 Many of you have probably heard a lot about psychedelics in the past few years, whether it's from people like Miley Cyrus or Kristin Bell talking about their ayahuasca experiences or whether it's from my lot like Prince Harry talking about his transformative experiences or people like Michael Pollan. Or maybe some of you have seen the quite incredible clinical research that's coming out. But our goal today is to try and loosely focus on the impact investing side, so investment or, say, some philanthropy. I think to start with, my amazing panel is probably going to get us up to speed on where we're at in the space today. So without further ado, I'll introduce this amazing panel to start with. We have Miriam Volat. She's dedicated her career to the biocultural preservation of indigenous plant medicines, including peyote. And she achieves this mission as her role as co-director of Riverstix Foundation and the Indigenous Medicines Conservation Fund. She's also Executive Director of the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative. We also have Leanna Galouli next to me. Leanna is Strategic Initiatives Officer at MAPS. MAPS stands for the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, say that five times. It was founded 37 years ago. And they're really a leader in public policy and public perceptions around responsible use of psychedelics, but also on the research side. So the wholly owned subsidiary, the Public Benefit Corp, is potentially applying for FDA approval of MDMA Assisted Therapy for PTSD, which could be approved as early as next year. So really a leader in the field. Alongside her role at MAPS, she's also Board Chair and Founder of North Star, which is a nonprofit that tries to bake values-aligned business practices into this space from the start. And she's also Advisor to Chakruna's Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative. Right on the far end, we have Lindsay Hoover. She's managing partner at JLS Fund, which is a venture fund that invests in the intersection of neurology, technology, and also has a substantial investment theme in psychedelics and plant medicines. And lastly, we have Henry Elkis here in the middle. Henry is founder and CEO of Helena, a global problem solving organization that he's so passionate about that he dropped out of Yale to run. They look at implementing solutions to critical social problems. And interestingly, some of those solutions are achieved via nonprofit means and some via for-profit means, like investing in company formation. It's an interesting mix there. So please join me again in welcoming our panel for today. So to start with Miriam, in my intro, I kind of talked about this psychedelic renaissance, right, the sort of past maybe half decade. We've really seen an increasing amount of excitement around psychedelics, but they're not entirely new, are they? So perhaps you could sort of give us that broader context to start with. Absolutely. So as you heard already, I'm co-director of the River Styx Foundation, and we were early philanthropic investors in this psychedelic renaissance. We also call it a psychedelic boom, and invested in the cancer anxiety study at John Hopkins with Roland Griffith about 14 years ago. And with that has come a real sense of responsibility to ensure that this field is integrated into mainstream society in a way that is really helpful and doesn't do some of the harms that could potentially happen. And so with that, we've really spent the last nine years focusing on indigenous medicine conservation. And what we've learned during that time is that many of the medicines that are now being looked at for therapeutic support have thousands and thousands of years of knowledge about how to use them, knowledge about how to grow them, knowledge about how to take care of them and integrate them into community health, mental, physical, psychological, spiritual health. And some examples, we're focusing primarily now on five keystone medicines and their conservation, keystone meaning that they're critical for a territory, a people and a culture. And to put your mind behind some of the kinds of concerns that we have would be, for example, with Iboga. Iboga has been used in Western Africa, in Gabon and areas around that in the jungle by people for initiation and healing and peacekeeping for thousands of years. And in the last 10 years, while being used in a way that has brought many, many vets relief, it's also become almost impossible to get by local people in the ways that they used to get it. And that's just one culture. So we're also really looking at the Amazon Basin where ayahuasca and medicines like that have been used for, we think, at least 6,000 years. We know that peyote's been used as a healing medicine for over 10,000 years in the Americas. And yeah, there's a lot of knowledge out there. That's a long time. For sure, thanks. And I think later on, hopefully we can loop back to thinking around concrete ways that companies and entrepreneurs and investors today can recognize that knowledge, whether it's bringing those thoughts and opinions and history in or whether it's concrete ways for reciprocity, but we can get to that. But first, Liana, I wanted to ask you, obviously Maps, the organization you're with was founded in 1986. So they've been at it longer than the current boom as well. So perhaps you can give us a sketch of where the research is, both in Maps but beyond and also policy reform. Where are we today versus where we were in 1980s? Sure, absolutely. There's been an incredible amount of progress, especially over the past five years. But just to give us some more context, Maps was founded when MDMA was made illegal and Rick Doblin, our founder, knew that there was therapeutic benefits of MDMA. It had been used in context in the underground or actually was an underground because MDMA was made illegal about 15 years after the rest of the classic psychedelics were made illegal by the Controlled Substances Act. And so during that period, it was utilized by therapists for all kinds of reasons, including treating trauma, couples therapy, these kinds of things. And so when MDMA was made illegal, Rick decided to focus on finding the, generating the data and the knowledge that would be required to have an FDA-approved medicine. And so this has been a very long journey. We really formally began our MDMA research 17 years ago. And last, well, this year, we've completed the phase three trial of MDMA assisted therapy for the treatment of PTSD. And so Maps has been, is a nonprofit that has been sponsoring research in the space throughout all this time. And it's taken a very long time. We like to say that we don't just do science, but we do political science because the science that we do is very controversial. And so what we've seen through demonstrating phase two and now phase three is this huge boon and interest. And we've kind of helped to lay the groundwork alongside institutions like Johns Hopkins. And so now we have over 17 major university institutions from UC Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, all these places looking into psychedelics. If you go onto clinicaltrials.gov, which lists all the clinical trials all over the world, there's over 500 active studies into different psychedelics right now. And primarily to treat mental health conditions, but also looking at other indications such as inflammation, treatment of Alzheimer's, these kinds of things. This is a very, there's an understanding that there are a vast potential array of uses of therapeutic uses of psychedelics. And so what that means is that even five years ago, before we were at this stage, it was seen as a lot more risky. And so all the research early on had been funded by philanthropy. And that was because there wasn't really an investment opportunity. There wasn't really a pathway to have a business inside of this field. And we've seen that really change. We've also seen there's now probably about like 300 or 400 companies that have come up over the past couple of years inside of this field. And what we're seeing with the research in the MDMA research that we do, we find that the members of our study have suffered with MDMA for on average 17 years. And I'm sorry, I've suffered with PTSD on average of 17 years. And we find that two thirds of them no longer meet the criteria for PTSD diagnosis after going through our treatment protocol, which is about a three month protocol. And that's really significant because PTSD, there currently is no known, there's no known treatment that reduces symptoms anywhere near as much as this. And so it's seen as a really significant breakthrough, it's been designated as a breakthrough treatment by the FDA. And we're seeing that this is just the first and MAPS has sponsored the most advanced research, but there's so much more coming up behind us now. Yeah, for sure, MAPS really leading the way there. And just quickly, Rick, you mentioned, because to us he's Rick, it's Rick Doblin, who's the founder of MAPS. And yeah, I just want to highlight how incredible it is really to bring a drug nearly through to approval, almost entirely on philanthropic dollars. I mean, I think there's a couple of examples of other groups doing that, but really, I mean, it's unheard of. It's a small handful. And yeah, and Rick's been at this, fighting the good fight this whole time and there's others like him, but we owe a lot to him. Yeah, for sure. And Lindsay, you're one of these investors who's turned up. So what got you interested in investing in psychedelics? And perhaps you can give us the lay of the land of the types of companies that people can invest in. And also just the magnitude of investment that we've seen. Sure, well, I think as you noted in the introduction, Josh, we invest in the intersection of technology, neurology, and therapeutics and tools. So really, we're all about investing in mental health and it's a continuum and our ecosystem, if you will, but we were galvanized by the catalytic potential of psychedelics to be game changers for not only mental health, but as Leona mentioned, possibly neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, certainly addiction. Ibogaine has a great track record in that regard. So we started investing in 2019. There's been about five, I wanna say three, four billion put into the broader psychedelic space in the last four years or so. And we invest in this entire ecosystem. So on the drug side, there are plant-based medicines and there are a host of researchers and drug developers taking how the scaffolding works, for example, they call it a drug scaffold for psilocybin and they look at how it works in the body and then they'll tweak it or develop a new molecule that might have a different side effect profile or a lower duration. There are those who are creating drugs that are sub-pollucinogenic to treat indications where hallucinating might not be required as part of the therapy. So if you think about the continuum, I think what's exciting about psychedelics is this research, I guess the other thing to say about psychedelics that's so catalytic is take antidepressants, for example, which have been the therapy of choice. Supposedly they work on some people, have some very serious side effects and they're pretty difficult to get off of. But listen to a scientist and expert in Germany, in Berlin a couple weeks ago, talking about the issues with antidepressants, basically treating symptoms so they can help dull your pain but could also help dull your joy. Psychedelics seem to be the only group of substances that we're looking at for mental health that really seem to impact the root causes of at least a lot of people's depression and anxiety. The search for meaning and connection. And that might be why they are so dramatically different than everything else that we can imagine and why you might not need to take them forever because they make a change in your brain by affecting your neuroplasticity. So we're investing in the whole ecosystem and that starts with some really neat diagnostic tools like, I don't know if anyone here has heard of F-nears but F-nears is a way of measuring the oxygenation in your blood as certain things happen so you can tell the state of someone's brain and how it's responding to a medicine. You could trace the progress of an Alzheimer's patient on a new disease. These are portable now so you're basically getting the equivalent of an EEG, portable EEGs out there too. So diagnosis of mental health has been one of the biggest problems. We don't even know what people have but that's getting better with technology. You can go from that to software platforms that are connecting patients, helping patients find out what therapies might be good for them, connecting them to other patients and sharing notes and then also connecting those patients to therapists. So there's a number of software platforms of course that are aiming to connect groups and a researcher at UCSF at a conference this weekend said, you know it's interesting when we do research on psilocybin for example, right after people are taking it or they're still in the trial, they wanna talk to each other. They wanna talk to other people who have had this experience. He said, that never happens with any depressants. So it's another kind of unique thing about that connection aspect of psychedelics. So the soft, there's of course a bunch of digital therapies in that regard and then there's as you probably know also not just for psychedelics but a huge shortest of psychotherapists and psychiatrists in the US and around the world. So we've also invested in the therapist training program which is a very respected group that's working with most of the early drug developers in this space to train therapists how to prepare someone, help them prepare for a psychedelic drug therapy session and also help them integrate what they learned because there's an important therapeutic aspect to optimizing the benefit of these substances. So we're helping on the training side. There's adjunctive therapies as well. I actually am a co-founder of a virtual reality software company and I learned about neuroplasticity a little bit there first but interestingly VR, well done VR and psychedelics both impact the brain in a somewhat similar way in terms of enhancing its plasticity. So for example for pain, VR has proven very effective for pain and we think psychedelics can also be effective for pain. So we've invested in some adjunctive therapies that help patients again with figuring out why are they doing this psychedelic? What's going on with their life through a VR kind of self led journey and also help them integrate. So a lot of things that are giving more power to the patient you're hearing us talk about where the patient can think about what it is they wanna get out of this, choose a therapist to work with and choose other tools to enhance their ability to integrate it. And then of course there's the preventive side of things. We invested in a company that makes a variable heart rate monitor that is just a little thing on your chest that can detect when you start to get stressed by your heart rate change and it immediately gently gives you haptic vibration feedback so you can kind of relax. So imagine you're on the stage and you're nervous about doing a speech that device will pick that up immediately and sort of help you, remind you to breathe, remind you that this is fine and guide you through that so that maybe you don't have a panic attack that you need drugs for. And another somewhat preventive tool that we invested in is a company called TripVR which is guided gamified meditation. Now all of this stuff goes with psychedelics. We've invested in multiple drug development companies as well but our goal as a fund is to really empower people to realize that this helplessness that a lot of us feel with the pace of change in the world and our inability to really impact the direction of how things are going. We wanna give power back to people because the reason I think psychedelics have become surprisingly and controversially more available and will be legalized is because people are demanding mental health solutions. There was a great resignation in part because of the despair that people feel around the world and the sort of sense of loss. And I think that the government and the powers and people ask about Big Pharma crushing it, it's a huge market if you look at it from a business perspective. And it's also one that when we have the problems of aging and Alzheimer's, if anxiety continues to spread and depression continues to spread at the rate that it is, nobody will wanna work. The healthcare system could go broke. So I think the powers that we finally said, hey, you know what, maybe we should let this stuff, let this stuff find a home as evidenced by at the MAPS conference in Denver this year, Rick Perry and the governor of Colorado were both on stage advocating strongly for the legalization of MDMA for vets and these drugs to be available. Yeah, thanks. I think that's a really interesting point as well. How bipartisan this movement's become partly because of that political science that Rick started and the other groups have done. Not without controversy though. I mean, there are some arguments that perhaps there's too much of a broad church now, but I mean, we can get into that another time. But I think also you alluded to the fact that this isn't just giving someone a psychedelic and sending them home, right? There's this broader therapeutic container which does lend itself to adjunct therapies and other opportunities. But it also means at least for the first generation psychedelic treatments like MDMA and psilocybin assisted therapy, the psychedelic is really just a juvent to the psychotherapy. So as you mentioned, there will be a huge demand for trained, motivated and well compensated therapists given the existing therapists shortest. So there is this broader context of mental health care that we always have to keep in mind. And with that in mind, I wanted to ask you, Henry, how a firm like Helena looks at something like psychedelics? And perhaps first, I didn't do a great job of introducing Helena. You could sort of explain how you are set up, how you might look at psychedelics, what type of societal problem you might identify for that to solve, hopefully. Sure. Honored to be here, guys. Thank you for listening to me. We're about eight and a half years old. We're a bit of a unique model. The goal is step one, search for viable solutions to large scale societal problems. Step two, do diligence on those solutions to ascertain whether they should be implemented or not. And then critically, step three, actually try to implement them. And what's unique about us is that we have a for-profit and non-profit and a legislative arm. And so we search for our individual large scale projects to take on. And over the last eight and a half years, we've deployed hundreds of millions of dollars across each of these different categories in things as diverse as nuclear fusion to protecting the electrical grid from being hacked by foreign powers or taken down to depolarization in the United States and abroad, responding to COVID, et cetera, et cetera. So I come at this actually quite agnostic and I'm not somebody that's been historically participating in the psychedelic space and definitely conscious of the fact that we're standing on the shoulders of so much work that goes back thousands of years. The reason that we're interested in psychedelics I would put into three different layers. Layer number one, if you guys just imagine a map of the United States, all 50 states, and it's color coded by the leading cause of death in 2000 for the age group of 18 to 44. So the most economically important demographic of the most economically important country in the world. What's the, can you guys guess in 2000 what the leading cause of death was? Across the United States, all 50 states. Yeah, traffic accidents. And then two states had cardiovascular disease. Do you know what it is today across all of those states? This is 23, 24 years later. Suicide and opioid addiction. So this is a here and now massive, I wouldn't say existential, but it's a close to existential crisis. Even if you're just an economist, a macro-economist thinking about the importance of US competitiveness or you're thinking about just how we're gonna survive as a species, the here and now problem is we have a depressed population. We have a population that struggles from suicidality. Then you have something that has been around for thousands of years and has been tested and tested in the most rigorous ways. You know, in the case of psychedelics that in just a very narrow way when you think about the indication of depression, when you think about the indication of post-traumatic stress disorder, it simply just works and the testing shows that. As an investor, I also see a bit of an arbitrage just to put on my capitalist hat is you have something that was synthesized in the case of MDMA by Merck in the 1910s and we know it works and it's actually been a non-economic stimulus that has delayed it. It's been a political stimulus which is the war on drugs and so I see something that has just overwhelming data to support it and I say I wanna invest in that and I wanna deploy hundreds of millions of dollars into that to help. So that's layer number one. Layer number two, if you take just a little bit more of a macro step is that these treatments are not narrowly defined. It's kind of funny you think about something as complex as MDMA or psilocybin or Ibogaine and then you say oh well it's just a PTSD treatment, it's not, that's just the first indication. So we have a country that spends nearly a third of our GDP on healthcare, yet we're horrendous at healthcare and the reason why is that we're a sick care country, we're not a preventative, we're not a healthcare country. We wait until people are already struggling and then we are very, very good at coming up with market ready ways to manage those diseases but not solve them and those indications and not solve them. Psychedelics break that mold and it's a path for us to become a proactive society rather than a reactive society when it comes to healthcare. That's a multi-trillion dollar problem and if you wanna really save the world that's the kind of stuff you wanna get involved in. And so I think the success of an FDA approval, I know that eschatomy is technically the first but I think the MDMA assisted therapy approval would be a watershed moment and it will be. The research dollars that that's gonna put in for these other indications is enormous. Final layer number three is the one I'm most excited about on a long scale, which is if you think about, for example, Ibogaine, I was talking to Nolan Williams at Stanford as one of the leading researchers in that space amongst many others. We don't even have the concepts to conjecture to understand the manner in which some substance like Ibogaine or a compound like Ibogaine interacts with your brain. It's that complex. So my imagination says 100 years from now, 200 years from now, we're going to realize that reverse engineering and simply understanding the billions of years of R&D that is Mother Nature that created a lot of these drugs and even inspired the synthetics, we're gonna learn so much from that. If you think about the space race and the amount of things that have nothing to do with beating the Russians to get to the moon that we learned just because of that surge, imagine what we can learn by trying to just deeply understand what is already on earth. And so that paired with conservation to make sure that we don't actually deplete the natural resources that are giving us these amazing substances and compounds. I see a future in which society can have a software update not just in which humans can have a massively higher amount of empathy for each other and depolarization and all of that, but on a technology level, I think that some of the most helpful things that have nothing to do with healthcare will actually also come out of understanding these incredibly complex compounds. And so it's an amazing time for this space. I'm very honored to be in it at this moment, but it's also something that I think you could spend in multiple lifetimes just scratching the surface with and I really love those types of problems. Yeah, me too. I mean, that's why I spend all my time writing about the field, but it does make it difficult to compress it into a 45 minute panel. Let's see any downside. But as you mentioned, there's billions of years of mother nature creating these compounds, and that's matched with the urgency of the present moment with the opioid crisis suicide epidemic. And I think the topic of this year's CERCAP is facing urgency impact to the speed of trust. So in this urgency we have now to solve this issue of mental health crisis, there is a risk perhaps of going too fast. And obviously those compounds have existed for billions of years, but as we know, there were people who identified their potential spiritual and healing properties. So I don't know, I wanted to ask the panel, is there a risk that we're moving too fast and we're not integrating the wisdom or we're not compensating those people, indigenous people in particular, that first identified the healing potential of the compounds? Miriam, I see your hands up. Well, I think the way that you talked about this psychedelic boom is really interesting because there is this mental health crisis. We've shifted into having suicidality being a primary cause of death, and we can all think for ourselves, what's underneath that, why is that, right? But there is this opportunity within this psychedelic boom to actually address being in right relationship with people who have been at the unequivocal brunt of colonialism for a really long time, 500, 600 years. And so what if, what if we could imagine that we could bring these mental, physical and spiritual health medicines to the mainstream with unequivocally not harming again the people who have stewarded them for thousands of years or indigenous people who also, speaking of underlying causes, happen to live on 80% of the most important territories for climate mitigation, biodiversity hotspots are where these people who have the knowledge about these medicines live. And I would venture to guess that many of us feel that the ecological state of the planet is one of the underlying causes of our mental health concerns. Also, not being able to get to a society that has racial and class and ethnic equity and is in constant conflict is another underlying concern. And so what if the psychedelic boom wasn't just yet another colonial extractive wave sort of doing piopiracy and taking organisms and molecules out of existing structures and cultures without being in right relationship? What if, I mean, right there without even any MDMA that might help a lot of our suicidality? I'm just venturing, I guess. So some of the things we can do in this space are follow United Nations protocols for how to engage in these activities. There's what is known as the biodiversity protocols, Nagoya protocols. These are, of course, the United States as an assigner, but many 136 countries are. And these are protocols that were put into place over 35 years for right relationship and they involve things like free, prior and informed consent. So if you're working with an organism or a molecule that has what is considered to be cultural or biological heritage of an indigenous group, you would involve them in the decision-making. What are the right research questions? You would involve them in engaging around how these molecules and organisms should and could be used. You would engage in some kind of reparations, reciprocity, benefit sharing. We have a lot of terms for this, but essentially ensuring that conservation, both cultural, territorially and biologically, is happening in those medicine communities led by the people in those communities. And so that's our opportunity right now. It's hard when you're going really quickly and there's a lot of urgency to go at the speed of building trust, especially with indigenous communities who don't tend to be on a Silicon Valley timeframe. But I guess since we just have 45 minutes, I wanna encourage all of us to unequivocally, even if you're working on MDMA, which doesn't have that biological heritage, to be thinking that we can't have this incredible opportunity have the unintended consequences of hurting a lot of people and causing more trauma than it may solve. I'd love to add something. People, there's such a desperation for better solutions to our mental health care treatment that when people see the research and see what's happening, they can often think of psychedelics as some sort of panacea, some sort of heal all solution. You take this drug, you take this pill, you take this molecule and you're healed. And I think that that is one of the biggest risks of the moment that we're in right now because the medicine and the molecules are not the point. The point is what we teach, what MAPS has developed as part of the protocol is how to help an individual gain access to their own inner healing intelligence. And that is done with the therapeutic component and supporting a person to gain access to that. And that is where the healing is. It's an individual's ability to access themselves. And that is why there's evidence of resilience in when people continue to face trauma in their life after going through treatments like this because now they've gained access to an inner healing intelligence innate within themselves. And so for me, I see a lot of emphasis on chasing peak experiences, on this sort of competitive healing that we might see sometimes in places like the Bay Area where people are really making it about these peak experiences and going from one thing to the next. When integration, that's a really big key word when we're talking about psychedelics, is so important. It's helping a person to actually develop a lifestyle in a life way that will work for them and sustain them over time so that when life will continue to be challenging, we're facing more and more compounding crises of our times. And the goal here is to build resilience and ensure that we're not misappropriating the shift that's happening onto these molecules. And they're incredibly powerful tools. How we pick them up and use them matters a lot. People are also vulnerable and susceptible when they're in non-ordinary states of consciousness and that's something else to really be aware of. And to your point as well, MDMA might not have that biocultural heritage as it was developed in a lab, but the ways in which the early pioneers learned how to work with non-ordinary states were very often influenced by indigenous wisdom and indigenous medicine carriers. So just wanted to name that. Yeah, for sure. And in terms of if people in the audience are investors in these companies, I mean what sort of controls can be put in place, whether it's governance, whether it's the type of company, like conventional C-Corp or whatever it's called in America versus PBC. Yeah, what sort of things can investors point to concretely and say, I want a, whether it's a reciprocity pledge or I want it to be a PBC. I mean, to any of you have suggestions. No, you're right. Well, I mean, some of the things that folks have done are things like reciprocity pledges. So if you're going into a commercial endeavor with any of these medicines, then you unequivocally in your company governance structure set up to ensure that you're doing philanthropic or other investment work in communities so that they can do their own conservation work. And then one of the reasons why seed funders like River Sticks and a number of other supported this Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, which actually as of this month, I'll be stepping off and will be fully Indigenous led and has representative governance for many of the different medicines is that companies can actually put money into these organizations like this, which then ensure that what's happening in these territories and where the medicine comes from, including the communities, is led by people who are experienced in that culture with that medicine and are driving the conservation strategies. The idea being that in the next five to 10 years, this is our opportunity to ensure that those communities have all the infrastructure they need, the territories preserved, the access to their own medicine, the governance processes in order to be strong, healthy, and able to interact with the psychedelic boom and including companies because something that's really important to remember is that if 300 companies go into the Amazon and start talking to people, that's actually extremely disruptive. So another thing that companies can do is work with something like the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund or other organizations to kind of mediate their impact on the communities. So again, just doing reciprocity and doing free prior and informed consent. So, yeah. I'm not an expert anywhere close to you guys on the uses of, or the right modalities to accomplish the answer to this question. What I do wanna point out though is they cost money and they need capital and as the space grows, my worry is when you get to the point in which an influx of billions and billions of dollars of capital at a pharmacological scale has to come into this space in order for it to succeed if this space does go the commercial route. Capitals like water, it's gonna flow into the highest margin into the most profitable way. That's the system we're in. It's unfortunate, but it's the reality and it's why we're in the situation that we're in. And so what I think is really interesting about this space is what controls can be built in at the inception of for-profit enterprises such that when the capital does flow like water, it flows directly into these opportunities and how to not make the mistake that we made, for example, in the tobacco industry in which we waited for massive levels of harm to finally put the tax on it. And so the first place I look is margin. These are incredibly high margin business. I'm just going right to the capitalism here, but it's where the money is. These are incredibly high margin businesses. You think about depression, PTSD, how expensive it is to be on SSRIs your entire life. That's cash flow, cash flow, cash flow. All the insurance companies have to pay for that. The payers have to pay for that. When you have a treatment that you can do three times and then it's over with, it's an incredibly high margin activity. And you have to price it in an equitable way into which people can get access to it. But what I would explore is what could you build into that initial margin such that when these companies get bigger and bigger, people like yourself can actually get inflows of capital to actually do this work. Because when you're, you know, you're going to need to step up. When you think about the Amazon, okay, but most of these countries are in debt to the Chinese and what's the collateral to the debt? It's the land of the Amazon. So how do you beat that? You have to make it more profitable to not cut down the trees than to cut down the trees. Well, how do you do that? You have to get into the macroeconomics. So this is a really multifaceted and expensive problem. And I don't think that philanthropy is going to solve it. Philanthropy is a great catalyst to put in relatively small amounts of capital relative to the market. But when you're up against a multi-trillion dollar beast, like, you know, the capitalist pharmacological market and the political machine that's there, you have to build it into the DNA of these companies from the beginning. Yeah, and I guess one thing I'll just share as well is some maps started out as a nonprofit and then in 2016 we were moving into phase two realize that if we were successful, there would be an opportunity to commercialize access to MDMA-assisted therapy. And so maps incubated the Maps Public Benefit Corporation. Now the Maps PVC, as we call it, is its fully-owned corporation, pharmaceutical company, that is preparing for commercialization in the event of success with the FDA new drug application that's being filed shortly. And so we've set up this up as a PVC. It's very influenced by the principles and the values of being incubated by a nonprofit, but we recognize, and maps has been the sole shareholder of Maps PVC, we know that that is going to change because we need this influx of capital if we want this to impact millions of people around the world and have the reach that it does. So one of the things we look at is like where will those corners get cut? And also, where can we cut expenses? So we're looking at group therapy models instead of individual therapy models. But we are also looking at, we don't wanna reduce the amount of therapy and cut that part away because we know that the therapy is really important to outcomes. So how do we protect outcomes? We'll also look at ways to increase accessibility and affordability for patients. And this is so complicated. Healthcare systems, payer, I mean, it's really, really complex stuff, but we're going to need this very large influx of capital from very values, hopefully values and principled aligned investors. That's our goal. And we think that there's a lot of will inside the psychedelic space. It's been generated from this very deep place of longing for healing and doing and creating ways to heal that can really last and sustain a person. And so we're hopeful that because it's not an SSRI model, it's not a drug that you take every day that you can continue to sell in that way. That's not the model that we will be going for. And so we're hopeful that we'll find the right partners that share the values and that can, that want to help us transform the mental health industry as a whole through these treatments. And isn't it true that like the maps PBC is looking at how to ensure that there's support for therapy so that more people can have access to it. And that actually may be initially driven by philanthropy, but then could actually be embedded in the business model. And by the same token protection and conservation of both the knowledge, territories, and medicines could be as initially driven by philanthropy, but really ought to be built in through kind of reciprocity trust put in at the beginning into companies. So we're still in this kind of space where there's a lot of building and design of this industry that can happen. Yeah, and at this early stage, we're thinking about this deep reciprocity. We're thinking about patient access. We might be able to, Maps PBC might be able to subsidize the cost of the drug itself, but therapists build their own hours. So we're thinking about how we can subsidize the cost of therapy through the sale of the drug and create philanthropic pools to subsidize treatments. And so that's something that is very built into the ground layer of this emergent industry. I think one of the things that's heartening as well is, I know you haven't asked it yet, but you did have a question earlier, Josh, about who is investing in the space. And what we're seeing is a lot of investors are individual investors who are private equity, VC, people who already understand the money game that Henry well described, but they're also strong advocates for enabling these medicines to get to people equitably. So they're often investing directly and then figuring out, oh, that's a little bit hard because this is very technical and scientific. So they might invest with us or Henry or other funds in the space, but they tend to also be philanthropic. So they're combining donations in the space with investing judiciously in the space. And the foundation money and the money that we mentioned for the initial clinical trials before there is even something on the other side that could be funded. It's often a blending of all of this. And I think the serendipitous thing is family offices around the world, many of them are formed around or have a mission around either mental health or a particular issue like suicide ideation or the overdoses. Every single family in the world, whether it's a senator or whether it's someone in the Amazon is touched by these issues. And so I think we're gonna see an increasingly diverse pool of capital because a lot of passion ends up showing up in this space. I've worked in banking for a long time and a lot of different sectors. I've never seen anything like how excited people are and how they really feel like one lifetime isn't enough to try to accomplish as much as we possibly can. So I think we're gonna get different minded investors we already are who want to change the world this way. And they recognize that if you help people, I think you were mentioning Leanna, if you empower people, which is a big part of how this is intended to work, if you empower people to manage their own mind and have their own tools, you're accomplishing a lot of other things at the same time. It's not just healing sickness, right? It's optimizing wellness and it's also galvanizing people to realize that they do have power over their lives. So it's the whole aspect of this that's different is it's not just a different medicine. These medicines help change the way people think about the world and about each other and about their place in the actual world, the natural world as well, so. For sure, and we only have seven minutes left so I'm gonna urge you to quick answers on the crowd questions. One is actually a nice segue from what you're mentioning, Lindsey. Someone's asking, in addition to JLS, which other funds are high impact investors in the space? So maybe if you have any other ideas. I mean very selfishly and conflictedly I advise Lionheart Fund, which invests in psychedelics and we actually have a Lionheart Investing Principles, which is about four or five principles and one of them is including the fact that as Miriam's discussed, we try to avoid companies explicitly biopirates, as you might call them. So we do have a list of principles. I don't even wanna name check any other funds or difficult for you, Lindsey. There's actually a small handful. All the funds in the space are emerging managers because the institutions won't touch it until it's a much safer thing. So everyone in here is here because they wanna be here. Integrated, I love Palo Santo, Leafy Tunnel. I mean there's a lot of, there's really only a handful actually. We all know each other very well and I think one of the principles that we all take is whatever we're investing in, we have to believe it's gonna work. Early on you could have invested in things you weren't too confident would work but you would have made some quick money. I think everyone that's here is very committed to the mission of investing in things that work and teams that are ethical. And I'll call out Olympia. It's another one in the space but they're already on the panel so. Okay, we have another popular question actually which is can we talk about natural versus synthetic psychedelics and the example that's given is Bufo versus synthetic DMT or 5MEO DMT. Some of you might have actually seen the National Park Service here in the US put out an advisory a few months ago to ask people to stop licking the toads because they secrete this psychedelic. But it is a common discussion, right? Plant-based psychedelics, synthetic, any comments? Well, I have to comment a little bit because I am an ecologist and over the last three years we've funded population studies with Bufo, with now called Insilius alveris. And basically in the last 15 years the population has gone from being very, very abundant to now this year, next year they'll be listed on red list as threatened species. People are carrying truckloads out of the Sonoran Desert truckloads. And so we've done consultation with the Yaqui people to whom the toad is sacred and although they don't use it for that purpose and they are encouraging the development and use of synthetics. Somebody else might comment, I don't have experience on the difference between the two in your experience but that's just a little bit of background on that one, 5MEO. And there are a lot of people working on developing really great synthetic molecules that we haven't done a full consultation process, that's very complicated, but at least the Yaqui's that we've consulted with say mainstream culture, go for it with synthetic 5MEO and leave their toads alone. Yeah, and actually we haven't mentioned thus far, we're talking mainly about the medical model here, but outside of the medical model states like Oregon and Colorado have legalized the facilitated use of psilocybin, so the compound and magic mushrooms to start with and at least in Oregon they explicitly, well they don't outlaw it, they just don't make it legal, the synthetic production of psilocybin. So I think this is interesting situation where the medical model is quite agnostic and it almost prefers something synthetic because it's reliable, reproducible, scalable, whereas the consumer choice and might more closely resemble traditional use, right? Where the plant and the whole plant is respected and seem to be superior. So there is also a difference between the two models there. Any other comments on that? And should we move? I think the other thing about some of the synthetics is they'll be designed for specific use cases. Maybe your granny needs to take a pill at home and she can't go into the jungle or a sub hallucinogenic therapeutic is appropriate possibly in many cases, maybe including Alzheimer's being one of the most obvious. So we owe it to ourselves to leverage the complete range of what's available. Okay, and we have a question now which is directed to you, Leigh-Anne, about anyone can jump in about facilitator training programs for people who aren't doctors. So if they want to become a psychedelic therapist or facilitator, how can they go about that? Well, as you just mentioned, the states of Oregon and Colorado have now created a legal framework for facilitated psilocybin sessions. This is already live in Colorado. You do not need to be a licensed therapist or to have that kind of training. There's other kinds of prerequisite requirements that go into this. There are an increasing number of training programs. It's a little bit tough right now because they're not regulated. So there's a lot of people, you know, promoting trainings and doing these kinds of things, but there isn't a nationally, federally recognized program. So proceed with caution. But I would say right now, the training that MAPS offers and other institutions offer is primarily oriented for the licensed therapist. Now, while we have promoted the medical model and doing this research is what we are best known for, MAPS' mission is to create safe and legal context for people to experience the beneficial uses of psychedelics. And it's why we have a very large policy and advocacy team and have participated in all the statewide initiatives that have been happening right now because we do believe that there's a huge application for the use of psychedelics outside of a strictly clinical medical environment. And so we're hoping to generate a culture that is responsible and ethical and principled so that we're able to promote the ways that I think that peer support is another really big avenue. Most people who try psychedelics for the first time do so with their peers. And so there is a program called the Zendo Project. They do psychedelic harm reduction and peer support at music festivals such as Burning Man. They offer a training program in the art of peer support and I really recommend that as a good starting place. I think just to kind of take advantage of having the microphone, that's one of my concerns actually, I think traditionally we've seen psychedelics used outside of the medical model in kind of community settings whether some substrate of care, community and knowledge whether it's indigenous groups, whether it's hippies or whether it's ravers. I mean there's always some sort of peer support whereas now we're seeing people who might have read Michael Pollan's book or they might have read the headlines about how psilocybin can reset your brain and they might think, oh this could help me with my intractable depression and they might take it alone at home. And then what happens when they turn up to the emergency room and it's cold, it's sterile and they don't know how to deal with a bad trip. So I think this is a broader issue, right? We do really need to work on outside of the medical model increasing capacity and lobbying for more understanding and just a realism, right? This treating drugs as a criminal issue is not gonna work, right? So I think that's like my broader bugbear. Well and things are emerging to support that like fireside or the free call line that's also doing a lot of education and has like a Twitter, what do you call it, campaign and you can call if you're in the middle of your bad trip. So these things are beginning to emerge pretty quickly. Yeah, so I think impact investors should think about supporting that as well. Yeah and I think it's a cultural thing as well. What are the narratives being mainstreamed alongside the knowledge around psychedelics and how can we ensure that those narratives include how to safely and responsibly engage with these really powerful tools that should not be taken lightly? For sure. Okay, I think we have time for one more question and I'm gonna ask each of you to quickly tell me one way that people in the audience can get involved or perhaps one thing they should be keeping an eye on or looking out for in the next couple of years as this field unfolds. So perhaps, Lindsay, we can start with you. Well, I have a specific task that anyone can take on for themselves which is one of the companies we invested in and they're not the only one. And Thea is helping employers incorporate any kind of psychedelic-assisted therapy and adjunctive therapies like the one I mentioned. I'll mention another one, the ability to safely taper off antidepressants. A lot of times you can't or you're not supposed to take certain psychedelics while you're on antidepressants. It's hard to get into criminal trial and we found out when we talked to reimbursers that gee, they're gonna try to get you to take two courses of antidepressants and we all know the downside of those in terms of side effects, suicide, ideation, never getting off of them. Very hard to safely detox from them. So those kinds of adjunctive therapies and psychedelic therapies as well. So there's insurers like and Thea that will work with employers to add different therapies to what they cover as they are approved and legal, some of which are already legal, something like VR guided meditation is already legal. And that comes from a grassroots. Again, people add a company often saying, hey, we want this. So if you're interested in having your company cover some of these therapies, maybe not now or exploring it, talk to and Thea or find another insurer in the space that's focused on making sure that this starts happening starting with from the ground up. Mine isn't gonna be a surprise. If you're wanting to be involved in this, what we hope is a healing revolution, whether that's politically, commercially or just personally invest in companies that are actually doing reciprocity are interested in free prior informed consent and being in right relationship with traditional knowledge holders. If you're a philanthropist, give money to things like the indigenous medicine conservation fund or others that bring money directly into ensuring that these communities that have stewarded these medicines for thousands of years aren't harmed in the process of all of us getting healed and just pay attention to that on every level. Politically, if you're involved in a decriminalization or legalization effort, make sure that you're doing consultation. Do things like California did. It didn't pass, but Senator Wiener out of respect for Native Americans left pay ODI out of being decriminalized in order to not threaten the existing law that protects Native Americans. So, I just call on everybody to have 50 years from now us not be looking back and wishing that we had paid attention in that respect. I think this is changing, but one of the things that we, when we went up on our own learning curve discovered is just how uninformed those in positions of power, public office holders, people that run banking institutions, people that run law firms were about this field. And so, I think if you work at a large corporation or you work at a pharma or you work at a corporation with a lot of employees and you have access to senior leadership, actually just making that an agenda point, the top-down effects that are pretty enormous. From our work on Capitol Hill, and it seems similar with you guys, a lot of senators in Congress, people just have no idea about the underlying science or they're not really thinking about it. And it's actually quite unpolitically challenging for them to add language to a bill that they're sponsoring or to add an addendum to something just because a constituent comes up to them and says, hey, I really care about this. Here's the underlying science. Here's how it's gonna affect the community. We didn't discuss this on this panel, but it's worth just putting a pin in the fact that this is an incredibly bipartisan field, and surprisingly so, because of the effect that this can have, especially on the military and the VA, and so the Republicans are quite up to speed on this. And I think that should be utilized quite heavily. There's still a massive amount of work to do and there's still a lot of misunderstanding, but yeah, so I would just try to get to the people that are institution holders that in your life if you have them. And if you don't, just read the science. The science is breakthrough and it's amazing. Short and simple, talk to your families. Talk to your peers, talk to your coworkers. If you've been changed by psychedelics, if you're curious about this, this is how we start to create the shift in culture is by sharing authentically and honestly with each other and helps to destigmatize this movement even further. The more that we can see people just like us are being benefited by these experiences that can really help move the culture forward.