027 - From Lawyer to Co-Founding Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy Clinics
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Summary
In Episode 27 of the Playing to Win Series, I'm joined by my good friend Ronan Levane. Ronan is one of the founders of Fieldtrips, a venture capital and advisory firm focused on the cannabis and biotech industries, a Chief Strategy Officer, a member of the Board of Directors for Traitor Biosciences, a leading biotech company in the hemp and cannabis industries, and a lawyer by training.
Transcript
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all right gents welcome to another episode of the playing to win series number 27 i'm joined by my
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friend ronan levy how you doing brother i'm doing well man good to see you in a long time
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been a while since we've connected uh we've known each other for quite a few years so let me just do
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a quick little intro on um your bio here to introduce you because i just pasted your description
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i know a lot of people don't read it but an entrepreneur and a visionary ronan is one of
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the founders of field trip which is what we'll be talking about quite a bit in this broadcast uh
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concurrent with his work at field trip he's a partner at grass fed ventures a venture capital
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and advisory firm focused on the cannabis and biotech industries is a chief strategy officer
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a member of the board of directors for trait biosciences a leading biotech company in the
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hemp and cannabis industries and prior to current roles ronan along with joseph hannon and ryan
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co-founded canadian cannabis clinics uh which i'm going to tell you about an interesting story and
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an opportunity that i missed out on uh in cannabis rx the latter of which was acquired by aurora
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cannabis incorporated new york stock exchange uh ticker acb in 2016 after which he served as senior
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vice president business and corporate affairs for aurora a lawyer by training royer sorry ronan started his
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career as corporate lawyer at blake castles and grayden and legal counsel at ctv globe media holds a
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jurist doctor and a bachelor of commerce degree both at the university of toronto what's up brother
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how much that's a mouthful i gotta shorten that down that's for sure you gotta you gotta way more
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impressive bio than i do i'll tell you that so i don't know about that but i appreciate the compliment
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so um let's kind of do like a little bit of a batman origin story because i'd like to introduce
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a lot of the characters that i put on this playing to win series and we didn't have a lot of time to
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talk ronan and i before kind of leaning up to this because we're texting on some other stuff that we're
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working on together but um i thought it would be a great fit for him because of the way that he lives
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his life i've often talked to you guys about playing to win versus playing not to lose um did you ever
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do any work with um fireweed and colin colt color no i haven't yeah no so colin introduced us when he
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was tearing us apart um at a retreat that i was at with a bunch of guys from eo who you'd all know
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excuse me um you know this concept of of in life you either play to win or you can play not to lose
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and it might sound like the same thing but they're two very different behaviors um so i like to bring
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guys onto this um playlist onto this stream to really talk about how they play to win at life
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and um you're you're just one of those top shelf guys that that that just seems to knock it out of
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the park one one venture after the other um appreciate that i i first met you at an eo event
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i don't know when it was it must have been like 2011 or 12 i think it was at the brickworks or
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something like that and you were talking about how do you how do you utilize lawyers better in your
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business yeah yeah i think that's i remember that i don't remember much these days but i do remember
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that uh that session yeah and um one of the big takeaways that i got from that which i've shared
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with a few friends since was a lot of a lot of what happens in business is you'll get these notices
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in the mail from you know another company another organization into whatever that wants you to change
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your behavior they want to force you to change what it is that you're doing usually in their interest
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but they don't want to go so far to register a claim in court and you know force you to do it
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through uh you know the court system so they try to scare you with a letter and one of the things
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that i learned from you that day which i've used quite a few times and it's and it saved me money
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probably at least six out of seven times you just run it through the shredder yeah yeah exactly right
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you basically said look if it's not got a registered claim to it don't waste your time because they're
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not serious about it don't even respond right yeah that's exactly it's it's uh it's a philosophy i mean
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like listen i had to learn it i'm a lawyer by training um so and and it's interesting i mean the way you
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describe it as like playing to win versus playing not to lose it's like most lawyers i'd say 95 if
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not more are playing not to lose they're trying to minimize risk avoid you know uh confrontation
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try and settle things as quickly as and easily as possible which certainly there's rationale for in
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certain circumstances but um you know if you're starting from that position you're always starting
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from a back foot right so always go in aggressive like the most important thing especially when it
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comes to the law is that there's the letters of the law of what you can and cannot do according to
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you know whatever's been legislated but the truth is is we don't live in a world where if you break the
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law you're immediately penalized right and maybe we'll get to that one day maybe we'll live and live
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in minority report but in the meantime we live in a world where there's a lot of gray area between
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you know how the law is written and how the law gets enforced or how the rules get enforced doesn't
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necessarily mean to be a law and if you're willing to play within the boundaries of those two lines
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there's a lot of opportunity to really do cool things grow businesses take opportunities you know
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position yourself for success as opposed to just trying to avoid a fight yeah um really intelligent
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approach to dealing with business strategies like how is how is your legal training like operating as a
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lawyer affected you as a entrepreneur because i mean you think and act a lot differently than a lot of
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lawyers that i know and you think and act a lot differently when it comes to your approach to life
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and business when it comes to business too like do you see it as an advantage obviously or yeah i do
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i mean i think being a lawyer has going to law school i don't think taught me anything it taught me
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you know it's a good rigorous exercise was like going to the gym and like being forced to do a lot of
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mental exercises i don't think it equipped me at all to to become a lawyer um but what it did show
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me is you know the inside of the beast to some degree understanding the mentality of lawyers and
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how they think and how they approach life i mean most people go to law school because it's a nice
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safe conservative path to make a good living right you're smart you're capable but you don't want to
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take risks on life um and and so you go to law school by and large and then listen a lot there are some
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happy lawyers i would say most lawyers are not terribly enthused with their careers but you know
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it's a it's a comfortable path and for some people that's fine you know if that's the path you want
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to go on um but you know there is typically a personality around most lawyers and so when you
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realize that their approach is going to be pretty consistent which is follow the rules do it the right
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way follow the process uh it gives you a great opportunity to say like well i i know what that person's
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going to do you know it comes down to sort of just basic game theory which is if you can anticipate
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the actions of the other party then you can always be two steps ahead and so because most lawyers are
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fairly predictable in their approach to it um you know you can you can take advantage of that and
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and in the same token it doesn't have to be lawyers and most regulators as well uh tend to follow a
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given path so if you're willing to take on some degree of regulatory or legal risk um which most
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entrepreneurs are doing you know most people think of it oh my god you're breaking the law but a
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perfect example probably the best example of a company that was willing to operate outside of the
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law and to great success is uber you know they operated globally in violation of all sorts of
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municipal regulations knowing that uh for a while they'd get away with it and then eventually the
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regulators would push back but by the time that happened they would have developed enough of a fan
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base enough of a customer base that they'd have a position of strength to negotiate to you know
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create a world or a paradigm that may not be ideally suited for their business model uh but certainly a
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lot better than what existed before they went into that given market um and and so that's the kind of
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mindset and i think going to law school and and understanding that environment has helped me see
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opportunities in that respect um i want to take you back to your uh position as legal counsel at
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ctv globe media because i think that's where like that was a parent company for that dating site
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no that was avid life media uh that was the parent company ctv was not part of it yeah okay so um
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yeah so you're involved in avid life media sorry um yeah you told a few stories to us um around your
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time there what did avid life media manage what was that dating site all about yeah i mean i i don't
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openly talk about that right now so i'll speak vaguely about it um but um you know we we operated
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a bunch of dating sites often in in various uh unique uh niches or or uh um particular communities
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and uh you know they were very successful at creating awareness uh through taking cheeky approaches
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to to marketing and pr uh and recognizing that there are opportunities um to do things that would
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create a pr opportunity um far greater than the advertising so one time we offered to um you know
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wrap a street car in a banner um or uh around the street car uh for one of our sites and uh we knew
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that initially they'd probably get rejected but to our surprise uh they actually said yes and so we
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looked at it and we said well we could either pay the 25 000 or whatever it was to wrap the street car
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in in this particular advertisement or we could leak it to the media because that would be just juicy
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enough for the media to say like hey this company is now wrapping a street car is the ttc actually okay
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with it and get much more awareness and publicity uh for free than paying the 25 000 or you know one time
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we uh we're we were there was a well-known actor uh who had voiced advertisements that most of you
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probably heard of this was probably 10 or 11 years ago um but it turned out the the actual ad you
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heard uh was this particular actor's voice um but what happened is the company who was making the ad
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um had initially approached this actor who wanted some obscene amount of money just to audition for
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the part um and so that company decided to be like okay well we'll find someone who sounds like you
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and record the ad anyway because we don't want to pay just to have you audition um and so they
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prepared the ad with this sound alike's voice and and sort of submitted it to the actor and said listen
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you can do it or we're going to go forward with this and the actor said okay i'll do it and they came
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to a much more reasonable approach we subsequently found out about it uh and so in the same kind of
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context the same kind of mindset um we got the sound alike we recorded an ad you know started playing
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it on the on the radio in the u.s knowing that the following would happen people would start saying
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like hey is this actor doing an ad for this particular dating site uh which would probably
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be shocking to him most people's sensibilities um and we did and there's a whole bunch of pr that
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followed and then inevitably we're expecting a letter from his lawyers which we got saying hey you're
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inappropriately using this actor's persona please stop and so we did you know and we got millions of
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dollars worth of free publicity and pr uh with no consequence because we knew the lawyer letter
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would come we would stop and then it just doesn't make sense for people to litigate beyond that um
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because it's too expensive there's no guarantees in litigation and and so it was uh it was a great
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cheeky opportunity to create some awareness now you know with hindsight at the time it seemed like a
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great idea in hindsight you know i'm kind of come to the place where it's probably not fair or
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appropriate to use someone's identity in that way to benefit yourself um but these are just examples
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of things you can do to um you know push boundaries or another good example is we would always offer to
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sponsor you know uh major events you know and then uh we would get rejected um or we would just leak
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the fact that we're putting in an offer to to sponsor a major event um to the media and then you'd see
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it in the news the next day that this dating site is uh offering to sponsor the the super bowl or the
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world cup or whatever it was um and again knowing that we were taking risks we were wading into
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regulatory gray zones but there was really no consequences that would come back to bite us at
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any point so we took advantage of those opportunities yeah and like it's starting to sound a lot like what
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ryan halliday did with um you know with his career with that clothing company i can't remember what it
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was i think was american american apparel yeah apparently yeah yeah um yeah very very clever
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marketing strategy and you kind of have to i mean when you're getting started in business and you
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don't have a network you don't have connections i mean you kind of have to be more innovative than
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any of your competitors if if you want to get a foothold in it um and you've and you've done that
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time and time and time again um to kind of share that story about uh cannabis clinics i'm sorry
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canadian cannabis clinics and canvas rx um i remember you came over to my office with your
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partner at the time with a investment to um put some money into that when you guys were just starting
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to raise your uh first first rounds of funding and it was the same week that i had another lawyer come
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into my office try to buy my book of business for cents and a dollar i think you know who i'm talking
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about yeah but um um you know i looked at that i was like dude they're not going to approve this man
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they're not going to legalize weed in canada that's not happening here we are in 2020 it's like fully
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legal you can buy whatever you want from like the government is now the drug dealer yeah um you know
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you came up with this concept of um kind of kind of cracking the legislative code that was coming
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through the pipelines for the approval for additional use um and i mean embarrass me here
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but i know all the information is public but obviously i passed on the opportunity as an early
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investor and um you know you sold to a much larger corporation aurora cannabis how much did i lose out
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on i mean you must have walked away with a triple quadruple even larger digit multiple right yeah i mean
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i'm not so good at doing the math in my head but um you would have invested at a six million dollar
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valuation i think you were talking about maybe investing let's say a hundred grand yeah and a
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six million dollar valuation we sold the company for a purchase price of 37 million dollars so there's
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a six bagger right there but the thing was is that a big chunk of the purchase price was paid in aurora stock
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at 40 cents uh over the next two years aurora went from 40 cents to 16 dollars so with that that's another
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20 bagger on top of that so you're you know you're 100 grand could have turned into a lot of money
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is is what it well down to and in that case you know to be fair it wasn't that i was uh
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i i didn't it wasn't a legal kind of analysis i just kind of saw where the the trend line was pointing
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which was cannabis was becoming ubiquitous you know they had essentially created a program that
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were creating these large corporations growing cannabis you know once you create that kind of
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capital markets dynamic um it's going to be hard to turn back the engine uh that that was the insight
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there i think you know one of my and it has nothing to do with being a lawyer i just i think i've been
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gifted with an ability to see where trend lines are going by and large in the future um and uh getting
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in front of that and certainly you know uh from cannabis to now field trip that's one of those
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things which was this is going to happen you know most people don't realize it was going to happen and
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for a long time i wasn't convinced but then certain things fell into place and now like
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you know i guess that was six years ago we met in your office and and we're on the cusp of legalizing
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cannabis and and you know six years later uh we're on the cusp of legalizing psychedelics uh as well
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um you know which is crazy i seven years ago i never would have guessed we'd be sitting in this
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position but no i was dude i was sitting there going this is this is not i i just can't see this
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happening i just can't see them allowing you know the canadian populations just you know recreationally
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i mean like even at the time you're talking about medicinal use which which had uh you know proven
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peer reviewed benefits um you know it existed right so and then it was kind of supposed to lean
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into um recreational use and that of course happened very quickly soon after so um yeah bravo i mean
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like you you know you you uh you know you took a stake in the industry you saw a trend coming and it
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ended up working out for you i mean um had i had i invested that hundred grand uh at that time i could
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have probably bought a ferrari la ferrari a porsche 918 uh maybe the mclaren p1 and a bugatti vayron just
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kind of top it all off instead of the one r8 that i've got right now but you know um i didn't have a
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crystal ball to appear into the future none of us do it's just one of those things that you have to
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take uh take a stab at in life and at that time you were you were playing hard to win and it was a bit
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of a gamble but it you know it paid off big time for you um you know thankfully with with the
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organizations and some of the guys that you know we've all talked to and um you know been at men's
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retreats and groups with i also made some subsequent investments that still caught like
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the top end of the trend um and made some money there as well but uh talk a little bit more about
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the um new business that you're running uh field trip psychedelics um i know that it's been a couple
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years in uh full disclosure i am an investor i didn't i didn't become stupid this time and passed
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up on it so i've gotten in on rounds of funding but talk a little bit more to the audience about what
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what field trip is and what it plans to do and what's all happening there yeah i'll kind of tell
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the narrative so we started canadian cannabis clinics and canvas rx we sold that to aurora in
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2016 uh helped aurora grow into one of the largest cannabis producers globally uh over the next couple
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of years but by the middle of 2018 we kind of saw the writing on the wall that the cannabis industry
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had become quite inflated and is probably going to go through a bumpy period and and our earnouts
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through uh the sale of our business had been met so there wasn't a whole lot of rationale for us to
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stick around so we left and um started grass-fed ventures which was really just a an avenue to
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lease an office and start making some strategic investments and doing some advisory work not
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really knowing what we were planning to do and um much like the initiation of canadian cannabis
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clinics and canvas rx back then what happened was i was working with uh joseph and the guys who
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eventually had partners but i was a lawyer i was i mean i i've always been fairly activist as a lawyer
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um in terms of being very involved in the business side of things but in this particular case i was
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advising them also on you know what areas of of opportunity you know this was still very much the
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tech bubble time to some degree uh startup mania was in full effect and i was trying to guide them
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into different directions and then you know they um they after one meeting where we reviewed a whole
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list of opportunities uh i was putting my coat on apparently i said all of the opportunities they
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were considering were terrible i don't remember being so so brash but uh it's possible um you know
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they said well there's this one other idea you know the laws around cannabis are changing and
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there's an opportunity to do something with cannabis and they're like ah but it seems so sketchy
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cannabis is so so sketchy and i was like guys you know i uh i'm a corporate lawyer which don't have
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the best of reputations um i worked for this dating company the aforementioned dating company
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uh and i had also started my first business which was a cash for gold business which also doesn't
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have a greater reputation and i'm like if this is legal now you know cannabis is the best opportunity
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i'm ever going to see you don't see a multi-billion if not trillion dollar industry go from black
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market to perfectly legal almost overnight um you guys got to do something in this space and if
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you don't i'm going to do so uh and so i cajoled them for a while and eventually we kind of all
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joined forces and then that became canvas rx and canadian cannabis clinics um so fast forward to
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middle of 2018 we just left aurora we've got grass-fed ventures going we're looking for new
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opportunities uh joseph my business partner the ceo of field trip had a meeting with a woman named
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judy bloomstock was trying to raise money for a pharma company that was doing new formulations around
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psilocybin which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms um and he comes out of that meeting and
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he's like yeah this you know judy was looking to raise money for this you know but uh i don't know
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like magic mushrooms really and i had that same kind of light bulb moment being like this is happening
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and it's like i think so she pitched us on her idea but told us what else was happening around
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psychedelic which i hadn't been advised of which was um you know uh peter teal had invested in compass
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pathways which went public last week and is now worth 1.3 billion dollars michael pauland had
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written his book how to change your mind which if you haven't read it you certainly should if you
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have any interest in psychedelics and the emerging industry uh and maps had just been granted breakthrough
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therapy designation so maps is doing a clinical trial looking at the use of mdma or or street drug
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ecstasy more commonly known as um looking at ptsd and the results around that are just mind-blowing
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you know psychedelics are infinitely more uh effective than current treatments and i'm like
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we got to do something in this this is amazing and and what really inspired me at that time was
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judy described a single psilocybin assisted psychotherapy session as being like 10 years
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of therapy in a single session and i'm like this is something the world needs you know i've done a lot
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of work on myself uh both from like emotional growth and meditation and therapy just for my own
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purpose is to leave live a happier healthier you know more productive life and and so if you can
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take all the work i've done over the last 15 years and shrink it into a couple of sessions that was
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something that i thought was going to be huge and that the world really needed um and uh interestingly
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at the time there are some online sites popping up that were openly selling psilocybin mushrooms in
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canada which really surprised me but i think it's reflective of the kind of very liberal attitudes
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towards uh at least low harm drugs like psilocybin and lsd um are reflected in canada interestingly and
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it kind of fell under the radar and i'm surprised by it but i'm going to do my best to raise it just a
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couple of weeks ago the crown attorney in canada gave a mandate to all crown prosecutors across canada
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to not prosecute simple possession of drugs so we actually live in a world where you have
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decriminalized possession uh in canada um no one's talking about it but that's a pretty interesting
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evolution of um our society that possession of drugs is essentially no longer criminalized i mean
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it's still technically illegal but if they don't enforce it going back to some of the first principles
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we're talking about on this conversation you got to query whether it's actually still illegal or not
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but anyway at that time we kind of looked at it we realized that psychedelics uh the research around
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psychedelics was incredibly persuasive much more persuasive than you see around cannabis
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and so we started thinking about how we build a business in this space you know it was it was hard
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because unlike cannabis when we got into cannabis the laws had changed already they changed much more
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rapidly after that but there was a legal business to be built with psychedelics the laws hadn't changed
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and still hadn't changed but you know with uh some determination and the benefit of some time and
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a lot of conversations with people like rick doblin and michael paulin and the folks at the
00:23:31.240
beckley foundation in the uk you know we kind of eventually formulated the initial skeleton of a
00:23:38.540
business model and um and that became field trip and so what field trip has become is the world's
00:23:44.300
first vertically integrated company in psychedelics and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy we're really
00:23:49.380
trying to um be at the forefront of the development and delivery of psychedelic therapies and that
00:23:55.620
involves building out a clinical infrastructure so right now we're in the process of building out
00:23:59.680
field trip health psychedelic hubs that will deliver psychedelic medicine um it's not typically known as
00:24:06.680
a psychedelic but it is actually a psychedelic molecule that ketamine which is legal and prescribable in
00:24:11.260
in north america um exists and can be used in psychedelic therapies and so our clinics rolling out right now
00:24:17.580
are providing ketamine assisted psychotherapy but the business rationale is really to position them such that
00:24:23.920
when mdma or psilocybin get legalized or approved we'll be right there and we can just turn on that
00:24:29.520
engine and certainly there's going to be a lot more interest i think in psilocybin and mdma than
00:24:33.100
than ketamine but that's actually quite shifting um but then we also decided to get actively involved
00:24:38.740
in cultivation of psilocybin producing mushrooms at least on the research side of things through a
00:24:43.340
partnership at the university of west indies uh where we're building the world's first research
00:24:47.980
facility studying psilocybin producing mushrooms as well as embarking on our own drug development
00:24:53.000
efforts through you know the classic fda health canada approval pathways with our first molecule
00:24:59.000
which is ft104 kind of unsexy name but what we did is we looked at the known still illicit psychedelic
00:25:06.920
molecules uh assessed if there are ways to improve them um to deliver differential or preferential
00:25:14.440
experiences uh and did some work with chemistry and then came up with ft104 and so that's in the early
00:25:21.140
stages of drug development as well and um so we've got ketamine approved for medicinal uses for
00:25:29.740
um psychotherapy treatment um how far away is psilocybin from the same sort of approval
00:25:34.900
i i should be clear just so everyone's talking on the same language ketamine is a is approved as an
00:25:41.200
anesthetic it was approved in the 1960s it's incredibly safe uh when used in the right therapeutic context
00:25:46.780
um for most people there are certain contraindications but it's quite safe and it's being and so even
00:25:52.560
though it's approved as an anesthetic it's being used been used uh off label as a treatment for
00:25:57.200
depression over the last five to ten years with great effect to the point where the the former
00:26:02.440
director of the national institute of mental health uh said that ketamine was the most promising
00:26:07.400
development in the treatment of depression in the last 50 years or something along those lines so
00:26:11.320
is that is that a um uh pharmaceutically manufactured chemical or is it from you know
00:26:16.780
like mushrooms like psilocybin is yeah no ketamine is a synthetic molecule so it doesn't exist in nature
00:26:22.200
um uh so yeah so it's it's legal and prescribable it's actually quite commonly prescribed if you have a
00:26:28.620
kid and your kid breaks your brain breaks a bone and goes to the emergency room uh often doctors will
00:26:34.860
give ketamine as an anesthetic to help manage the pain so that's kind of the safety profile associated
00:26:40.580
with ketamine uh but they found after giving ketamine which was used quite extensively in the
00:26:45.300
vietnam war actually uh that people reported that their mood significantly improved after having
00:26:50.180
ketamine after taking ketamine and and based on that anecdotal evidence a lot of research kind of
00:26:54.800
looked into are there mental health applications to ketamine um and that's really what's kind of
00:26:59.120
emerged over the last 10 years uh or so so it's it's perfectly legal and prescribable and quite
00:27:04.240
safe but the the real interest i think these days is in the classic psychedelics like psilocybin and
00:27:09.320
mdma um and you'll see legal access to these almost certainly um sometime in the next two to five
00:27:17.700
years uh and there's a number of different ways that that may happen uh the first is um mdma is
00:27:25.040
actually in a phase three clinical trials i was actually just speaking with rick doblin who is the
00:27:29.960
founder of founder of maps um which is a non-profit organization that's actually conducting these
00:27:35.300
clinical trials uh that have been approved by the fda uh and they're in phase three which means
00:27:39.800
they're in the last leg of getting approval to use mdma assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of
00:27:44.340
ptsd and the results that they're showing in other studies are just fantastic you know in their phase
00:27:49.080
two they saw that um 70 of people who had chronic severe ptsd within six months of a single i think
00:27:56.400
it's a single it may have been two but we'll say a single mdma assisted psychotherapy session
00:28:01.000
had total resolution of all symptoms basically they were cured of ptsd and generally their mental
00:28:06.800
health improved further over time because the experience not only helped them deal with their
00:28:11.560
ptsd it gave them the skills to deal with future traumas as well and process that more effectively
00:28:16.740
um and so their trial should be done uh i think they i think rick said that they expect the results
00:28:22.840
for the first leg of the trial at the end of this month um you'll probably see approval
00:28:28.000
uh for mdma sometime in the next couple of years i think they expect that uh um they'll have
00:28:35.680
approval to administering ketamine legally um uh or sorry i mean mdma legally for psd by 2022 2023
00:28:44.300
there are also clinical trials going underway right now compass pathways which i mentioned earlier
00:28:49.360
um uh is in phase 2b of their clinical trial and they expect that assuming it goes well and
00:28:55.940
based on all the anecdotal evidence out there it's going to uh they expect to have approval for
00:29:01.260
using psilocybin for treating treatment resistant depression uh by the end of 2025 2026 so that's the
00:29:09.740
sort of fda drug development pathway but that's not the only thing that's in motion um we're also
00:29:17.360
seeing states like oregon uh actually has a ballot initiative that'll be on the election uh ballots in
00:29:23.740
in november uh to create the first legal market for psilocybin services so uh much like a cannabis
00:29:29.460
market um people would be able to go and have psilocybin trips a little bit different than
00:29:33.500
cannabis um because you wouldn't be able to buy it and take it home you'd have to go to a licensed
00:29:38.780
facility where they take you through an experience but very similar in that anyone over the age of 21
00:29:44.080
as long as you don't have a contraindication would be able to access these services um and so there's a
00:29:49.220
very realistic possibility that oregon will create a legal market for psilocybin this year now it'll
00:29:53.880
take a year or two before that actually gets implemented and created but the laws will have
00:29:57.440
effectively changed and in canada um you know we tend to be a little bit behind california oregon
00:30:03.620
and colorado but what we do well up here is we do it federally and don't create any of those
00:30:08.760
cross jurisdictional issues that the u.s seems to be so fond of um just over the last couple of weeks
00:30:14.700
the minister of health has granted six people um who have terminal illnesses uh the right to use
00:30:21.060
psilocybin assisted psychotherapy for end-of-life distress um so uh based on that a for those six
00:30:27.380
people i think it's wonderful news that they'll help have an opportunity to help manage the anxiety
00:30:33.740
around dying and if you listen to a lot of the studies and reports of what the experience on
00:30:37.520
psilocybin is people often report a sense of unity a sense of safety a sense of like connection to
00:30:42.660
the universe and it helps relieve the fear of dying because it makes it feel like you're not
00:30:47.340
alone that you're part of something bigger that your body is just a you know a vehicle but your
00:30:51.480
soul lives on you know whether there's truth that or not is for everyone to make their own
00:30:54.920
determinations but um the people who have these experiences feel much less afraid of dying afterwards
00:31:00.920
um so you have these six people who have been granted access you know certainly based on that
00:31:06.220
you're going to see a lot more people asking for access as well and that's going to expand the scope
00:31:09.840
and so i think you'll see de facto legalization in canada around psilocybin at least for end-of-life
00:31:15.260
distress um sometime over the next year or two um so there's lots of different ways that we're
00:31:20.200
going to see legal access to psychedelics so i've seen um like i've seen kevin o'leary talk about his
00:31:26.860
investments is he an investor with field trip or is he with another organization no he invested in a
00:31:31.500
company called mind med um mind med is a little bit different than us in a few respects uh one is
00:31:37.980
they're just drug development they're not they're not interested in the delivery of care which we are
00:31:42.100
um and then at least their primary focus is on a molecule called 18 mc which is you know there's a
00:31:50.320
big debate within the psychedelic industry and the psychedelic community uh as to whether you need the
00:31:55.020
psychedelic experience to actually get the results you're looking for or whether um you know just uh
00:32:01.000
the molecules the the drug interaction with your neurobiology is enough to achieve the effect and so
00:32:06.360
18 mc is actually a form of ibogaine uh which is um a psychedelic derived from a plant that grows in
00:32:12.840
west africa um are you but it's different differently than i've heard i've heard it pronounced as iboga
00:32:19.420
yeah iboga uh or yeah i think ibogaine is the actual molecule iboga is the tree i think um
00:32:26.720
but uh 18 mc strips out the psychedelic experience from it so the thought is is you could and and my
00:32:36.280
meds particular case uh 18 mc is being used for the treatment of opioid addiction um but you won't
00:32:42.360
have a trip you won't have to spend you know eight hours in a room going through the experience
00:32:46.600
but just the drug will do the work now at field trip our philosophy is we want people to lean into
00:32:53.100
the psychedelic experience we don't want psychedelics to be used just like a an antidepressant where it
00:32:58.040
just fixes you because you know our belief is you got to do the work you know it's it's growth is
00:33:03.840
something that takes effort um either the universe is going to make you grow or you can you know choose
00:33:09.280
to grow consciously and psychedelics are i think are a great tool to to do that growth and sometimes
00:33:13.800
that growth may be in terms of healing your traumas and dealing with your depression or anxiety or
00:33:18.980
ptsd or sometimes you know and i think certainly what motivates me a little bit more is uh choosing
00:33:24.360
to grow and in terms of an elevation taking you from baseline to above as opposed to from below
00:33:29.800
baseline like if you have depression and anxiety up to back the baseline but um but we lean into the
00:33:35.540
psychedelic experience we want you to have the trip we want you to you know have the insights and
00:33:39.900
awareness and relive those past moments that may be causing the issues that you're dealing with
00:33:44.260
currently because that's where we think magic happens is in confronting your demons and not taking
00:33:49.560
a pill to avoid them you know is the um psychotherapy assisted uh treatment protocol that you like to
00:33:57.440
use um is it dealing with a conscious mind the unconscious mind because i did a hypnosis session
00:34:03.740
for the first time ever in my life last week with this guy in one of my men's community and that was
00:34:07.640
kind of a bizarre experience like i noticed my aura ring picked up on it as sleep like it picked up
00:34:12.640
picked up on it as rem and deep sleep but i felt somewhat conscious during the experience i'm just
00:34:18.520
wondering what what the strategy is with field trip with that stuff yeah it's both i mean the thing
00:34:24.960
that happens when you're on a psychedelic trip is it really opens up the unconscious mind uh and brings
00:34:30.020
it into the conscious so you can you know kind of like remembering a dream like a dream is an
00:34:35.060
unconscious experience but you can remember a dream and bring it into the conscious mind and that's
00:34:40.560
exactly what happens with psychedelics which is the psychedelic opens your unconscious mind very often
00:34:45.340
you'll become aware of something that you didn't become aware of on a neurobiological perspective
00:34:50.760
they've actually done fmris which is a functional magnetic resonance imaging um work with people on
00:34:57.020
psychedelics and what they see when you're on a psychedelic at least with psilocybin and i can send
00:35:00.880
you the pictures parts of the brain start talking to each other uh that either don't talk very
00:35:05.200
frequently or or you know never talk to each other and so all of a sudden your brain is making
00:35:08.720
these connections across cross-functional areas of your of literally your your you know brain mass
00:35:15.180
and that's why people all of a sudden will report either re-experiencing something from childhood or
00:35:20.500
they'll notice like music speaks to them on a different level or color has way more pronounced
00:35:25.160
effect or emotional impact because you have essentially synesthesia happening in your brain
00:35:30.780
as a result of the psychedelic and so often people have memories or insights or create awareness
00:35:37.000
um that stays with them you know people often forget their dreams but generally people are able to
00:35:42.980
remember their psychedelic experiences and then when you go into the therapy you take what your
00:35:48.000
unconscious mind revealed and talk through it on on a conscious level which you know if you go into the
00:35:53.600
psychology and philosophy of it most people would say would then you know affect your unconscious mind
00:35:57.920
afterwards but uh that's that's a sort of separate conversation interesting um man i got a lot of
00:36:04.500
questions here so um uh the the um man uh let me start with this so i talked to a lot of guys with
00:36:17.640
the regular content production that i put on my channel because one of the things that kind of
00:36:22.340
pivoted me with what i was doing i remember when i was talking to you you know about setting up this
00:36:26.820
channel i think it was 2014 that i did uh you're like yeah what are you up to and i was telling you
00:36:30.680
about the channel and i was probably around that time just hanging out with entrepreneurs and the
00:36:34.240
rides and just kind of interviewing them sort of thing yeah one of the things that happened to me
00:36:38.320
which i didn't realize until um probably a good year after the fact was i had all the symptoms of
00:36:45.700
ptsd from a uh unhealthy attachment to this one chick that i was dating at that time that i'd broken up
00:36:52.780
with right and um it took it took a little bit of self-discovery for myself and it took some
00:36:59.660
not not some but quite a few conversations that i had to have with other people and diving down
00:37:05.260
rabbit holes when it came to um human nature uh you know looking at evo psych and stuff like that
00:37:12.380
and it probably took me a good few years to really come to the realization even then like you know to
00:37:18.960
this day i still feel a little bit of vulnerability to like a condition that the red pill calls one itis
00:37:24.740
right where you can have an unhealthy attachment to one woman when you can't let go of something
00:37:29.280
sort of thing i see a lot of guys have it um just because they subscribe to a belief system that
00:37:35.060
isn't that doesn't accurately reflect human behavior and nature like a lot of guys will watch a lot of
00:37:41.960
disney stuff and pay a lot of attention to media and the news and they'll think oh sugar and spice and
00:37:46.140
all things nice nice and you know how could this woman possibly you know alter the course of my life
00:37:51.560
yet there's men every day going through the divorce machine that take their own lives right
00:37:55.260
so um like with stuff like this is this app is this application broader than just dealing with
00:38:02.740
something like ptsd like is this something that can be used for um like there's a lot of people in
00:38:09.600
ssris you know dealing with depression i know you talked about not not particularly wanting to focus on
00:38:14.740
that but how how broad is the scope of treatment that field trip can you know really participate in
00:38:21.260
it's incredibly broad um you know it's it's it's a little bit of science but it's a little bit of
00:38:27.940
terminology which is you know in your particular reference it's like yeah you had ptsd you know most
00:38:33.580
people think about ptsd as being something associated with veterans but any trauma experience
00:38:39.420
um can create its own instance you know they they talk about how in the community and in this
00:38:45.060
current scientific belief is that there's no such thing as a bad trip you know if you grew up in
00:38:49.380
the 80s like i did uh or earlier you probably watched all sorts of like dare to not do drugs
00:38:55.220
videos and you know this is your brain on you know the frying pan with the yeah exactly and all that
00:39:00.400
kind of stuff and or like people jumping out of windows out of everybody yeah exactly uh people
00:39:06.020
jumping out of windows after doing lsd and all that kind of stuff unless you know the truth is is
00:39:10.340
like that did happen it didn't happen with nearly the frequency you would think um uh based on what
00:39:16.420
we were taught but there are risks those are powerful molecules but generally the belief is
00:39:20.860
that there's no such thing as a bad trip per se um there are hard trips and there are easy trips easy
00:39:26.020
trips are exactly what you'd expect you know wonderful colors feelings of love unity all of these positive
00:39:31.540
emotions and there are hard trips that can get dark and scary and and challenging um and really
00:39:37.980
challenge your sense of self-identity now a hard trip can become a bad trip if it's not given with
00:39:44.720
the right therapeutic support you know most psychedelic therapists will say like if you
00:39:48.940
encounter something terrifying during a trip don't run away from it go towards it because there's
00:39:53.200
something to be learned your unconscious mind is telling you something uh that you need to confront
00:39:57.760
and process um but if if you don't do it with the right support if you feel scared it can actually
00:40:02.840
create its own instance of ptsd you know that's only in your mind and if people kind of wonder
00:40:07.600
about it it's like think about like having a nightmare you wake up from a nightmare and you're scared
00:40:11.380
right it's affected you if you physically you know your fire flight system is is engaged um the same
00:40:17.500
thing can happen with a trip but it can go much deeper than most bad dreams would um so ptsd is is
00:40:24.480
an experience that's much broader than just uh you know being present and more you know all of us
00:40:30.680
experience traumas all you know in the work i've done you know and with erwin uh who's who's my coach or
00:40:36.820
i don't even know how you describe him you know when you're a kid you experience traumas you have
00:40:41.200
to how many times do your parents say no to something you want to do and so what kids do is
00:40:44.780
they kind of build up emotional walls because they don't want to constantly be angry about hearing
00:40:49.720
be being told no don't stick your finger in that no don't pick that up uh and so it's a lifelong
00:40:55.320
journey to process all of these traumas and feelings and emotions and take down those emotional walls
00:41:01.380
um and to the extent that psychedelics are opening your unconscious mind uh to new experiences new
00:41:09.100
perspectives they can be used across any number of potential applications and within our clinics
00:41:14.540
we're somewhat restricted um jurisdiction by jurisdiction because of guidance from the colleges
00:41:19.200
but general rule is within field trip we'll treat any form of mental health condition you know
00:41:25.280
ranging from the most severe treatment resistant depression uh to people who just have adjustment
00:41:31.220
disorder or dysthymia which is basically they're feeling low they're feeling sad and they can't
00:41:35.620
seem to bust out of it um and all of them can potentially benefit because at the end of the day
00:41:40.560
that the mechanism of action is really the same which is psychedelics by and large are rapid
00:41:45.240
antidepressants they make you feel happier almost immediately uh but then uh they do two other things
00:41:51.360
one is they open your unconscious mind so you can revisit things that may have been packed away or that
00:41:56.380
you're not willing to go into um you know and that your brain has put or your mind has put conscious
00:42:01.900
balls against uh so you can confront them and start to process that trauma um and then thirdly
00:42:08.340
uh they create a period of neuroplasticity um so uh what happens is your brain what when you have
00:42:14.980
consistently say depressed thoughts uh the more you have a consistent thought the more that pathway in
00:42:20.280
your brain gets cemented and it makes it easier to have that thought over and over again and so
00:42:25.000
essentially what um what psychedelics do as as michael pauland described it is if you can imagine
00:42:30.800
like a lane uh with cross-country ski tracks in it uh psychedelics are kind of like a fresh batch of
00:42:37.180
powdery snow on top of that so those old pathways that you're used to using can get you know essentially
00:42:43.400
removed and you can open up new pathways that may be more productive more optimistic happier um and so
00:42:49.320
you have this period of neuroplasticity where the therapy really kicks in where you know if you're
00:42:53.500
doing the cognitive behavioral therapy shortly after a psychedelic session and your therapist is
00:42:58.800
using motivational interviewing or behavioral activation these techniques that have been
00:43:02.560
shown to work they just take a long time uh you're much more receptive to that and and so you can
00:43:07.400
change your habits you can change your outlooks much faster than you could if you're just doing
00:43:11.800
cognitive behavioral therapy so between these three layers of the immediate lift um the ability to
00:43:19.220
process old experiences and the neuroplasticity um that that's across everything you know you don't
00:43:26.820
even have to have a mental health condition to potentially benefit from that um to get a session
00:43:33.660
at one of your clinics like in like in toronto you know for example um do you have to have a referral
00:43:38.300
from your medical doctor do you have to try conventional psychotherapy first like what
00:43:42.460
do you have to do before you can that's right and dot your eyes before you can take them as a patient
00:43:47.280
yeah so in toronto we will treat any treatment resistant mental health condition which means you
00:43:52.880
had to have tried at least two courses of conventional treatment that could be cognitive behavioral therapy and
00:43:58.580
one antidepressant it could be two antidepressants it could be any number of techniques
00:44:02.300
but you have to have tried two without satisfactory success um have you guys tried um any combination
00:44:10.260
of hypnotherapy with ketamine or are they testing it with psilocybin uh we're not doing hypnotherapy uh
00:44:19.320
with any of these right now we're just doing cognitive behavioral therapy uh associated with it because i
00:44:24.040
think by and large the psychedelic experience when you're on ketamine or or psilocybin is kind of like
00:44:29.020
being hypnotized it takes you into your unconscious mind but i'm just speculating on that i don't
00:44:33.940
actually know um but in toronto it's treatment resistant mental health conditions but it can be
00:44:38.700
any treatment resistant mental health condition ptsd depression anxiety even eating disorders will
00:44:43.820
consider working with uh but that's a function of the regulations and guidance in ontario uh in la
00:44:50.220
we have a lot more flexibility um so treatment resistant mental health conditions people can come in if
00:44:56.260
they have you know they want to try um uh ketamine assisted psychotherapy if they've been recently
00:45:02.640
diagnosed with uh depression and they haven't tried anything else that's okay and we'll even treat
00:45:06.860
people um like i said who are just having a hard time you know they broke up with someone and are
00:45:12.520
having time hard time getting their mood improved or they're just feeling down um you know these are
00:45:17.580
all things you know at the end of the day the the real emphasis and it kind of gets lost in the word
00:45:23.340
psychedelic but the real emphasis is this is therapy right and therapy can benefit anyone you
00:45:28.940
don't have to be sad or depressed to benefit from therapy you could be happy in fact most therapists
00:45:33.100
say the best most productive therapy are when people are open and happy and feeling good you know that's
00:45:38.760
when you can enhance their lives but um the drug just catalyzes the therapy it just makes it easier it
00:45:44.880
makes it easier for people to go deeper and take down their emotional walls but it's therapy
00:45:48.860
um and so if you can benefit from therapy which is pretty much everybody uh you can benefit from
00:45:54.280
psychedelic assisted psychotherapy now you know there's some contraindications if you have a history
00:45:58.800
of psychosis if you have addictions all that kind of stuff it may not be appropriate for you but
00:46:03.020
by and large it's uh it's open to most people got it um with anything you're always going to have
00:46:09.000
critics and pushback um what are the obstacles for you guys dealing with that we've been fortunate
00:46:16.680
that there hasn't been a lot of obstacles we live in a world where there's been a whole bunch of
00:46:20.580
convergent trends that are leading to this moment which many people call the new psychedelic renaissance
00:46:25.360
or the psychedelic renaissance um and those are mental health has gone mainstream you see that
00:46:30.740
all the time with you know the bell let's talk ads you see that with um companies like calm and
00:46:36.620
headspace achieving multi-billion dollar valuations for meditation and mindfulness you have a we live in a
00:46:42.920
world where cannabis has gone mainstream and so a lot of those old tropes that we were talk taught
00:46:48.380
about drugs have disappeared um you have and i think most importantly the research around psychedelics
00:46:55.320
coming out showing not only that most psychedelics are safe and non-addictive and and almost impossible
00:47:00.840
to overdose on but they're also extremely effective you know and and so it's not when when issues of
00:47:07.380
stigma come up i don't really have to try and um rationalize it or convince them i just point to the
00:47:14.280
data saying like listen the data shows they're safe and they're effective you know if you want to
00:47:18.040
believe the movies you saw in the 1980s about this that's ultimately your choice but you're choosing to
00:47:24.080
ignore the current information and and to be clear no one in field trip uh right now is advocating
00:47:30.200
that everyone run out and do psychedelics that would not be a good outcome because that creates the
00:47:34.100
risk of a lot of negative outcomes and some bad trips turning or some hardships turning into bad
00:47:38.360
trips and you have that risk of you know people jumping out of a window or something along those
00:47:42.980
lines but when it comes to like the thoughtful implementation of starting with a medical program
00:47:48.720
and eventually expanding into a wellness program where people have qualified providers and
00:47:53.580
ensure legal access to safe analytic analytically tested supply it's really hard to argue against that
00:48:00.020
right now um you know it's just uh the evidence is is too persuasive and and the need too urgent i don't
00:48:06.000
know if you saw but there's a study that came out of i think california saying like one in four
00:48:10.780
millennials had contemplated suicide during like the the pandemic it's like we have a real mental health
00:48:16.720
problem and when you look at uh the current treatments they just don't work they i mean they work for some
00:48:22.000
people and i don't want to diminish that like if you have benefited from using antidepressants that's
00:48:26.400
fantastic but for majority of people they don't work people you know antidepressants have a 75
00:48:32.800
non-adherence rates which means people stop using them within six months of starting not because
00:48:39.020
they're better uh but because they found the side effects to be too intolerable or they saw no
00:48:43.680
improvement um yeah the side effects with ssris are brutal for most people exactly uh and so you have
00:48:49.920
a world where we have you know mental health becoming more problematic pandemic we have a huge problem
00:48:55.880
with digital isolation you know with the internet which has benefits and its limitations you have
00:49:01.600
these sound chambers you know these echo chambers where ideas and ideologues just get bounced off each
00:49:07.180
other and people take positions that get reinforced and reinforced because they're not seeing or being
00:49:11.200
exposed to alternative viewpoints all of these kind of circumstances are creating great challenges in
00:49:17.340
terms of people um finding emotional you know healthy emotional balances and uh and and so psychedelics kind
00:49:25.160
of are emerging at a perfect time uh where people seem to be more open-minded towards one stigmatized
00:49:31.220
medicines cool all right um i want to respect your time because i know you got to bounce for another
00:49:36.260
uh call and i have a bunch of quick questions here that popped up in the chat while we were running it
00:49:41.720
um steve said canadian legal aid only covers around 800 for counsel i saw mitigation of risk over
00:49:48.080
representation every case take the deal mentality uh it's more of a statement than a question so let's skip
00:49:54.720
over that thanks for that steve uh here's one uh good morning will this new treatment protocol give
00:50:02.200
hope for treating narcissistic bpd conditions uh quite possibly yeah i mean i i don't know specifically
00:50:08.700
around um that particular condition so it's hard for me to say but again the general kind of
00:50:15.080
mechanism of action of psychedelic therapy should treat most mental health conditions because most mental
00:50:20.480
health conditions do arise from some degree of uh emotional or mental trauma at some point in their
00:50:26.280
lives uh that haven't been addressed or rectified and um and so to the extent that's true about
00:50:32.820
narcissistic bpd uh it would make sense that these treatment options are potentially beneficial
00:50:37.960
all right and uh just feedback there loving the show the ketamine churches i've not heard of that
00:50:44.740
what's the ketamine church in toronto i don't know about ketamine church but i know there have been
00:50:49.780
five or six churches in canada that have been given the same exemptions as have been given to
00:50:54.920
um some ayahuasca churches or some churches have been given right to use ayahuasca as part of their
00:51:01.300
sacraments um and uh so maybe it's the same thing all right ketamine churches in toronto definitely
00:51:07.120
hold promise for progress here in canada rich or proven time and time again you need to be on the
00:51:10.660
joe rogan podcast already great discussion well reach out to joe and tell them to call my people
00:51:16.460
man uh i'll join you on that i'd love to be on the joe rogan show yeah there's lots to unpack there
00:51:22.320
um choose all gadgets beards let's do it so just real quick just to wrap up before you go so
00:51:28.660
where can people learn more about you field trip if they want to become an investor i know you guys
00:51:33.580
are planning on going public soon yeah uh we're listing on the canadian securities exchange next week
00:51:38.680
october 7th should be our first trading day that may slip a day um but if you want to find out more
00:51:43.760
about the company go to meetfieldtrip.com that's our investor relations corporate site if you're
00:51:50.100
interested in treatments go to fieldtriphhealth.com that has all the information about our clinics we
00:51:54.820
have clinics in toronto new york and la right now uh chicago is in construction and should be open next
00:52:00.040
month and then we have two more clinics that should be up and running before the end of the year we
00:52:04.220
haven't disclosed the locations yet and just being sensitive to us and being a public company
00:52:08.580
i gotta disclose it through a press release as opposed to right now but you'll see more and
00:52:12.300
more we're hoping to scale up to at least 75 locations across north america before 2023 2024
00:52:18.540
cool all right well appreciate that um hang out for a couple minutes you know when we get off the
00:52:23.960
air just like to talk a little bit more about some other updates on the business side um ronan thanks
00:52:28.180
for joining me guys make sure you uh hit like if there's somebody that needs to see this or you want
00:52:31.760
to learn more about field trip or ronan check them out uh also on monday on the before the train
00:52:36.580
wreck show i've got um john coming on who's the guy that was uh the ex-husband of that woman that
00:52:41.860
was the pastor turned stripper turned only fans foddery so uh he was at the rollo last night i
00:52:48.060
talked to him this morning uh we're gonna put him on before the train wreck and see if we can
00:52:51.660
reverse engineer the train wreck that happened in his life and and uh get some clarity for him and for
00:52:56.040
you guys uh thanks for uh watching guys ronan appreciate it dude of course man thank you