PTSD, anxiety, traumatic brain injury, potentially stroke and neurological diseases as well. So it's a pretty exciting topic and I'm glad you guys came here to hear about it.
So this conversation is also very interesting because we're entering into a new whole era of healthcare, especially in America, which is on the verge of changing very much because of a coming government. And Genevieve, if you are involved in these activities, please talk a little bit about this.
Yeah. So we'll have a new president in the United States, if you haven't heard. His name is Donald Trump on Monday. And I can't even believe these words are going to escape my mouth, or I wouldn't have believed them a few years ago. But I think the Trump administration will do more to advance psychedelic therapy and access and healing, and thereby advance mental health, than any previous administration. And again, I'm almost shocked hearing myself say this. But there are several folks in the administration, particularly Robert F. Kennedy, RFK, who will be running our Health and Human Services, has personally seen the healing in his own family. He's been public about this, public about his support, particularly for our veterans. So I couldn't be more excited. In a few short weeks, you're going to see some researchers in the United States who have spent decades of their lives studying these medicines who will come into positions of power. And I think we're entering an era unlike any other. And I think the thing I'll add to that, and why I think this administration is going to be so exciting, is psychedelics address root causes, and that represents kind of a paradigm shift in the way we think about healthcare in this country. So Robert F. Kennedy has been very clear about ending chronic disease. And indeed, Donald Trump has said he wants this to be his legacy, ending chronic disease in our country. And if you take that viewpoint, then you have to recognize that psychedelics are the only tool that actually addresses root causes. The way we treat mental health in this country today, and sorry, not this country, but in our country, and I can only imagine Europe's the same, is basically palliating symptoms. So if you're someone who goes to the VA, you're a veteran, your best hope is to just deal with your symptoms for the rest of your life. And in fact, Steve and I remember talking to a therapist at the VA who said, 'I grow old with my patients.' Can you imagine how depressing that is as a practitioner who came into medicine to try to help others, to say there's basically nothing I can do but maybe these pills will help? Take these 10 pills. And that's kind of the state of the art in our country. And psychedelics change all that.
So I mean, since already you pointed out, since a couple of years, there are big investments happening in psychedelics. And investors start to be interested in this more and more. So how do you think this will play out in the next couple of years now that there's a legal opening to this, maybe even on the global level?
Right. So obviously we started with the philanthropic angle and we'll spend more time on that later, but the business side is also quite exciting. One of the reasons is it takes quite a bit of money to get a drug through clinical trials, right? By some estimates, a billion dollars with a 10% success rate in general. That's not for the faint of heart. That's hard for most nonprofits to fund. If you look back over time, MAPS has spent 35 years trying to get their product to market as a nonprofit, then they spun up a for-profit. They had some hiccups, we can get into that later if you'd like. But the capacity to raise hundreds of millions of dollars tends to be in the for-profit sector. Now there are some drawbacks, of course. You want to make a return on invested capital, so you need to have something that's proprietary, be it a patent, a formulation, a manufacturing technology, something. So there are pluses and minuses for the for-profit model. But let me paint the picture of why it's an interesting business opportunity. First is market size. So we are in a mental health crisis globally. It's insane and it's getting worse dramatically ever since COVID and the isolation. The incidence of depression, suicidality, and what have you has gone up through the roof, right? We've had 22 times as many veteran deaths by suicide than by combat this century, right? It's everywhere. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates that if we don't have a dramatic sea change in how we treat mental health, which I would say psychedelics is the only thing on the table that would be that sea change, if we don't have it, we will have the largest disease burden globally by 2030, which will be mental health diseases, and it'll cost the global economy $16 trillion a year. Mind-blowing. So then you might say, well, what is business as usual? The SSRIs, as Genevieve mentioned, are not effective in the vast majority of cases. They're prescribed to a large number of people, but it takes on average about seven years of effort to cure about 33% of the people. In fact, the mental health profession never uses the word 'cure' because their numbers would look so bad. They just don't even want to reference it that way. They actually have an institutional aversion to using the word 'I cured somebody,' right? Again, it's like a lifetime of managing symptoms. And the drug companies like the idea that you'll be on an SSRI for the rest of your life. So we'll talk about psychedelics and what they can do in a moment. I'll leave that out. But the business case is it's a huge market, it's a huge unmet need. You have disruptive new entrants, right? Because often big pharma companies, due to the stigma associated with the drugs and its sort of marketing negativity, the fact that these drugs are illegal, that's a slight negative to the proposition of how one brings in the market. And the fact that they generally never lead any new change means that this is one reason why, as venture capitalists, about five years ago we were investing in this sector quite actively. And I think about half of all mental health treatments before the FDA today are psychedelic. So it is percolating. It just takes years to come to market. So five years from now, we'll see the seeds that are being sown today.
So Genevieve, you're on the board of PSFC, like the biggest philanthropic organization in America donating money for psychedelic research for kind of projects. So what is the biggest challenge to change the narrative for you? Because there are quite some names involved in the foundation, but still it is kind of a really big challenge to tell people how these substances actually work.
Yeah, there is still so much stigma. So actually, thank you for even elevating this conversation at conferences like this. This might not have happened five years ago. So the stigma related to this field is so debilitating. It keeps top-tier foundations from investing in the space, and we're desperate for philanthropic capital. It keeps great investors from engaging in the field. And I'd say the largest problem is that in our country, these substances are Schedule I, which means they meet no medical need and there's high abuse potential. Yet ironically, LSD, MDMA, psilocybin have all been designated by our FDA as breakthrough therapies, which means they get fast-tracked through our FDA because they are so efficacious and people are so hopeful. So one of the things we've been pushing on is if a compound... Oh, and they have no addiction risk. Not all of them, the ones you mentioned. In any event, we're hopeful that we could remove these substances from Schedule I, because that's probably the thing that keeps extraordinary entrepreneurs from entering the field and extraordinary foundations from engaging. And it just seems frankly silly. The other thing is I think this is a movement unlike any other. We often look at the gay marriage movement to see what did they do when they were trying to change minds and hearts. And a survey came out recently that basically said if you yourself or someone you love has had a psychedelic experience, you feel very differently about these compounds. So helping people become familiar, whether it's through television or film or PR that we might be doing, or just educating people through conferences like this, I think goes a long way. I also think we need to be really balanced in the communications. So recently psychedelics have been in the news, and 99% of it has been positive. And then this summer we saw a flip when MDMA did not make it through the FDA process, and now the stories have more of a negative tone. And I think when big pharma starts to realize that we're going to cannibalize some of their sales, we're going to have even more competition or more headwinds. So I would say it's important that we be balanced in our messaging. These are not miracle substances. You still have to do the hard work. I also think they come with some risk. These are potent, potent tools, so you don't want to do them without proper set and setting and the care of someone who knows what they're doing. So I think one of the projects we're about to tackle is an initiative to educate young people who have mental health diagnoses on harm reduction, because what we found is people who are trying to heal themselves from depression, that's where things can go awry. So we're going to launch a campaign that's targeting youth in California, and we'll see what outcomes here, and if it works, we'll expand that effort.
So I mean, we were talking a little bit about it before. So I mean, we obviously also need new kinds of ways to judge these substances and let's say drugs, so far for example as opposed to alcohol. And I feel like in terms of the governmental changes all over the world, it's also not so easy anymore to say those people are progressive, those people are not progressive. So how do you kind of try to work around, let's say in the foundation, your psychedelic communication to people who would say, 'Well, but this is dealing with conservatives, this is not what we like.' And we talked about this too, that Rick Doblin, one of the most famous activists in the field, said this thing, meaning psychedelics going mainstream, will only work if we have a so-called bipartisan approach, meaning conservative people, let's say veterans, will say we want this, and let's say more progressive people, more tech people for example, would say yeah, we also want this. So how can we make this really strong that we have a bipartisan approach to this? Is something I really think about a lot recently.
Do you want to take this?
Okay, I'll kick it off and you jump in here.
What, don't you kick it off? I'll just mention one thing then you can say substance.
