Why Psychedelics Might Be the Breakthrough That PTSD Patients Need (Kevin Ryan, The Godfather of NYC Tech)

25:52That's important. Fascinating. Well, let's talk about one of these trends that you've been involved in deeply for quite a long time, which is psychedelics. How did this interest arise? Was this something that, I don't know, maybe you had a transcendent experience yourself or you saw its effect on other people's own mental issues? How did you sort of come to this space? so I do read a tremendous amount it's an important part of what I do I'm reading probably easily two hours a day and some books some a lot of articles things like that in 2017 I read the Michael Pollan book How to Change Your Mind it was one of the New York Times 10 best books of the year and I had never been interested in psychedelics before that never tried it and I read the book and it actually ironically did change my mind I came out thinking oh my God, these are useful.

26:45Some of these substances can be extraordinarily useful for what's arguably the most important problem of our time, which is the increase in depression, mental health, anxiety, PTSD. And the scientific data shows that it works. And so then I was still on the board of Yale at the time. And I didn't even know, but Yale has one of the best practices, academic practices in the world on psychedelics. They did all the original work on ketamine. And now I've been doing for the last seven years, a lot of work in psilocybin. So I met with a team there. I'm probably the leading donor to the Yale Center for Psychedelic Research.

27:24Got to know them very well. So learn more, became more persuaded and became persuaded of something is, you know, if I told you that AI is going to be big, you'd say, thank you, Kevin. I think everyone, including my grandmother, already knows that. You're a thing to the game. in 2018, 2019, it was not as obvious. Most VC firms couldn't even invest in psychedelics, excluded from it and thought it was a really bad thing, which of course makes no sense. You know, how can you not invest in something that Yale, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins are working on in the lab? So anyway, I thought, you know, there's an opportunity here because most people don't touch it.

28:02Most people don't understand it. And it's going to be very big. I think it's going to be a$10 billion industry. So I was active as a nonprofit donor and still am. But I also then in 2020 started a company called Transcend in psychedelics, which so far is looking very, very successful. So interesting. You mentioned, you know, the use of ketamine and psilocybin. Is there a growing consensus about, you know, when is the right time to use one versus the other or which is more effective? How is that sort of perceived at the moment? I think it's truly to say there's a consensus. What we're seeing is that these things work.

28:40So, you know, if you read through 300 academic studies, you would come back to me and probably conclude the following, that, you know, it looks very definitive that, you know, the cycles can work for the things I mentioned, PTSD, depression, anxiety, addiction. You would probably conclude that it looks very promising in things like traumatic brain injuries, anorexia, OCD. And you would conclude that if someone is bipolar or has psychosis, you should not use psychedelics. As of right now, there are isolated cases where we're going to make it worse, and we just don't have a good solution. All of these things may evolve over time, but the first four categories or five categories I mentioned probably hit 80 million people in this country.

29:25I mean, it's not solved. I mean, And it's one of the most interesting things to think about. If I asked you what causes depression, you can't even answer. We don't even know that it's really genetic. We don't. We know there's an environmental influence. But on the other hand, maybe your brother has deep depression and you don't. You grew up in the same household. You have the same things. Why is that? You don't know. Depression has been around for 200 years. It's one of the, we just don't understand the brain that well. What we do know is that generally these psychedelics do work. And they, by the way, don't work 100%.

29:59Nothing works 100%. MDMA in their phase three trials, 66 % of the people who had treatment resistant PTSD, which means they'd had it, I think, on average for over 10 and a half years, were cured of PTSD after six months. Wow. That is so staggering. We've never had anything that has achieved 30%. And in fact, everyone on this podcast knows that depression is a big issue. Yes. Name something that has come through the FDA in the last 20 years that's helpful. Nothing. As I recall, its ability to help treatment-resistant ailments is actually sort of like broader even than the PTSD, right? Like treatment-resistant addiction.

30:41It seems like for these extremely hard cases, there's just this different modality almost that is opened by this path. Oh, yeah. I mean, for example, if I had a relative who had a severe addiction problem, let's say heroin, and they don't have a heart issue, I would absolutely recommend that they use Ibogaine. It's a long process. It hasn't been fully, fully, fully tested. But the results that we're seeing in so many cases are amazing. So, yeah, very excited. But your earlier question, do we know what works best for which? We're getting there. We're getting, you know, not fully solved. And some of them work for multiple conditions.

31:24I mean, psilocybin tends to work for almost everything. Ibogaine is a particular use in addiction and traumatic brain injuries. And we're still figuring out why. I mean, we know that in general that psychedelics increase the neuroplasticity in your brain. That we can measure. I could look at your brain before and after psychedelics. And the first looks like a map, an internet map of Africa, meaning that there's some areas that don't have connectivity. And afterwards, it looks like an internet map of Europe where it's condensed connections everywhere. Things have grown. We know that's helpful. That's an important part.

32:04For folks to help sort of wrap their minds around this, how is this sort of traditionally administered? You know, is this over a certain, you know, you mentioned certain time frames. Is this, you know, something where you're taking a bill, you're going to a clinic, all those sorts of things? Yeah, almost every case here is someone going to a clinic or there's a big underground economy right now. Guides who, you know, today, this weekend, there'll be 100 guides working in New York City. and you'll do a one-on-one session with them, get a big dose of MDMA or MDMA and mushrooms or something else.

32:40There are group ceremonies that occur all the time where there's maybe 30 people in the room. So that's how it's given. You don't generally do it on your own. You do it with a professional. It doesn't have to be a doctor, but it'll be someone who has experience, who's done this many times because you can have some difficult moments. You may revisit a challenging bullying incident you had in high school or a sexual abuse case or things like that. And so it's helpful to have someone there who can comfort you. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the B2B identity platform helping businesses verify users, fight fraud, and build trust.

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33:59It's fully configurable, so you can launch in days, not quarters. Want to see for yourself? Generalist listeners get a free year of the starter plan. Head to withpersona.com slash generalist and check it out. You mentioned this company, Transcend, that you founded in this space. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what it is that Transcend exactly does and the progress it's made. Yeah, so Transcend, we worked very closely with some of the Yale faculty to go through to the list of 300 psychedelic compounds. All of us know that the five that are the most well-known because people take those recreationally, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other ones that have particular properties that haven't been fully researched.

34:39So methalone is one of those. It's basically an MDMA analog. So it's not a hallucinogenic. If I gave it to you right now, you don't see anything different. You feel a little warm. You feel different. You feel better. You feel more open, but it can be very, very valuable. And so we have a patent for that, for PTSD, for anxiety and depression. We've taken it through phase one and phase two trials. We've spent about$50 million to date. The results have been published in papers. They've been extraordinary. So you have a double blind study. So one group doesn't know what they're taking and they're taking placebo.

35:19One is taking it and then you compare the results. And if the results are different, because there's always a important placebo effect, So 20 % of the people feel better no matter what they took, even if it was a sugar pill. But if there's a big difference, that means that the drug was working. And so that's what's happening. And then we will start phase three in the first half of next year. We will be going out. We need to raise probably 80 or$90 million. We're going to start that process in the next two weeks. And it's just an exciting biotech company, essentially, which happens to be in this space.

35:52What will phase three involve? And, you know, as you think about the journey of this company, what are the, you know, maybe next three, five years look like, hopefully? So what happens is a couple hundred people will be part of a phase three. So it'll just be bigger than phase two. Phase two is about 60 people. So we'll really phase three will be very similar to phase two. And so we'll give it to a larger study. We've run that by the FDA. And so gotten comments for the FDA to make sure they are on board. The FDA has a designation. They can take certain projects and call them breakthrough status, breakthrough designation, which is essentially their way of saying, we're super excited about this, not guaranteeing that we're going to approve it, but we want this to happen.

36:38We want this to move forward. It's very helpful. So we got breakthrough designation. And so the phase three will take about two years. and then, you know, once it, assuming it does pass and it's going well, it'll be legal to be prescribed by doctors and then there's a rollout for the whole country. So the goal is that tens and tens of thousands of people will get this and be better off and we created this as a public benefit corporation. So 10 % of the equity will be given and is donated to nonprofits that are in the psychedelic space. So I really do hope that this company is very, very valuable because it'll have a big impact on the whole industry and on these people.

37:20There's over 10 million people who have PTSD. Most people tend to think of war veterans first, but actually the biggest category are sexual assault victims. So the majority are women, obviously, super difficult problems. Many people walking around who are friends of yours, You don't even know what happened to them five years ago or 25 years ago, but they're still dealing with it. And it's a real challenge. Wow. When you look at the broader psychedelic treatment landscape, are there other approaches that you've started to feel, you know, are very promising, maybe just on another avenue? And on the other side, where are the spaces that you hope, you know, the next set of great biotech founders and founders in general maybe, you know, really devote themselves to?

38:08I don't spend a lot of time in biotech outside of this area. In this area, yeah, we're really trying to just move all of them through. The biggest challenge, I would say in biotech, but in psychedelics, it's so expensive. Our phase three will cost$150 million just to put this in front of 300 people. Okay. Explain that to me. Why is that the case? It's the case because recruiting is very difficult. First of all, you want to make sure that someone has the condition you're talking about, but also doesn't have any other condition that could get in the way. So if you have diabetes or you have suicidal thoughts or all kinds of things, you're probably going to get excluded.

38:53it. So the recruitment process is expensive and hard. Some people drop out. They have to be willing to do it. They have to be willing to do something. When there's a 50 % chance, they're going to spend four months and have taken a sugar pill. And so the FDA makes this process very expensive. Now, part of that is good. If I told you this product was approved by the Somalian FDA, you're like, I'm sorry. That means nothing to me. Everyone in the world respects something approved by the FTA, but they are very conservative. They make it very expensive. And so very few things go through. And so the trade-off is maybe literally tens of thousands of people have committed suicide over the last decade because they didn't get these products that eventually will be approved because it was so expensive.

39:46And this is, by the way, one of the reasons that, you know, why do rare disease drugs not get through the process? Because if it's going to cost 300 million, and by the way, there are people who spend 500 million or a billion to get a product through. If the market's going to be a couple hundred million dollars in revenue, you're like, forget it. Those people are just going to die. So somewhere there, we have the wrong trade-off. I will say that, you know, I disagree with a lot of the things that the On psychedelics, they are really trying to move the ball forward and trying to accelerate it. And RFK is really trying to do that.

40:24And on nuclear as well, I think they're doing a good job in trying to accelerate that. What are they doing on psychedelics that is valuable? You know, it's early because, you know, the team has only been in place really for like three months. I know they're looking at ways to accelerate the process I just talked about. They're looking to see if there's public-private partnerships that could be put together to get money to move these things forward. They really want to get the science done and make them legal and get the boundaries out of the way. And do you just attribute that to the fact that RFK is sort of so high openness on any alternative?

41:02Look, I don't know him personally, but he has had personal experience, has tried psychedelics, had good experiences. and there's a bunch of people in the administration. But I would say in general, don't forget that, you know, the United States is in a different place than it was eight years ago. I'm sure you or anyone you know has many, many, many more friends who have tried psychedelics in the last three years than, you know, did 10 years ago. Yeah. It's just become much more mainstream. We see that in the numbers. We see that in all the positive articles in the New York Times and the traditional media.

41:36So it's just a different time. So I think any administration today would probably be more positive, but they definitely are. The Biden administration and Biden himself, you know, not particularly passionate about this area. And so could have been more aggressive here. You mentioned sort of earlier that when you were starting to learn about this space, you sort of came up with the research shit or came to the opinion that this could be a sort of$10 billion industry. Is that sort of roughly the magnitude that you think of today? Yeah, I mean, it just depends on what time frame. It'll be bigger than that over time.

42:09But already, ketamine is selling$1 to$2 billion a year. And that's the only one that's legal. And it's also growing at, I think, 40 % or 50 % a year. Five years, 10 years from now, ketamine could be there on its own. And I assume that psilocybin will be approved. Psilocybin is already in phase three trials. They're a year to two ahead of us. MDMA might get approved in the next year. And then methadone. Those are probably the leading ones. LSD is in the process as well. It's much longer acting. So you have to be with someone for probably 11 hours. And that's a disadvantage. But yeah, and Ibogaine is in early stages.

42:51So many, many years away from that. But I think a lot of these things will get approved. And do you expect there to be sort of markets and uses for each of these, for ketamine and Ibogaine? Or is it the case that, you know, we will eventually see that one or two sort of are, you know, clearly the best choice? Look, I'm hopeful that we have many different compounds for many different conditions approved. Then there'll be a lot more data coming out and then we'll see, oh, you know, Ibogaine is particularly good for this. I think, you know, GLP-1s is a good example. That's been around for 20 years.

43:26We've only discovered literally in the last 18 months that it's good for mental health and for Alzheimer's. And we could have found out that it really wasn't and it had side effects, but it turned out it was the opposite. So yeah, we're still in the early stages of figuring out what works really well. Look, here's where I think we'll be in 20 years. A person walks in, we take a brain scan and we say, okay, for your particular brain, I think we need a cocktail of a little bit of compound number three, you know, psilocybin and a big dose of compound number seven and just a touch of compound 13. Because at that point, we will understand how the brain works, why this is doing it, and we'll be able to fine tune what we're doing in the same way that we can actually alter your genes today.

44:16And we couldn't do that 20 years ago. You know, the brain, we are probably two decades behind the body. I think we're on our way. Yes, we're just sort of scaling the sophistication with which we can sort of understand these things and apply them. Switching gears, material science is sort of this other space where you're spending a lot of time. And it's interesting. I feel like from a lot of smart people that I respect, a growing interest or intrigue in what's happening in this space. For folks that are brand new to it, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what we mean when we say material science.

44:50What people don't realize is how impactful material sciences on everything. Obviously in aerospace, it's extremely important. You need a new helicopter blade that has to be made of something. And so is it a combination of aluminum and carbon and this? You actually have like 50 ,000 different choices. It has to be very resistant to heat because it goes very fast, cold because it might be high up in the sky, incredible wind pressure. You'd like to not use any, you know, expensive items that are controlled by China. They need to tie together and it can't be too difficult, too expensive to manufacture.

45:29That's a complicated model. Today, how many people are actually working on, you know, helicopter blade, you know, compounds? Yes. 20. I mean, it's a tiny thing. The odds that they've come up with every combination. And by the way, when you test it, let's say you come up with an idea right now. We have to test it in a wind tunnel. We have to test it in a specific facility that goes to 100 degrees below zero. That in and of itself is expensive. So if AI can come up with recommendations that are much better and save you so that you don't get one out of every 10 right, but one out of every three right, saving you millions and millions of dollars and years.

46:11If you asked, why do some of our missile systems take 20 years to develop? It's because of this. But that's true on an industrial side. But, you know, your computer, your iPhone has a specific type of glass that did not exist 20 years ago. That's incredibly resistant. And you can see through and it's really great and touchscreen. That's a material science problem. You know, even my I have a teacup here that didn't exist 20 years ago when you and I were growing up that hot tea keeps in on the inside, but on the outside is completely cold. That's a material science. The fact that my shirt does not sweat and is now wrinkle resistant is a material science problem.

46:50They actually put some substances into the fabric that make it better. My couch, what I'm sitting on right now, is not flammable. And by the way, people don't realize there are so many fewer fires today in New York City than there were 30 years ago because it's a material science problem. Every couch now is not flammable. The things on your walls are not flammable. So fires don't spread. So it's everywhere. This is a trillion dollar industry and we need to do it better and faster and cheaper to move things forward. Is the right way for folks to maybe think about this, you know, when you talk about how AI is impacting this, you know, just in the same way that AI is searching through a million different, you know, proteins for different interventions in the pharmaceutical industry or whatever that might be.

47:42It's sort of searching through all of these different materials to say, hey, this combination for this purpose has some promise. Is that sort of roughly the right heuristic? Absolutely. I mean, the ideal person or AI machine would have read and remembered all 25 ,000 research papers in detail, which obviously the human brain can't do, that would put things together. You know, there's a very famous example we all cite when the first time DeepMind beat the world champion in Go. And don't forget, there was 500 million people have played Go. 500 books have been written about Go. It is a studied subject.

48:21Yet, move 19, the AI chooses something. Every world expert says that's insane. I mean, that's just a terrible move. It's hallucinating. Makes no sense. and 10 moves later, everyone's like, oh my God, that was a brilliant move that no human had come up with. And so the thesis here is if 500 million people had not come up with something, then what are the odds that those 20 people working on a helicopter blade have come up with every possibility already? Yes. Yes. Or frankly, even just, you know, how many people are working on shirt technology right now? They have a lot of good things. Have they come up with everything?

49:01I'm not sure. And so that's what we're doing. And so the company I started here, Radical, actually had the board meeting yesterday, you know, is going after this problem, is creating an autonomous lab, is really their goal is to create new compounds. And they're in conversations with, you know, companies in many different areas to create those models. And the goal is next year we'll have created some innovative new compounds. And so we started a year ago, we raised$55 million, one of the largest seed rounds in the history of New York City. We have a fantastic team of 23 people, and we're off to the races.

49:38And the CEO who worked at Alicorp before was about six months away from his PhD in material science. So he had a perspective on this industry that most of us didn't and came up with the idea, and I'm very, very excited about it. Really interesting. So that sort of maybe gave a hint of it, but was your intellectual journey essentially, you fell down the rabbit hole because of this person who sort of showed you the opportunity? Oh, it was his idea. There were actually two people. So he had a material science background. His co-founder, Jorge, also worked here, had his computer science background.

50:12This is essentially material science meets computer science. And so the two of them really brought it together. And we had the idea. And then we normally go out and find the CEO. But it turns out that we said, you know what, you guys are the right people to go do this. And so they spun out of Alicorp and have been running this company and are doing a great job. When you talk about, you know, spinning up this lab, you know, going after these new materials, are there sort of certain spaces where it makes sense to begin, you know, maybe electronics or defense or whatever it might be? Or is it actually better to try and cast a very wide net and see sort of almost what comes up organically is probably not the right word, but computationally?

50:57It's important to specialize a little bit because there are learnings. So that was one of the things in the beginning. Eventually, this will be applied to everything. So we have been contacted by large consumer companies like the Nikes of the world. Yes. Also care about material science for their next shoot. But right now, we are mostly focused on aerospace, alloys, semiconductors, places like that, just to focus. You can't do everything. And that's just because the demand's there? It's a big space. We also need things that don't take 10 years to develop. We think there's real demand and enormous companies.

51:35And so, yeah, those are good areas for us. And so you mentioned this automated lab. And tangibly, what does that end up looking like? Yeah, it looks like a robot that's making all the decisions, you know, taking the model and actually creating a compound. So we'll be moving into Brooklyn on the first part of next year. We're renting a huge space and we'll have a world class, fascinating laboratory to see there in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Wow, fascinating. That is really cool. One of the most best parts of my job, and you've just highlighted it, is these are two of the companies I'm involved with.

52:13Obviously, completely different industries. Psychedelics and this. I'm also on the board of a Walla, which is a mobile bank in Argentina, which is the most successful probably private company in Latin America. It's worth billions and billions of dollars. Started seven years ago. I've been involved since day one. And so that's what's so fascinating about our business is I'm not necessarily an expert in anything, but diving into these various spaces and helping CEOs build the companies. Well, obviously, as a generalist, that appeals to me hugely. You're just doing it at a different order of magnitude and altitude here.

52:50But that makes me wonder a little bit. You mentioned at the start of this conversation how we were talking about Mongo going through this period where it had a billion dollars of spending before it turned to profit and how that was sort of such a uniquely American asset class in a sense or, you know, quirk of this asset class. I know that you're also, you know, a Francophile and have a lot of ties to France. Do you see some of that dynamic beginning to appear more in the European ecosystem? ecosystem? Do you spend much time in that part of the asset class? No, I do spend a lot of time there. I spent half of my childhood growing up in Europe and then business school there.

53:33Two of my three kids live in Europe. So lots of ties there. The key number is there are 241 decacorns created in the United States over time, 14 in Europe. So I love being in Europe, but they have been way behind in developing technology. And are they doing better? Are they catching up? Are there lots of very smart people there? Absolutely. Do they have the same risk tolerance in the VC system? Not yet. Everyone in Europe knows, and our companies in Europe know that when they need to raise$5 million, yeah, Europe is great. When they need to raise 25 or 50 and they are years away from break-even, that is a tough sell in Europe.

54:18The other thing is that we just have a better ecosystem of universities in the research. I mean, we have tens of billions of dollars being spent at our top 30 universities that have real science breakthroughs. AI is great. Where was that discovered? Most of those algorithms were at Dartmouth in the late 50s. So many things were really different. You see every Nobel Prize, vast majority are not necessarily Americans, but they were done at American universities. Yeah. And that leads to a venture capital industry that the core research, so Oxford and Cambridge are great. There are a couple of places in the UK that are great.

54:55Yeah. But, you know, name discoveries coming out of Germany at universities, very few don't have the money. It's a huge advantage that we have and they also have a more fragmented market. So there are some disadvantages. But, you know, when I'm over in Europe, a lot of the top entrepreneurs still want to come to the United States. You know, I'm sort of maybe a bit like you in that respect in that I, you know, American or half American parentage, the other half Italian and grew up in England. So, you know, there's sort of this, I think a lot about Europe. I now live in London. And in many ways, there is certainly, you know, maybe these differences in funding, certainly a much less mature venture ecosystem once you hit the growth side.

55:38But one of the biggest pieces to me feels just like purely cultural almost. And I wonder to what extent you think like that can change over the next, I don't know, 10, 20 years. Like, do we you know, there's sort of a almost shamefulness about being too ambitious in Europe. I'm at risk of talking about this too much on this podcast and in the generals, but it's really like a bit of a bugaboo of mine. Yeah, look, I think there is some of that. We've seen countries over time develop different skills. Like Copenhagen. How did Copenhagen become a food capital of the world? They don't have a lot of farming.

56:17They don't even have a tradition of Danish food. I mean, did you grow up eating Danish food? No. No, no, no. And yet they had a great restaurant in Noma that then moved. Seated in the ecosystem. Seated and the ecosystem is incredible. Yeah. So it is hard. I mean, in theory, it's easy to do. It should be anywhere, but it's hard. And the US has a lot of those things. And I don't see us losing our position right now because it was like a Mongo. Mongo, most people haven't even heard of Mongo. The reason is it's probably tech company number, I don't know, 80 in the United States or 50. And so at$25 billion, France still has never created a company in the last 30 years that's worth half of what Mongo is.

56:58Oof, that is tough. I don't think Spain has. I don't think Italy has. Yeah, Italy, no doubt. Yes. You know, UK, other than Revolut. Yeah, Revolut is a real outlier. Some of the other neobanks are maybe not that far off. Maybe Monza is a$10 billion business. Like, yeah, something like that. FinTech has worked outside of that, so little. And we're still talking about, we just named 200 million people, comparable to the United States, a little bit smaller. And yet Mongo, as I said, is number 50 or something. So there is a big difference. And I love spending time in Europe, and they do a lot of other things very well.

57:39In biotech, they have incredible companies. Switzerland has amazing companies. But in this particular area of real innovation and really taking big risks, Europe is still behind. Yes. Well, I hope the gap closes. I obviously want America to continue to thrive and be at the forefront of this, but I would love for Europe to do a little bit more itself as well. Absolutely. And by the way, the talent is incredible. I mean, look, the people are the same. Europeans and Americans are essentially the same people. just because a couple of people came over two generations ago doesn't change genetically.

58:16We are the same. So it is about the ecosystem, the incentive structure, the most recent history, funding, things like that. Really interesting. Well, I always like to wrap up with a few more philosophical questions. And so if you'll indulge me, if you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what's an experiment you would like to run? It'd probably have to be something with public policy. So, you know, giving money to people in a better system. We've done some small studies. Sam Allman did some in actually just giving cash out. I would like to see the results there. I'd like to see what happens if you give free child care to people.

59:00It's been proposed in New York City recently. I really want us to measure the cost of putting someone in prison. Here's what I mean by that. you have two twins. We arrest them both. One of them goes to jail for a year. The other one doesn't. We just didn't have the evidence. What happens over the next 30 years? We know that we spent, I don't know,$80 ,000 putting him in jail, but that's not the cost. Is he going to be able to get a job after that? No. No one's going to hire him. So he's going to make$5 ,000,$10 ,000 a year less than his brother for 30 years. Studies show that the odds of his kids going to jail are much higher than his brother because I don't want to be embarrassed about my father.

59:44He's a cool guy. He went to jail, whatever. The odds of him being on welfare, on unemployment, I think the cost to the state of putting someone in jail for a year is going to end up being like $500 ,000. If that's true, then why don't we actually solve his real problem, which is he has an addiction problem, or he didn't have his GED, or he is really autistic and needs some help, or has a mental health issue. And so we're not willing to spend$10 ,000 to help him because we think it's welfare, it's really bad, but we are willing to spend$500 ,000 to put him in jail. That's a dumb idea. Yeah, I can totally appreciate that.

1:00:29And we don't want to just, we don't have unlimited money to give to everyone, but sometimes we underestimate the long-term implications of things we're doing and we're spending more. I'll give you another micro example. In France, you may notice they don't repair the roads all the time. In New York City, they're repairing the roads all the time. Why? Two reasons. One, they spend more to build the roads and build it once and spend twice as much. It lasts five or six years. We have a light coating and it gets destroyed. The second thing is they invested at one point and move things from under the street to under the sidewalk.

1:01:07You never see them digging up water pipes in Paris. That is a upfront cost that pays off in the long term. And I think there's a fundamental problem in our government that we're just not willing to make some of these long-term investments that will save us money. hmm that's really interesting i never knew that about france and so those are experiments that i'd like to see those are great ones um i don't think anyone's ever suggested those or anything particularly close to them so uh i appreciate that what is a tradition or practice from either another culture or another era that you would like us to adopt more widely well actually i'll give it away i do think that the use of psychedelics in native american tribes uh in latin america and in the U.S.

1:01:53was actually positive. And we've discovered that through back doors in the United States. But especially, you know, and I'm not talking about going to a rave. I'm talking about in a ceremony, in connections with family. And so, you know, everyone I know, including myself, who is, let's say, done MDMA with a brother or a parent or a child, you know, or a wife has had an incredible connection and feels like one of the best days of the year for their relationship. And I think the Native Americans understood this. And, you know, and we lost that over time a little bit. Do you think too many people do ayahuasca in that sort of a setting and too few MDMA?

1:02:41Because in some ways, I feel the seriousness with which people approach these different drugs can be super different. Yes. And the intent that people go into an ayahuasca ceremony is definitely not, hey, let's be at a rave versus MDMA. But on the other hand, that from everything I've ever heard from people who have done it can be almost so intense that you're really maybe taking on a different level of risk or the difficulty level on it has turned up a lot higher. I'd put it a different way. Just use the word enjoyment. And I've tried all of these things and And no one comes out of ayahuasca saying that was really enjoyable.

1:03:19But many times, not always, they come out saying this was very profound. I am so happy I did it. It's one of the most important days of my life. And I think that most people don't realize that MDMA, which can be very fun to take at a club, can be incredibly deep and introspective to take. It's an utterly different experience if you do it with music playing, with a guide, with a blindfold. And it's just hard to imagine because if you did that, for example, with alcohol, alcohol can be fun in a party. Yes. If you sat on your couch and got drunk, nothing good happens. You're not having experiences.

1:03:56And so you don't realize how different it is to use MDMA and how positive it can be in that environment. So it's easier to use in a club. So people do it. And you're right. It's self-selects the people who use ayahuasca because they really have to be committed. And I think more people should do MDMA or mushroom ceremonies. Okay, final question. If you had the power to assign a book to everyone on Earth to read and understand, what would you want to assign to them? We actually have a book club here. And so I read about 30 books a year, 32 books a year, a combination of fiction and nonfiction. So a wide variety of things.

1:04:35So we just read Dan Wang's book comparing China and the United States. but we'll also read tons that we went back and we'll read a Solomon Rushdie book or something else or upcoming fiction. So I don't have any book that's gotten to the level where I think everyone on earth should read it. What might be in your favorite books, let's say? What would you put in maybe a couple that you really loved? Well, the ones I've given out the most to people, 50 of them, but they're more practical books. One is the Walker book on why we sleep. Oh, interesting. I haven't read that. Yeah, you should definitely do that.

1:05:11It'll just, you know, I think in the last five years, we've learned how important sleep is. And we prided ourselves 20 years ago, and I only get six hours of sleep. And you're like, oh, my God, what are you're a cool guy. And it turns out that that's just a really bad idea. So I do prioritize sleep a lot more, influenced partly by that book. And How to Change Your Mind is a book I've given out to many people as well over the last 10 years. So those are those are two I've given out the most. By the way, this year, this year, I think the Peter Atiyah book Outlive is a very good book that reminds you of the current thinking on both the big risks for any one of us.

1:05:51You know, the three biggest ones are going to be Alzheimer's, cancer and heart problems. Oh, interesting. Okay. Since you mentioned that you read a lot of fiction, and I'm sneakily always looking for book recommendations, are there any in that camp that you just always find yourself coming back to or particularly loved? Yeah. I mean, Burnham Wood is a very good book that we read last year that I really liked. I reread The Odyssey, which I think everyone should go back and reread. You may have read it in high school. I just reread Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. which I think is good. I've been reading James Baldwin, which I think is good.

1:06:33I thought on the public policy side, I mean, everyone's reading it, but Abundance was a good book. So I thought that was good. I read The Optimist, which was a book about Sam Altman, which is reminding you how that process occurred in the beginning. For those of us that lived in New York 30 years ago, The Gods of New York just came out by Jonathan Mahler, which talks about 1985 to 1990 in New York. It's just a reminder to everyone, you know, it's crazy to think that there were 2 ,200 murders in 1990, and this year will be 275. That is insane. Yeah. 85 % drop. And that is just unprecedented. You know, that's a really amazing thing to have seen there.

1:07:19So, yeah, there's so many good books out there. Yeah, no kidding. Well, you've added some great ones to my Kindle wish list. So thank you for that. And thank you so much for this conversation. I really, really enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you. This is great. I'm glad it worked out. That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions. So if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com.

1:07:59See you next time as we continue to explore the future.