Psychedelics Might Be the Future of Mental Health | Althea CEO, Niko Skievaski

Speaker A: For my sake and for the audience's sake, give us a little bit about your background.

Speaker B: I went to school for economics, ended up working at Epic, which is a large electronic health record company. While I was there doing healthcare economics, I saw a need in the industry to figure out how to get the data around healthcare linked up. In, uh, 2014, I left Epic and started a company called Redox. The main idea was to pull data out of all the health systems, bring it into the cloud. As a young entrepreneur, I frequently felt overwhelmed. I was on a camping trip with some friends and took psilocybin and left my group, went out into the woods and I came out of the woods feeling like it was exciting and a wonderful opportunity. Both mushrooms and LSD were adopted by hippie culture and became part of the drug war. It wasn't until the last 10 years or so that it has resurfaced from a clinical research standpoint as an amazing medicine for psychiatric care and for spiritual care and for our, uh, loneliness epidemic and all of these things that plague society right now.

Speaker A: They have been shouting from the rooftops the life changing, almost impossible to believe,

Speaker B: positive effects for so many mental health conditions like depression, ptsd, anxiety. Most of the treatments we have out there are working on helping with the symptoms of these different diseases. But psychedelics actually go in and help you attack the root causes. They showed me truths in a way that made it unavoidable to continue on living in that way. That wasn't my truth. And so while those decisions were not what I would have wanted going into it, they were what I needed afterwards and ultimately the right decision.

Speaker A: You may have heard about the recent scientific discoveries around the use of psychedelic substances. Interestingly, what were once considered illegal, harmful mind altering drugs used by the counterculture at music concerts or by the flower children of the 60s are now being recognized by the medical community as unbelievably beneficial substances that are helping thousands and thousands of people. Psychedelic medication is making huge waves all over the world. Today's guest, Nico Spatsky, is the founder and CEO of Althea, a company that connects people curious about and looking for psychedelic medical treatment with the providers who are offering it. It's currently legal in Colorado and Oregon, and after over 4,000 patients, the results are astounding. Uh, people that have suffered from lifelong anxiety and depression are able to live totally different lives. This is a fascinating topic with a lot that is still left unknown and a lot still left to be learned. But if you're curious at all about psychedelic substances and their ability to positively benefit a whole bunch of people. You're going to love this episode. Boundary breakers is brought to you by Carter and Clark. Nico, I'm thrilled and very appreciative to have you on Boundary breakers today. I can't wait to jump in some of this stuff, but for my sake and for the audience to say, give us a little bit about your background, sort of where, where, where you were born, kind of how, how you got to adult life.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was born in Hawaii, which is where I get my vague ethnicity from, but grew up in Arizona. So, yeah, uh, as a mainlander. But, yeah, went to school for economics and ended up working at Epic, which is a large healthcare electronic health record company. And while I was there doing healthcare economics, I saw a need in the industry to figure out how to get the data around healthcare linked up. And so in 2014, I left Epic and started a company called Redox. And the main idea was to pull data out of all the health systems, bring it into the cloud, make it available over an API for software developers who are building applications in healthcare. And that's exactly what we did. Yeah, I left in that company in 2014 and then started Redox. We, over the years raised about 95 million in venture capital than private equity. We had up to 300 employees over that decade brought the company to nearly break even before, before I ended up leaving. And I was in my. I was in my middle 20s into 30s during that journey. And as a young entrepreneur, I frequently felt overwhelmed. And that imposter syndrome of like, holy crap, I just raised $50 million. What am I gonna. What am I gonna do with that? And what I found was it was actually just, you know, I was on a camping trip with some. Some friends and took psilocybin and left my group, went out into the woods and ended up thinking about and processing all that I was going through. And it took everything that felt that was overwhelming me at the time. All of the pressure of being a founder and trying to run this company and living up to the investor expectations, all of that turned from things that were scary and overwhelming. And I came out of the woods feeling like it was exciting and a wonderful opportunity. And it really allowed me to kind of embrace that growth mindset. And so I actually started using psychedelics every six months or so throughout that journey as a. As a founder and president of that company, growing it. I think it fundamentally changed who I am as a. As a leader, as a CEO, as a father, as a partner to my wife, and. Yeah, and eventually led me to Founding Redoc. I mean Althea, a little slip there. Which is my new company, who. And my new company provides software for psychedelic therapy. And so it's now legal in Colorado and Oregon and we uh, have about 75% market share. So we're seeing a lot of the amazing impact that's coming out of these two first state regulated programs across mental health, as well as people using it for all sorts of different things. So, yeah, happy to take that in any direction you want to go.

Speaker A: No, no, that's perfect. I love it, I love it. So look, I mean a, um, natural born entrepreneur and your path, as you eloquently mentioned, led you to, to psychedelics, which your current. Is it. Would you still consider your company a startup? I suppose, yeah. Okay.

Speaker B: We're very searching for a business model. The current company. Yeah.

Speaker A: So your current, your current startup, you know, revolves around this. For the, uh, for the sake of the audience, I just want to make sure that we're on the same page here. I've done a bunch of, uh, which I'll get to other sort of interviews and discussions about psychedelics, but define psychedelics for us, for the audience, what it is. And then I want to talk about sort of some of the negative stigma that it's had and then I want to get into what you, what is being used for now, the benefits, et cetera. So what are psychedelics?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, so they're, they're a class of drug that from a phenomenological perspective, like what you actually feel is a loss of your identity in a lot of cases where you, which, which is absolutely terrifying. It sounds terrifying and yes, it is terrifying. You, you, you start to disassociate from who you think you are, the stories that you tell about yourself. And there's different types of psychedelics and there's, there's different ways that people have defined them. But that's kind of how I think of them is, is these, these medicines, these drugs that will actually help you break down the stories that we have. The stories that, that create our reality. They create an altered state in us. And the texture of these altered states, depending on the type of medicine, is very different. Some of them are very visual, some of them are very introspective, some of them are very social where you might be talking a lot, but all of them help us break down what these stories are. And when I think about it, you know, there, there are facts in life, things you can see with your eyes, but most of the context that we live in is the stories about how we interpret those facts. And, and I think psychedelics allow us to see those stories for what they are and actually question if they're, if they're true, question if they're 100% true or if they could be totally different. And so one of the terms people use for psychedelics is neuroplastogen. And what they mean by that is that it creates neuroplasticity in the brain. And what it's physically doing in your brain is allowing different parts of your brain to start talking to each other that haven't been talking before. And what that means is forming new thoughts, forming new ways of thinking. And so it allows you, and especially in a, in a creative, uh, line of work like being an entrepreneur, it allows you to think of the world differently and get out of perspectives that may be holding you back.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I love that. And, and so to try to connect the dots here, the, the, you know, I think socially the, the psychedelics, uh, people might have heard of psychedelics by sort of their street names or, or, you know, the, the, the, or in movies or, or popular culture. But you know, is it fair to say, you know, lsd, acid, mushrooms, if you will, unfortunately. Right. Uh, in some case, because whether they were misused or abused or what have you. But, but the, the, the science behind the molecules in those sort of recreational street drug names, those are what we consider psychedelics, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And those ones that you named are what we call the traditional psychedelics. And they actually, from a uh, pharmacological standpoint, hit the same target in your brain, the serotonin 2A inhibitor. And so, yeah, they go after the same thing. They produce different, you know, slightly different effects across psilocybin, which was mushrooms or LSD or, you know, there's, there's a few other of these classical psychedelics, but yeah, before they were adopted by the, the Cultural revolution of the 60s, these medicines were, were used in different ways that weren't so popular from a, uh, cultural standpoint. So psilocybin in particular had been, has been used for thousands of years in indigenous societies in Mexico and South America to, for, for healing purposes and held by wisdom keepers there and medicine people and you know, used in rites of passage, used in trans life, transitions in grief, things like that. And the community would gather and share. These medicines. LSD, came about in the 50s and was discovered and was initially introduced to the world through therapy. So its initial uses were to figure out how to make therapy more effective. And it was actually adopted by different regions for Use of, of substance abuse was, was one of the, the big ways that that LSD was used. And in Canada it became a standard of practice in, in one province there to actually use it for um, alcohol use disorder, to help out the alcoholics. And then of course both mushrooms and LSD were adopted by, by hippie culture and started to, you know, became part of the drug war, the stigma you talk about. And it wasn't until the last 10 years or so that it has kind of resurfaced from a, uh, clinical, uh, research standpoint largely by a lot of the clinical trials held at Johns Hopkins and has reemerged as an amazing medicine for, for psychiatric care and for spiritual care and for, you know, our loneliness epidemic and all of these things that plague society right now.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, the, the, I mean I was mentioning off camera, I first became aware of the, the, the medical use of psychedelics through the veteran community.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I interviewed a brilliant guy, brilliant doctor, I should say Dr. Chris Free, who, he was a gentleman who actually coined the term operator syndrome, which is m. You know, a very specific form of PTSD that is experienced by Special forces or tier one operators. Navy SEALs, Delta Force, those guys in and as in its relationship to traumatic, traumatic brain injuries. And um, there's a retired Navy SEAL named Marcus Capone who, he leads a, uh, nonprofit that takes all types of veterans down to Mexico. And they, There's a treatment program that uses 5 Meo.

Speaker B: Yeah, 5 Meo. DMT. Yeah, correct.

Speaker A: And then one other that I can't remember off the top of my head, but. And they have, uh, Anyway, they have been shouting from the rooftops, the life changing, you know, almost impossible to believe, positive effects. You know, the Sean, I don't know if you know the Sean Ryan show. It's another podcast. He's a Navy SEAL veteran. He's got one of the top podcasts in the, in the world. He had some folks on from the veteran community that done it. He went and did it and he sings it. He talks about its benefits routinely. Like every other one of his shows, he'll bring it up. And so the, the I, I think that there's a sort of a growing wave of people waking up to the positive benefits of this as medicine.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And you know, I'd love to hear from you, from your perspective, you know, what it is that, that we think or what data we have to support what this, what it, what it's doing. You mentioned neuroplasticity, which I think, you know, for the audience in my understanding, Correct me if I'm wrong, is that we sort of, you know, I think about, I sort of vision it as like a creek or a river, like where water will carve a path, you know, like uh, so in our brain we have these, these pathways that, that are carved based on our thinking and our experience and it, that's sort of the way that we see the world. But then neuroplasticity is the, the ability to sort of rewire that, those things and, and, or at least the ability if, if you have neuroplasticity, uh, you, you don't always go down the same road, but you can, you can change to different paths and open yourself, open your brain up to thinking things in a different way. Am I on the right track here? Educate, educate us, educate us on what this stuff does.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. And one of the metaphors I love, you know, I have two kids and something I read was that when you look at someone's brain who is on psychedelics, like you put them in an FMRI scanner and look at what their brain's doing, their brain actually looks a lot like a newborn baby. Uh, and if you've ever held a newborn, right, they're just like mesmerized with everything.

Speaker A: I have five, by the way.

Speaker B: Yeah, oh yeah, exactly. You've held a lot of newborns.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: And, and when we think about the amount of learning that that early childhood has the, the impact that life has on an early child and develops them as a human, it's because they're super neuroplastic. They have a ton of neuroplasticity. And it's not until they're about three years old where their brains start to look more like, ah, you know, regular human adult brains. And so I, I think of that newborn to three year old phase as kind of like what's going on in a psychedelic trip. But that might happen over, you know, three hours, four hours instead of three years for a, for a child. So when, when you're, when you take these medicines, it sort of creates a blank slate. And you know, they're at least, at, at least in, in the data we're seeing, they're, they're not addictive at all because it's not fun to do that. Oftentimes what happens is in the first hour after you consume psilocy instance and you know, our, our platform centers around psilocybin mushrooms. So a lot of my data is going to focus on that. But in the first hour after you take it, it can be a really distress, distressing hour as you come up on the medicine, because you might be confused, you might be nauseous, you might be forgetting things that you find important, like who you are and what you care about. And then on the other side of that is that blank slate. And that's where you can start to, to realize these stories and reevaluate these stories so quickly. From, uh, a data perspective. I think you're spot on in that the veterans are screaming this from the rooftops because psychedelics for so many mental health conditions like depression, ptsd, anxiety, even OCD and eating disorders and things like that. Most of the treatments we have out there are working on helping with the symptoms of these different diseases, but psychedelics actually go in and help you attack the root causes. And for something like ptsd, what it often does is in this dissociative moment, you can actually separate what caused that trauma, whether it's combat trauma or sexual trauma, whatever it may be, a car accident, you know, whatever trauma is you're holding onto that causes that ptsd, it can allow you to separate your ego from it and start to understand that you are not the cause of that and you are not the same as that trauma. And what people often talk about when they're, when they're coming out of these experiences is that they, for the first time, were. Were able to. To see it from a more empathetic perspective as, as, you know, watching it as. As some, as that trauma happened to someone else and understand how that shouldn't define who they are going forward. And so those are some of, like, the, the qualitative things we hear from it. Over the past couple, we've seen about 4,200 participants go through the regulated models of using psilocybin legally in Colorado and Oregon. We just crunched those numbers to take a look at what the outcomes look like. In general, a lot of these people coming into these experiences did have significant anxiety and depression. Those were some of the measures that we were looking at. In particular, two weeks after these journeys, we saw huge effects, uh, essentially coming. Coming down to the minimal range of anxiety and depression. And so clinically, it's. It's about five to six times more effective than antidepressant. Antidepressants is what we're seeing in the data two to three times more effective than cbt. Cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the leading ways of working through this. We asked people to rate the benefit that they perceive that they had from the experience. 98% rated it as beneficial. And across that entire population, we only saw 1.2% log adverse events. So this is their facilitator saying that something, something either behaviorally, behaviorally, behaviorally or medically was challenging for them and most of it was nausea. And the people who had adverse events still rated it beneficially. So what felt subjectively true to me as someone who has, has done a lot of these experiences, we're now seeing objectively in real world data. And I'm not talking about clinical trials that are, you know, heavily controlled and you know, a small population. This is real world world data. All different types of people coming into these experiences and just seeing phenomenal outcomes.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I want to, I want to dig into that a little bit. So uh, how is this data collected? I mean, I, I, when you say that I envision, you know, the one of the participants sort of rating, you know, on a scale of 1 to 100, 1 to 10, their anxiety, their depression, etc. Then they, they participate in the program or the, the, the, I don't even know what to call it, the trial. They, they take the medicine and then they are asked afterward to rate those exact same things and then they perform a comparison. Is that how these, this data is gathered?

Speaker B: Yeah, and we actually use the same ways that is, is used in psychology and psychiatry to figure out if someone has depression or anxiety. So there's standard screeners. So the PHQ9 and the GAD7 are these nine and seven question screeners that we use. And so we're trying to get apples to apples here so we can show uh, efficacy across different modalities. But the way that these programs work is they're facilitated use of the medicine. So it's not that you just go into like a dispensary type model and buy psilocybin and leave. You actually will sit down with a therapist, they'll help you in a, uh, in a preparation session, figure out what you're working on and, and what you want to be focused on during the journey. And then you basically carve out a whole day to, to do the medicine with that therapist. And so these sessions on average are, are data showing us they last about seven hours on average. The, the actual psychedelic trip itself might be more like three to four hours, but you're in session with them. Seven hours, it is long. And through that experience you're, you're coming up on the medicine, you're coming back down. Oh, uh, yeah, you mentioned you asked data collection. So we actually collect the baselines at that preparation session, which might be a week before Their, their journey. That's when we, we figure out the baselines and then we give you two weeks afterwards to kind of, you know, settle in back to life, coming back from this experience. And then we ask again. And so that, that's the time points we're collecting the, the data at.

Speaker A: Gotcha. What, what about the like duration or the length that these, you know, the positive, the benefits are, are lasting. Do you guys have any data on that? I mean, with something like a, uh, antidepressants, whatever, it's something that you're on that you continue whether it's monthly or daily, however you, you can, you continue to take this medicine. How does it work with psilocybin?

Speaker B: Yeah, and so unfortunately our data doesn't look into that because we just ask at two weeks. But there are a lot of other studies that look at durability across, you know, six months, year time period. And the data is still very positive. And so rather than taking an antidepressant every day, which kind of turns down the volume on your experience of life, what psilocybin does is sort of it cranks up that volume to 11 for that one day. And you kind of move through these experiences rather than dampening them. And for a lot of people that effect can last a lifetime. So what we're seeing, and there are a few drugs moving through FDA clinical trials right now. And, and they're, they're in particular looking at the durability of this. And it's going to, they're doing it because it's going to determine how much they can actually charge and how much insurance will cover and what they're, what they're basically the, the benchmark they're using is that one psilocybin session should be about equal to a year's worth of therapy or a year's worth of anti. Antidepressants. And so the, they're trying to price it in, in that sort of, you know, could, could be that costly. But hopefully insurance will help take care of it for sure.

Speaker A: I mean, look, the, the, it's so, I feel like it's so unfortunate that, that uh, we had. There's so many prescription medications that are prescribed. You know, thousands of prescriptions are written daily. Nobody has any idea how they work. Right. Like, we just know, like, well, it's not supposedly not, not harmful for you except for these like 48 potential negative side effects and you're going to feel better. People are like, oh, okay, I'll take that. But then when you talk about something that has this like some type of historical negative stigma. It's all of a sudden it's subject to this, you know, crazy like, wait a minute. How is, exactly does it, what is it doing to the brain? And how. Why is it not going to kill me? So recognizing this is like such an unfair sort of bar to have to get over. What do we know specifically sort of what, what it's doing? And the flip side of that is like, what. What are the big risks to taking? We're sticking with psilocybin here. Cause I, I don't think you can talk about all of them together. Yeah.

Speaker B: And there. So there's a lot of neuroscientists focusing on how to solve this, this, how to answer those specific questions. And, and I need to preface this by saying I'm not a neuroscientist. I, I'm an economist and an entrepreneur. But what, what, what we're seeing is really positive from, uh, a neuroscience perspective. What it does is, what it's been shown to do is sort of turn off the default mode network. So there's these various networks in our brains that work together. Parts of your brain that work together to do certain things. Your default mode network is the thing that sort of carries that inner monologue. It carries the stories you have about who you are and who you're supposed to be. It's, it's what happens when you're daydreaming. The default mode network sort of clicks on and you know, the thoughts, the stream of conscious that moves through you, it, it turns that down and a lot. It's almost like a filter is being taken away from your view and the world looks different. They often create a sense of awe and amazement, which from a, you know, even outside of the neuroscience, from a felt experience is an absolutely beautiful and wonderful thing that people often cite as, as why it felt so healing because they, they experienced awe, uh, like beauty in the world, something magical from seeing, which is why they're so nice to take in nature because nature just has so much natural beauty. So it helps. And that experience helps to us to see how we're, we're so small in this, in this universe and we're so interconnected. And these are the ways where getting beyond fixing the, whatever mental health issues there might be. So that's sort of like baseline is zero and you might be at a negative and fixing it back up to zero. There's actually a lot of positive things that happen too, on the positive psychology side of the scale. And this is how I approach psychedelics. In my first, in my uses of it, uh, I have, I've never fortunately have dealt with serious, uh, mental health issues, but I have always used psychedelics to just become a better person. And I think that's, you know, for your audience as, you know, CEOs and entrepreneurs, that's something that I think we share in this growth mindset of like, how do we actually improve not only our companies, but as people, because we have to level up to lead our companies in ways that are going to be more effective in accomplishing our goals, have a bigger impact in the world. And what psychedelics always did for me was they gave me perspective that I could get really, really clear on what was important to me, what are my values and, and how is this company helping me to express those values. So it brought that clarity, it brought courage to actually make the decisions I needed to make to accomplish those things. And I think with, with clarity and courage, I felt like a, uh, powerful leader. And when I, when I lacked clarity, when I was confused about which way I should go, that would definitely remove the courage from the situation. That would take away confidence. And, and my team could see that in me, my customers could see that, my stakeholders, my investors. And so these psychedelic experiences, because it strips everything away and gets you down to your core, allows you to build back up in ways that feel really clear. And I think that's where, where I saw the most benefit from it. And you could see how that benefit applied to someone with treatment resistant depression or with PTSD would, would also be really helpful. And so I think that's. When I, when I say that these medicines hit the root cause of these issues, they're not saying, oh, you're depressed, let me make you happier. They're saying, let's actually figure out from a core level of who you are, where that depression is and how do you work through that depression and reconcile with it rather than avoiding it by, you know, taking an antidepressant, which helps you potentially just not feel that way, but it doesn't actually help you deal with the issue that might be underlying it.

Speaker A: Yeah, so look, I, I've never, I've never taken psychedelics, but it. This for. Interestingly this is. I, I have spent a good bit of time talking with people who are either advocating for the use of psychedelics in medical treatments or who have used them. Them used psychedelics themselves. And I've also just, I, I've heard a lot of people describe in very vivid detail their experience or experiences with psychedelics. And the it from my Perspective. If I were asked to explain it, this is what it sounds like to me, right? I, I think about. I've had pets all, all my life, right? I have a German shepherd and his whole sort of world is there's, I've got five young kids and so there's seven ups at my house. But his whole world is right. He's very sort of sad, mopey in the morning because he knows everybody's leaving and then he kind of sits and looks out the window all day long, like hoping when, uh, when we're going to get home.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: And, and it's just like this sort of melee or depression. And then when we get home, it's like the world's greatest thing just happened. Like, oh my gosh, my people are home. And like his whole body wags. But, you know, in his, in his life, right? He knows our house and our yard and he knows our neighborhood ish. Because we take him on walks, right? But. And he knows the seven of us and then anybody that may or may have come sort of into our house and that's his world, that's his. That's the limits of it. And what his most of his brain power is spent thinking about the worst thing that happens during the day, which is when we leave. And the best thing that happens during the day is when we come in, right? And that, uh, what psychedelics do or what the, the, what it does for the brain is it would allow like from my pet's perspective, to all of a sudden zoom out and look at the world outside, you know, almost looking at my house, uh, to, to realize that, you know, yes, your world might be these seven people in this, this yard, in this neighborhood, but look at all of the rest and people leaving and coming home during the day, yes, that feels like a big deal, but that's really not a big deal when you sort of look at the rest of the world. And that's a very, very sort of ridiculous, simple way to think about it. But you could overlay that on people too, right? I mean, maybe the biggest part of my day isn't when my owner gets home or whatever, but that there are certain things that have been wired in our brain to give us those good feelings and bad feelings. But psychedelics would let us zoom way out and be like, okay, maybe that's really not as big of a deal as it feels in the moment. And there are a whole universe of other things happening, not just people coming and going from this little house, you know, is that as somebody that is Used. I mean, you know a whole lot about it. Is that in the same. Anywhere remotely close to uh, like a recognize or a good explanation for.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, I think it, it definitely hits on one core aspect of it, giving you perspective beyond the, the world, you know, and the stories you tell yourself. So I love that that part of the analogy is that, yeah, you can zoom out and be like, holy cow, I'm just one part of this world. And we all work together to make this world work and we shape it as it is and I play my part in that and I can play whatever part I need to. And so I think, you know, thinking about your, your dog's perspective of like, yeah, like, wow, look at this amazing space. And there's some awe that comes with that. Right. But I also think what it does is, allows you to appreciate what's right right in front of you too. So your, your, the walls around you with whatever space you're in when you use this medicine suddenly become different and interesting and ah, in a way that you may not have seen it before. It, uh, changes your perspective. It is definitely an altered state of consciousness where you could look at one thing. Like, I can just look at this pen and, and notice the intricacy of it, notice the detail that went into it, the craftsmanship that went into making this plastic and the wonder around that. And so the, the Buddhists talk about this concept of the beginner's mind. And it comes up a lot with, with meditation and these sorts of practices. I think it gives you the beginner's mind as well. Um, and that is such a refreshing way to view the world as if it was the first time you saw it. And it's also, I think, a really important and refreshing way to view a market. As a, as a entrepreneur, that's what our jobs are, is to view a market and figure out what is wrong with it, what could be better about it, how do I create it in a way that, that suits the business? And I think having that beginner's mind is super important. But that's a fundamental aspect of it that once you see. I think another thing to point out here is that after we have these psychedelic experiences, it's not like the experiences I've had with alcohol or cannabis where afterwards I'm like, oh, that was so funny. But it actually wasn't that funny because I was just drunk or we were just high and laughing about the stupid thing that wasn't that funny. When I come back from these psychedelic experiences, I can still feel that beginner's mind, it stays with me. And even though I'm in my normal sober state, I can still shift and be like, wow, yeah, look at this pen. Like, it comes with. And I think that is the gift that it brings and prolongs.

Speaker A: Uh, that's really cool, because that was my next question was. I mean, I could sort of imagine, right, that in an altered state of mind, in your example, right, you could look at that pen and wonder, right, because your mind is altered, you're experiencing an altered state of mind. But then once the medicine wears off, how does that sort of, like you said, come with you? And I think you just explained it, right? It's not just a feeling when you're in it or on it. It is something that clearly lasts and doesn't go away. Yeah.

Speaker B: People talk about epiphany in these, in these situations. Uh, a psychedelic epiphany. And what that's describing is this, like, download this, this sense of like, oh, of course, that's how the world works. This quality that this, this word noetic comes to mind, which is like this inner knowing. And a clear example of this, that. That will make this very real. So I mentioned that psychedelics can be used for substance use. And so there's been a lot of studies looking at smoking cessation. People who want to quit smoking, they've wanted to for a long time. They've tried a lot of different methods to it, the patch, you know, AB incidents, other things like that. Hasn't worked. They enter a clinical trial for smoking cessation with psilocybin use. And first off, the results are amazing. We're seeing people quit cold turkey right, right after the journey, they're done. But then you ask them why. You're like, how. Like, uh, what changed? And, and the quotes that come out of these people are, are describe this, this. They say, I realized that when I smoke, I'm. I'm damaging my lungs, and my lungs are important to me as a human, and I need them to survive. And, and yeah, I can see in your face, you're like, yeah, duh, that's why we don't smoke. But what happened to them was they went from an intellectual sense of knowing, because everyone knows that smokers know that that's why they want to quit. They went from intellectual sense to a felt sense. They felt it in their body, in their heart. And that is the. That's the difference between. Or that's what that. That noetic psychedelic epiphany is, is you can take something that you might know intellectually something that you might feel intellectually, but then turn it into a, felt like turn it into who you are. And so, uh, for example, for, for me as a, as a, you know, a young founder of a venture scale business, I was full of, of doubt being like, why am like, how did I just, you know, convince investors to give me money? Like, I have no idea what the heck I'm doing. I'm just making it up as we go along and take that sort of inner monologue and shift it to no, I know what I'm doing. And being, being young and being new is actually a benefit here because I can think about the world differently than the incumbents who are in the space who are trying to disrupt. Being young means I have more energy and it shifts that perspective to something where I can actually use that to my advantage and get, gives me the perspective that you talked about saying, oh, I'm just a small part of this ecosystem. We're working in healthcare, one of the biggest industries in the country. My last company, and I can say, how can I use uh, my uh, small piece of this and actually shift the entire industry? Because the entire industry was just made up by people just like me or maybe older than me or different, but I can shift it. And that brought a groundedness to the culture of the company that permeated throughout all of our employees. This sort of chip on our shoulder of like, we can actually change this for the better.

Speaker A: That is so cool. That is so cool. So, so who are the, you know, I imagine we in the audience, people are thinking, wow, this is, this sounds really great. I'm really excited about somebody that has something, some other ailment, right? Because you know, maybe they can go get it, but they're not necessarily thinking about, maybe it's something that could help them. Who are the people that can benefit? Like uh, in other words, is this only for people that have sort of Category 5 PTSD or debilitating anxiety attacks? Like who is the psychedelic treatment for and how would you go about it in Colorado or Oregon?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. So I would actually say if you have serious mental illness, you should actually take this a lot more seriously than someone who doesn't. What we're seeing in the data is that the worse you are from a depression scale or an anxiety scale, that the, the more benefit it can have. But you're already in a place where you're fragile and so you need to make sure you have the support around you, whether that's your family or therapist or community or whatever that might be to go into a situation like this. So it's not destabilizing, because as I've been talking about, it can fundamentally make you shift the way you see the world. And, and if you don't have a community there who can support that, who can be open to that, who can accept you in that, then it can, it can be destabilizing. And so I would say if you are dealing with mental illness and you are working with professionals, or if you're not working with professionals, you should be. And talk to the, Talk to your therapist, talk to your psychiatrist about psychedelic, about potentially doing a psychedelic journey. Most people in mental health don't think this is, you know, fringe anymore. This is very much something that, that is being considered. And even, you know, in the. All over the country, therapists know about this. And if they don't, they probably know someone who does and they'll ask them about it. And so it's, uh, I would say it's definitely for that population, but that population needs to go to approach this with the most amount of caution and preparation. We actually have on our website a psychedelic preparedness questionnaire which was developed by, by researchers to, to show how prepared are you. And so you can take this questionnaire, it'll give you a score and actually show you areas where, oh, you don't have mental health support or you don't have clear intentions as to why you're doing this. That's something that, that we can share out and it's, you know, free and available.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Make sure you give us. What's your website? Make sure we.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It's withalthea.com so w I T H A L T h e a althea.com. yeah. And you can, you can find it there. But so the way that these programs work in Colorado and Oregon is you don't need a diagn. Anyone can do it as long as you're above 21 years old and you don't have. You're not pregnant or there's a couple other things that you might be screened for by. But what the way the program's worked is that you'll actually be working with a licensed facilitator to use the medicine. And their job is to prepare you and to sit with you during it. And so there's some scaffolding here that, that inherently make it a lot safer than the way that I had been doing it, which was taking mushrooms and walking into the woods, which you know, it's, it's, it's great I came back every time. But, but you, you'll be doing it in a, ah, in a supervised setting. And I, and I have experienced it in these settings too. And it's so much more powerful because these facilitators will keep you on track. They psychedelics. As I, as I mentioned, you might get distracted looking at the pen. And the facilitator will remind you, hey, you're not here to examine the pen. You're here to examine the relationship with your dad that is that you, you believe is holding you back. And so they'll guide you right back into the, the place that you need to, to be grappling with. And so I found them to be so much more effective when you're working with professional. And that's how it works in, in these state programs. So they help you prepare, they sit with you throughout, they guide you in that journey and then post journey, they'll meet with you at least once afterwards to help you reconcile, to remind you what you saw, to help you integrate back into your, your daily life. And so that's what they, they look like on these state models. What we're seeing in the market is, is they're running about $2,500 on average for, for what I just described. So it's a, it's a pretty substantial investment. Not to mention that most people would have to travel to, to a place where you can do it, as I mentioned, for the benefits you can get from it. For, you know, they talk about it as it's 10 years of therapy wrapped into one day. You know, it's well worth it. And, and I'm on a schedule where, you know, that's, that's every quarter for me right now is like I'm tuning, I'm optimizing. It's, it's not a set schedule, but that's about when I feel I should, I should go do another journey. And I think it'll, it'll benefit me.

Speaker A: That's really cool. So what do you say to people who are like, well that sounds interesting, but I mean, I'm kind of scared to go do that. What, what if I come back, uh, a totally different person and you know, my kids don't like it, or I could come back and like, look at my wife and I'm like, wait a minute, what do we, you know, what do you say people that are, that are worried about the, how it's going to change them negatively, um, and what the negative, potential negative Consequences are.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's a, there's a saying in psychedelics that the, the mushrooms don't give you what you want, they give you what you need. And it's mushrooms helped me figure out that I needed to divorce, uh, my wife. In my, in my prior marriage. They helped me figure out that I needed to leave my last company, which I ran for a decade. And we were about to break even. We're at all these milestones and it made me realize I need to leave it. These were not things that I was contemplating before the medicine, but. And after that journey, it felt destabilizing because I was like, holy cow, I have to figure out how to walk away from this company, walk away from this marriage, figure out how to make these substantial changes in my life that would be difficult and, and disruptive, but it's what I needed to do. They showed me truths in a way that made it unavoidable to continue on living, living in that way. That wasn't my truth. And so while those decisions were not what I, uh, would have wanted going into it, they were what I needed afterwards and ultimately the right decision. And so I think that it is going into these experiences you should be prepared to face, face your truth. But what they don't do is give you lies you're not going to walk away with and be like, oh, I should absolutely, you know, divorce my, my partner when that's not actually the truth that you were feeling to begin with. They help to unsurface the, the subconscious that, uh, you might, that might not be top of mind for you, but something that might be felt. For me, I have a pattern of avoiding feeling difficult emotions, avoiding situations that, that uh, can be really challenging. And what they always do for me is make me confront those situations, which is a better pattern to be a more, you know, aligned human in integrity. And so that's, that's how, when I think about how it makes me be a better person, like that's specifically how it does it. It makes me live more aligned with my values and an integrity. But yeah, they can make you divorce or they can make you leave your company, or that's uh, what it did for me. But I am in a better place because of both of those decisions.

Speaker A: Right, but, but yeah, I was going to say, but it sounds like that was what. Those were all ultimately positive things, not negative consequences. Well, I guess it depends on how you sort of frame it, but it was what you would desire. Sort of big picture looking back, not something that is like you were wish wasn't a consequence of the experience. Is that fair? Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well. And you know, going back to your question of who is this for? I would say if you're not ready to make change in your life or to.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And uh, I don't know. I don't know if we need to go down that. Like, it doesn't mean, it doesn't force you to make changes necessarily, but it will help you become clear on what's important and what you're doing. And maybe you're already living that life where, where your day to day actions and your. Whatever relationships you're in and where how you spend your time is actually aligned with who you are and what you want to be doing. You might not need to make any changes, but these medicines will show you where you, you're out of alignment with those things. And I think that's the part that can be really intimidating and scary here. And every time I go into a journey, I walk a bit away with at least one surprise that I came out the other end with where, you know, like having done this a lot, like I do a lot of thinking and introspection around am I living the lessons that these medicines have shared with me. And I go into a journey and every time I get shown something where, where that's not aligned or where I'm falling back into old patterns or where there's shifts that I need to make in my life. And some, you know, oftentimes they're not consequential anymore, but uh, but they are things that, that were kind of floating in the subconscious that were brought conscious through these, through these experiences.

Speaker A: Wow. I mean, it's very, very, very, very intriguing. So like usual running up here on time here. So I have to let you go. I mean, I've got 10,000 other questions that I'd love to ask. Tell us really quickly, so what does, what exactly does Althea do? Um, at the moment.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, so. And you know, as entrepreneurs in the audience can probably appreciate the journey here a little bit. So we started by providing a backend practice management software for psychedelic therapy. So the therapists are using our software to document their notes, sustain compliance, all of that sort of stuff. And then as we looked at that market, we realized, you know, we were solving a problem for them. They were appreciative of it, but their biggest problem wasn't, you know, where do I put my notes? Their problem was how do I find more customers? And what we identified in the market was that, yeah, there's a lot of people Talking about psychedelics, as you mentioned at the beginning of this episode, uh, a lot of people are talking about it and then there's a lot of these practitioners who are actually professional devoting their career to helping people sit with the medicine. But there's a huge gap in the middle. And this is, you know, using marketing lingo, this is the middle of the funnel. So the top of funnel is, is. Is hot bottom of funnel. Actually delivering on the product is, is going really well. But how do we actually get people from the. I'm curious about it into the. I'm actually ready to sit with it phase. And that's the, that's the m. Middle of funnel. And so we're really attacking that right now. We have a directory of all of the providers, L. Providers in the space that we made available. We acquired a, uh, top media company in psychedelics to start building that demand funnel to drive people into this regulated market. And so we went from kind of a backend supply side software system into more of a marketplace approach where we're trying to drive them business themselves and be a market maker in this. And so that's what we're focused on right now. And so we have a few different assets out there to help with that. And so I mentioned our directory if people are looking for services. Our newsletter is called Tricycle Day and it's a fantastic newsletter three times a week that shares information and stories and policy and business that's happening in psychedelics. So a really great resource for education that if people are just curious, they can subscribe to that and learn, learn a ton about it.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you can do that on the Althea website, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So that Althea website will link to these things, but yeah, it's a great place to start.

Speaker A: Well, that's incredible. So last, very last question and then you got to jump the. I mean if, if you were talking to. You had a, you had a megaphone and you could talk to the world, right? And you only had, I don't know, 30 seconds to tell them, uh, something about psychedelics. You feel like it's either misunderstood or unknown or what have you. What, what, what is it?

Speaker B: What would you shout a little context for this? It's funny, we, we actually haven't talked about AI once, which is like this day and age. How do you, how do you avoid that? But I'm going to bring it in here to close us out.

Speaker A: Please do. But yeah, go ahead.

Speaker B: In the era of AI, I believe psychedelics are the most important technology. They will help us be more human when our cognitive intelligence is being moved into large language models, other AI applications, How do we actually be more human? How do we deliver more love, creativity, connectedness in the world? And that's what psychedelics will do.

Speaker A: God. Amen. Tell you it's funny you said it. I think that my last six guests have been has been very AI centric and so this has been refreshing and fascinating. Thank you for lending us uh, some of your valuable time and educating us on psychedelics in general, on what you're doing to impact that market. Nika, wish you the best and well, we'll stay in touch for sure.

Speaker B: Amazing. Thanks Brandon.

Speaker A: Don't forget everybody. You can find Boundary breakers in a lot of places. You can watch our episodes on the Boundary Breakers YouTube channel where you can listen to each podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any of the other major podcasting platforms. Thanks for listening.