The Next Generation Psychedelic Molecule You've Probably Never Heard Of, Apps For Plant Medicine Journeys, Futuristic Garden-Cities & More With Field Trip Health's Ronan Levy.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, do you see there being almost like a menu of options for people? And if so, what would be on that menu in your wildest dreams?

That's not medicine. That's about life. That's about humanity. That's about consciousness. That's what's really cool. And what that showed me is that this experience of being human is actually a really special experience. Better. If we can make the lives of Canadians and all Americans 1 or 2% better, 1 or 2% more empathetic or creative God, the world would be an entirely different place.

Help. Performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Welcome to today's show, which is actually as my podcast guest for today, and I were just joking about is around two because we started to record, record a fabulous interview for you. And then I think a bulldozer and the, the entire, like Genghis Khan military and a herd of elephants broke in through his office door. And why'd you go lock yourself in a broom closet, dude?

We have like these little phone booth kind of talking rooms now because we're mostly open space, but everyone needs a closed space every once in a while for a phone call. So I locked myself. Yeah, the equivalent of a room closed.

Little cigarette smoking room. Well, you know, for those of you who don't know the voice of my guest on today's show, why shouldn't you? He's world famous. But you know what? I'll introduce him anyways. His name is Ronan Levy. R O N A N. Ronan Levy. L E V Y. You'll access all the show notes for everything Ronan and I talk about if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Ronan R A N A N. Your name is kind of hard to spell. It's like a tongue twister. Ronan. R E N A N. I like.

To mix it up. I like to keep things challenging.

Well, if Ronan's name sounds familiar to you, it's because this is the second time he's been on my show. We did a podcast called Microdosing Biohacking Plant Medicines and Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy. If that gives you a little bit of a flavor as to what this guy can actually rap on. And he happens to have founded something that's taking the world by storm right now called Field Trip Health. We did a whole podcast about Field Trip Health and how they're doing ketamine assisted psychotherapy, or what's called psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. And during that podcast, we delved into like mdma. And I know some companies are doing like DMT infusions now and psilocybin and a whole bunch more related to this whole psychotherapy landscape. And we'll revisit what that landscape looks like on today's show. But then I also wanted to get Ronan on because for many of you who might be familiar with this concept of microdosing or even journey dosing with something like psilocybin, his company, Fieldtrip Health, recently made an announcement about a psychedelic molecule they've developed that's similar in potency to psilocybin, but with a shorter duration of psychoactivity and also a great deal of efficacy when it comes to its use as a psychedelic therapy. So that one's called FT104. Sexy name Ronan. FT104. I don't even know what that means, but it sounds legit.

It means field trips 100 series of molecules and it was the fourth one that we worked with. So it's not very sexy, but it is pretty functional in terms of understanding where it sits in the paradigm of field trips.

That's what it means. Now we know FT104. So anyways, those of you who are not familiar with Ronan, go listen to my first interview with him because I'm not going to use up a bunch of our time introduction. But basically he's launched businesses across a number of industries, from gold to cannabis and most recently, as I've alluded to psychedelics. Formerly trained as a securities lawyer and now he not only has his own podcast called Field Tripping, on which I've been a guest, and I'll link to that in the show notes if you want to go listen to it. But he has also rolled out more of these field trip health facilities since we last talked. We what? Toronto, New York, Seattle, Houston, Atlanta, Stanford, Louisiana. Am I missing any?

Chicago, Chicago, Chicago, Vancouver, Fredericton and more on the way. Miami, San Diego, San Carlos. Yeah, we're expanding quickly because we expect this psychedelic renaissance to be big and happen extremely quickly.

Well, yeah, I mean, it is happening right now. And I think that some people don't really understand how a clinic would actually work in that respect. Although I know you guys wound up doing a lot of kind of more telemedicine in the past couple of years, if I'm not mistaken. Now you're kind of more kind of opening the doors to business, so to speak, for people who want that spa like setting for a psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, which I'm going to stop saying because it takes A really long time.

That's exactly right. I mean, I think the psychedelic renaissance takes a number of different forms, but one of them is certainly going to be medical. Treating people with depression, anxiety, ptsd, any number of actual mental health conditions. And to the extent that it becomes medical, you need the spaces, you need the clinics and the facilities to do this kind of stuff. And as we know from all of the research out there, where you do it, the therapist, you do it with the space. How comfortable you are during it has a significant impact on your experience. And so you need spaces. You can't really do psychedelic therapy virtually. You need great spaces with great people providing this kind of stuff.

Well, you guys tried to do it virtually, though. I mean, didn't. Did you have an app where you would like. I don't ship people a ketamine pill in the mail and have them pop it and then open up the app with the music and everything.

We've never actually done the at home ketamine model yet. It's something that we've been looking at, but we're focused on doing it in person. All of the therapy part, all of the talking to a therapist that's done virtually these days, but the actual dosing is done in our clinics. And we think as MDMA rolls out, which is right around the corner, probably a year and a half away from FDA approval, again, that's going to need a physical space. They're not going to let you send m. That looks legal.

Yeah, I was kind of joking. I didn't expect you guys to be like, like shipping out a bunch of shrooms worldwide and then having people pull open their iPhone to know what to do. But at the same time, like, isn't that kind of the idea behind the app? Suppose someone actually had ketamine or psilocybin or something like that, didn't know what to do. They could actually download your app and put on headphones and it kind of walks them through a little bit of an experience.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So our app trip, when we were building the clinical model and our protocols for delivering like the premium psychedelic assisted therapy experience in clinic, we realized at the same time Denver had just decriminalized, Oakland had decriminalized, Oregon was on the virtual precipice of legalizing. We're like, oh my God, there's going to be a lot of people doing this and not knowing what they're doing. So why don't we take all of these amazing protocols that we've developed, all of the great content and music and all of that kind of stuff and put it into an app. Not encouraging people to, to necessarily go out and do that on their own because it's not necessarily a great idea, but also not being naive to the fact that people are going to do this and saying like, hey, if you're going to do this on your own, if you're going to, even if it's not on your own, even if it's with friends, do it the right way. Make sure you set yourself up to have an amazing experience. Minimize the risk of having a bad trip. And here's everything you need, as much as we could possibly put that into an app that's now in the app. And so that's our app trip and it's available for anyone to use, whether you're using it with, you know, meditation, breath work, ketamine, legal psychedelics, illegal psychedelics. You know, it's really designed to be an aid and guide.

So. So it's got the music on there, it's got the breathwork cues. I would imagine you can't legally like, say, here's how much to take of one thing or another to guide your experience. But do you, do you have it categorized based on molecule being used at all or anything like that, or is even that difficult for the legal landscape?

We're trying to be conscious about how to get around some of the legal considerations. While we can't say here's how much to use, what we are putting together is a nice compendium of all the studies saying, hey, there is a study that looked at this much psilocybin for this particular indication, like depression. And here are the results. People can take that and make their own inferences as to what is appropriate, trying to be thoughtful and helpful without pushing the limits.

How long, how long does a track play? Or could you just like play a track on a loop if you, you know, because obviously some people might take a little bit of ketamine to relax them and deal with some type of depression, type of issue. And you know, I personally have used ketamine. You know, it's a 45 to 90 minute ish experience in many cases. But then someone might take a journey, dose of mushrooms and be laid out for six hours. So when you select the music, can you actually select how long?

You can't quite select how long. There's a number of different tracks. So we have some tracks that are like 45 minutes to an hour, which is well suited for ketamine. We've got East Forest's recent Most recent album, he actually released it through the track.

He's a great composer.

Yeah, fantastic. That, that track. That album is amazing. It's about two hours. If you're going longer than that, we can set it up to loops so it can support you through the entire journey. But, yeah, there's. There's different lengths for different experiences. Not specific, not particularly paired, but you can kind of put it together to make sure that you have an experience. You have support music through the entire duration.

Gotcha. So. So you can. You can. You can loop. Yeah. Okay. That's. That's what I like to do when I find a track that'll like, help me to sleep better at night. I'll literally just, like, sometimes put on headphones and go to sleep at night. Not. Not on your app. I haven't used that for sleep. But yeah, just. Just loop as long as it needs to loop. And that seems to work out well. What about. And this is something I've found to be useful. I'll often have, like, a digital recording interface that allows me to be able to remember what I said while in a journey or while using a substance. Do you have some type of way to record what people are saying? In a private way? Obviously, yeah.

That's actually the core functionality of the app. So we take you through a preparation exercise. We help you pick the music or meditations or actually meditations on there. During the actual trip experience, there's a big red button that you can press it and take voice notes that get timestamped and recorded and locked away. So at the end of the trip, after you've done some integration exercises that we offer as well, you can always go back and revisit all of your thoughts and voice memos in a very concrete way. And we help you track your progress and see if you're working on depression and your mood improves or changes in mood and all that kind of stuff and how your narrative identity changes. It's all built into the app. Yeah.

Okay. Cool, cool. So. So the app, you can get that in iOS or Android store or wherever.

Yep, exactly. Or you can go to TripApp co. Turns out that there's a lot of apps with the word trip in it, not necessarily pertaining to psychedelics. So if you. If you're having trouble finding it, go to tripapp.co is the best trip.

Oh, yeah, because it'd be like vacation and find. Find an Airbnb or vrbo for you, that type of thing. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I could see someone downloading your app and. And commenting that it's relatively useless because they never got a hotel. Okay, so, so then when it comes to the actual clinic experience, obviously that's something different. And I mean like since, since we last did an interview, like Wired magazine did a story on you guys and I'll link to that in the show notes at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/RONIN. But you know, in the, in the article that Wired wrote, they talked about like, you know, settling into a room with these zero gravity leather recliners and weighted blankets and then taking some type of like a ego quieting psychedelic substance under the supervision of a trained therapist. Is that still kind of the experience? I mean, is that because I have yet to actually go to one because you freaking haven't opened one in Spokazakstan yet. But what's actually occurring when someone walks in?

Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, we do medical screening because this is still very much medicine. But assuming ketamine assisted therapy, which is what we provide in the US right now because it's the only thing that's legal and we provide psilocybin in the Netherlands because we can, we screen you. You come in, you meet with, you'll, you'll speak with your therapeutic team in advance. But you come in, we help you prepare, we help you get in the right mindset. It's. All of our places are, I like the term oasis like, as opposed to spa like. But they're really beautiful spaces designed to make people feel comfortable and at ease. You settle into your zero gravity reclining chair, therapist is sitting beside you, put on noise canceling headphones, a nice way to blanket some eye shades. You get the medicine and you go inwards and you're there. You experience whatever you're going to experience. A therapist is with you the entire time. At the end of it, you can just kind of debrief, talk about what came up and that's it. And then there's like a lounge where you can hang out afterwards. Because even after the experience, some people aren't ready to go back to real life.

Oh, dude.

Like for as long as possible for.

Me, if I use ketamine and I actually like every couple of weeks. We talked about this on the last show. Like, I'll use ketamine for massage therapy, but there's no way I'm going to want to drive anywhere afterwards or do anything aside from just like kind of sit there smiling and journaling to myself and being in my happy place for a couple hours again once the medicine is not completely gone out of your system, but you're well out of, like, that disassociated space that ketamine puts you into. You really don't feel like going out to a cocktail party afterwards.

Not at all. That's exactly right. And truthfully, we want you to stay in that space. That space is where the magic, for lack of a better term happens is, like, when you've got that space, you've got the relaxation and disconnection from all the thoughts that are running in your head, and you can actually reflect cleanly and openly on your life and who you are and where you want to be and all that kind of stuff that journaling is so powerful for. You know, take that space. Take that opportunity. Don't go back into regular life.

Keep your cell phone off, for crying out loud. Even using the app. Keep your. Keep your phone in airplane mode technology. Like, you do not want to open yourself up to whoever randomly decided to text message you in the two hours while you were in there when you. When you first come out of it. And so that's super important. But then, you know, like, for me, if I were to get a massage. Ronin. At my house and were to use ketamine to do that, you know, the massage therapist and I have an understanding. Like, she just kind of, like, leaves when she's done, and I sit quietly, and I can journal and just kind of continue to listen to the music and listen to some of my audios. And, you know, I use that as fodder for coming up with ideas for new articles or books or, you know, tackling some type of a. Some type of a conundrum I've been experiencing personally or professionally. But if someone's at the clinic, I mean, what. What if they have, like, a treatment at 5pm and the clinic closes at. At 6pm or something, you just, like, kick them out and good luck, or go sit in your car in the parking lot. Because I've heard horror stories about stuff like that.

Yeah, no, we certainly don't do that. We schedule around it. So typically, people won't start anytime after kind of like 2pm and then the clinic usually closes at its doors around six or seven. So if the ketamine experience is about an hour to an hour and a half, there's always a good couple hours baked in where people can just be present in the clinic without having to, you know, hurry home.

Talk to me about, like, some of. Some of the other things beyond ketamine that you think we're gonna start to see. Obviously, you're in A lawyer. You're a lawyer, so you have to talk with your lawyer. Talk. And this isn't legal at this time and blah, blah, blah. But anyways, like, and I want, I don't want to be dismissive of any. This stuff we're talking about at its core is sacred, right? What we're talking about at its core is deeply meaningful and impactful. So I don't want to discount that when I'm joking around. But at the same time, Ronan, in terms of the landscape of what this looks like, if someone were to walk into a field trip health clinic right now, they can obviously have an amazing spa like experience with something like ketamine. But what's that look like, say five years from now? Do you have, you know, when you walk into like a, an anti aging clinic and you can choose your NAD cocktail and your vitamin C cocktail and your ozone this and that? I mean, do you see there being almost like a menu of options for people and if so, what would be on that menu in your wildest dreams?

Yeah, 100%, I see a menu of options. I think we're gonna see new options available. It'll be restricted. Not. I don't think it's gonna be like going into an anti aging clinic where you can pick, you know, ABC1 and put together your perfect cocktail. I think that comes, but I think that takes a little while. What we're seeing in the next five years, we're going to see MDMA assisted therapy become FDA approved for the treatment of ptsd. But lo and behold, you know, most depression often has roots in trauma to some degree. So I think you'll see MDMA assisted therapy quickly become available to anybody who's dealing with depression or anxiety or anything along those lines. Psilocybin is probably three, four, five years out from FAT FDA approval. But even though that's still a little bit out, we're seeing states like the state of Oregon legalize access to psilocybin therapies. I'm quite confident you'll see California legalize or at least decriminalize psilocybin next year. Canada federally probably is going to legalize psilocybin to some degree. You got Florida, you got Hawaii, you got all these states creating some sort of access program. So over the next couple of years, psilocybin will become an option. You'll probably see DMT become an option. You'll see LSD potentially become an option. LSD is a little bit more challenging because it's such a long trip time. It makes it Kind of clinically difficult to have someone sitting around for that long having an experience. But you'll probably see LSD become an option for those who want it. 5 Meo is probably on the horizon as well. So all of the psychedelics you can think of are probably three, four years away, maybe five years. And then you're going to see the next generation of psychedelics like FT104, the ones that are taking all the wonderful power of these molecules and just making them better or more accessible or more tailored. There's a whole bunch of interesting work around that kind of stuff, but that's probably six, seven years out.

I definitely want to talk about that. FT104, I think that's intriguing that you can just take something and fabricate it and make it very much like something that humankind would have used for thousands of years, arguably for, you know, commune with the divine or spiritual breakthroughs and be able to generate something like that in a lab. I want to talk more about this FT104 for sure. But regarding something like, let's say as you alluded to, someone wants to and has heard about all the benefits of something like taking lsd, but wants to do so in a very controlled set and setting, which they're safe, other people around them are safe. Someone knows what they're doing so they can actually trust the entire process. Like what does something even like that even look like? Would you anticipate cost wise, like what would it cost out of pocket or either via insurance for somebody to come in and do like a ketamine experience right now with you guys? And you know what, what would compared to that? Something like a long eight hour experience with someone in your clinic. Would you anticipate with something like lsd look like, you know, people are just curious like how much this stuff cost.

Yeah, I totally get it. It's, it's a fair question. Right now, Academy experience in Our clinic is $750, which includes the whole process from the screening all the way through to the end of the first experience and then subsequent ones are $750 and it's $250 an hour for the integration therapy. So if you think about it as, as comparable to what you, you'd be paying a therapist, the cost is not actually disconnected, right? Like if you think a therapist is in the room with you for a couple of hours, you know, which probably is 200, $250 just for conventional therapy and they're sitting with you for the duration of this, it kind of lines up to what you'd expect for therapy. And I think if you just extrapolate that to LSD or psilocybin, assuming that the cost of the psilocybin or the LSD is reasonable. You know, when you get drug development and approvals, you can have drug to drug companies charging an extreme number for the drug because they got to recoup their investment. And I don't have insight into what MAPS is going to charge for MDMA or, you know, Compass is going to charge for their psilocybin. But assuming it's pretty reasonable, then I think it's pretty easy just to draw a straight line extrapolation, which is if you have a therapist in the room for two hours and it's 750 bucks for that experience, and with LSD it's going to be 10 hours, 12 hours, you're probably looking at five times the cost for a day, which is basically what you're paying for is like a full day of therapist time. The actual medicine itself is not terribly expensive. It's the cost of the person sitting beside you that ends up being expensive because they're professional, they're qualified, and they got degrees and they got to make a living too. But I don't think the cost becomes too outlandish or too disconnected from the time input put in by the professionals who are with you.

How much long you think a lot of this stuff gets covered by insurance?

Ketamine, it's going to be a while because ketamine is a generic drug, so no one's doing the work. Well, that's not true. A lot of people are doing the work, but the most natural path to getting insurance coverage is getting drug approval for a specific indication and then taking it around to all the insurance companies. And because ketamine is generic, it's just, it's kind of putting the cart before the, before the horse and working backwards. I think MDMA assisted therapy, when it gets approved, probably in the next 18 months, we'll have insurance coverage come in really quickly, within probably six months of approval, maybe a year. And with the other drugs that are specifically approved for mental health indications, I think that happens really quick because when you look at the results and the economics, it's insane for insurers, I shouldn't use that word. It would be irrational for insurers and employers not to want to cover this. You know, maps, the organization running the maps, the MDMA trials, they did their health economic econometrics on, on MDMA assisted therapy. And they suggest that MDMA assisted therapy three sessions of it, which cures nearly 70% of the participants who have participated in their trials of ptsd. I put cures in quotes because it's not quite true, but it's almost true. It would save the average insurance plan $100,000 over the life of that patient. That's a lot of money. Right. And you can extrapolate that to other trials with psilocybin. And, you know, people who have depression tend to consume 40% or more resources of just medical care. Right. So not only are you making these people more productive, getting them back to work, we've seen that improvements in depression scores actually lead to greater productivity in the workplace as well. So you're getting better employees, healthier employees who are consuming less medical resources. It would be completely illogical for any insurance plan not to cover this and in fact probably try to make it a first line option because it's so effective, whether it's MDMA or psilocybin, and in treating the conditions and making people better, quite literally better than they were before that, that I think insurance coverage will be robust and available, and people will be excited to offer that because they will make an ROI on that and spade over the long term.

How many times have you gone into one of your own clinics and done one of these therapy sessions with ketamine?

I actually had my first one about two weeks ago, and that was mostly a function of regulatory environment and Covid. So in Toronto, where I'm based, the restrictions on who we can treat are actually pretty significant. We can only treat people with treatment resistant depression. So you failed two different courses of conventional depression medications. That's not me. So I had to go to one of our US clinics. But thanks to Covid, I haven't been on a plane since February of 2020 until two weeks ago when I went down to the Code Conference and actually got to pose a question to Elon Musk about psychedelics. I don't know if you saw that video. Video is pretty cool, getting Elon's perspective on, on all this kind of stuff. But when I was in LA for code, that's when I had my first ketamine experience. And my only ketamine experience, actually.

How'd it go? Like, like, you know, I mean, I. I realize I'm putting you in the hot seat on a pug, but I mean, any, any takeaways for you as far as your own experience? And you're in your own clinic?

Yeah, I mean, the clinic is fantastic. Our staff is amazing. And I'm not just, just you know, tooting our own horn. It was actually quite an amazing overall experience. Everyone was thoughtful, caring, super comfortable, super at ease. My ketamine experience itself, it was quite profound, actually. You know, I felt like as the ketamine took over, that I was seeing the beating heart of the universe. You know, they talk about life after life or people who have intense psychedelic experience often get the sense that there's a unifying life force that exists in the universe, whether you call that God or a life force or whatever you want to call it. I experienced that really, with.

With ketamine?

Yeah, with ketamine. And. But it showed me also that, like, even though there is this powerful life force that exists, it's not all bliss and wonder, that, you know, sometimes there are just some functional elements of being a life force. And so it's not always, you know, super flowery and amazing. And what that showed me is that this experience of being human, emerging from this life soup to become human for a while before we go back to this life soup, is actually a really special experience and it's something that we should enjoy for all its wonders and all its miseries. It's a really unique time, it's a really unique experience, and so love every moment of it. So coming out of my trip, I just felt an intelligence, intense amount of gratitude for all the things in my life, whether I find them stressful or loving, it didn't matter, all of it. I'm trying to enjoy all of it because it's a unique experience being here.

Now, the thing with ketamine, the reason I asked about your experience with, for example, feeling more connected to the divine or universal human consciousness or what I personally believe is God. You know, a lot of times you'll hear about something like that occurring with DMT or with a very, very high dose of psilocybin or, you know, or, or, or LSD in some cases with ketamine. I'll often, when I speak with people about their experience, hear them talk about really reliving things from their youth, dealing with past traumas, you know, having personal breakthroughs as you get a little bit of the, the ego kind of set aside and a little bit of that dissociative state. But, you know, some. Sometimes it seems to be a little bit less of a profound molecule, you know, with regards to really, really opening up the portals to God, so to speak, if that makes sense. That's why, that's why I was asking.

Yeah, you're 100% right. That tends to be at least the anecdotal reference to ketamine that people find it a little bit more objective, you know, creating some separation. But we definitely hear a lot of experiences from people in our clinics who experience something mystical, experience God, who experience the transcendent. And I had that experience. You know, I've done a lot of work myself with like, meditation and coaching and metaphysics and all that kind of stuff. So maybe I was more predisposed or primed for that kind of experience, but it's, it's not uncommon. It's just more common. People have a little bit more of a. An analytical experience as opposed to a wondrous experience.

Yeah, that's interesting. Do you think it's something you do again?

Yeah, totally. I'd be happy to do it again. Coming out of it, like, I felt, I was like, that was pretty intense. And I'm like, I. I don't know if I'd want to do that again. But having had the benefit of a couple of days to integrate, I was like, oh, that's actually was an amazing experience. And. And since then it's been a few weeks. I felt more relaxed, more at ease, more present. You know, all the wonderful things you want to get out of a psychedelic experience. I've actually found, even though coming out of the actual trip, I wasn't feeling top notch at that particular moment, with the benefit of time, it's been really, I think, transcendent.

Yeah. My own experience with ketamine for the first time was I was out at a dinner with Dr. Matthew Cook and also Stanford researcher, another friend of mine named Dan Pardee. And we were talking about ketamine and some of the research that had been done on it. And this was like four years ago, and literally I was down in the Bay Area, I was engaged in a bunch of podcasts and business meetings, et cetera. And I think it was Dr. Cook who piped up at the table and he said, well, if you'd like to actually see what this feels like, what the experience is like, come into my clinic sometime. I'm looking at my calendar and essentially I said, well, how things look 10am tomorrow morning. He's like, all right. So I literally went in and had him, a very well trained physician, administer an IV and special. You know, they have a room that's kind of like looks like a Chinese traditional medicine practitioner room with very good energy and clean energy, and they have someone sit with you. And so that was my first experience. And since then I've probably used ketamine for the past four years. Almost every month. Like using it at least one time for many of the benefits that you and many others have spoken about on my podcast and that I don't necessarily want to get blue in the face about, but it's. It's one of those things I've personally found to be not something that's necessary for everybody to have to check off in life, but for anybody who really digs, kind of let's just like setting the ego aside and having a profound experience that for me personally, has resulted in a lot of enhanced creativity and breakthroughs in terms of my writing and business ideas, et cetera. I think it's a very, very nice molecule for that a lot. I don't personally have a history of depression and haven't used it as such. I could see it being effective.

Yeah.

For that as well. When administered properly. Right.

Yeah. One of the things that differentiates us from most ketamine experiences is we give it as an intramuscular injection as opposed to an IV. So I took 65 milligrams, and that sent me into a little. Into an intense trip. You know, it was a very psychedelic experience. When you get it with an iv, it's a slow drip. It kind of helps put you under. It's a very kind of gentle, slow ride. With field trip, we want you to have the more intense ride with the. The lowest amount of drug possible. You know, that's where we get the best outcomes of people who have that psychedelic experience who have the trip, but also get all the. The neurobiology benefits. You know, the neuro, neurogenesis, synaptogenesis that's going on. You get everything. You get the whole benefit of doing it the way we do it. When you're just doing it with a ketamine infusion and maybe there's therapy, maybe there's not. It's like you get some benefit, but you're leaving a lot on the table by doing it that way as opposed to the field trip way.

And so, you know, kind of getting down to brass tacks again with this FT. What's it called? FT104. FT104. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is basically like a psilocybin lookalike that you guys have developed, which, you know, I think it's interesting for a few reasons. First of all, sometimes the sourcing or even the sustainability of harvesting mushrooms can be a little bit tricky. But I also just find it fascinating in terms of the ability to be able to simulate what psilocybin does. But with, you know, more rapid onset, shorter duration, et cetera. Walk me through the history of why you guys even thought of developing this and how you would actually develop something like FT104. So get into the science of this with me, bro.

Yeah, sure. So I'll start with the why, which is, you know, we're seeing profoundly positive results with psilocybin and MDMA in clinical trials. Like I said, 70% of people going through, through the MDMA trials seem to be cured of ptsd. Psilocybin trials, we're seeing five years of depression relief from a single session. Like these are mind blowing numbers in terms of clinical trials, particularly in the mental health sphere. Two big challenges with these psychedelics. One is business and one is clinical, administrative, business wise. If you're going after psilocybin or mdma, these molecules have been around for a long, long time. And so to generate an ROI on a genericized molecule is really hard. You can get data exclusivity and all that kind of stuff, but without a patent, you know, to recoup the couple hundred million dollars it's going to take to get it to approval is going to be hard. So that's the big challenge with creating a business around the classic psychedelics from a drug development perspective. Big challenge number two is the timeframes. Like we talked about, you asked me about LSD, it's like, well, if you're in the clinic for 10 hours and it's five times longer than you would be for ketamine, you're probably looking at $5,000 or so for an experience and an entire day off work and all the other attendant things that go along with that kind of commitment to a treatment, which is a wonderful treatment but like, it makes it harder for people to participate. So we set about trying to solve those two problems. So FD104, it's a novel molecule. Our chief science officer, Dr. Nathan Bryson, an MIT grad, been doing, doing this for 30 years. He set out and he read literally everything you could read, anecdotal and scientific about psychedelics, about triptamines. Most of the classic psychedelics like psilocybin, dmt, lsd, they're all tryptamines. That's the class of drug that they are, that speaks to their chemical structure. And he spent a lot of time thinking, trying to say, like, what is the opportunity? How do we do better than psilocybin? And so the easiest, biggest, obvious answer was cut the trip in half, but don't affect the therapeutic outcomes. And so we set out reading about all the known tryptamines and we landed on a particular tryptamine that was a synthetic. It was, it was synthesized by, by a well known chemist. That looked ideal, right? It looks like psilocybin. All the anecdotal trip reports were very psilocybin like, but the trip times was about two hours. But it was not an ideal medicine for FDA approvals because of a lack of solubility, generally speaking. So consistency of experience was a challenge. So Nathan took that original underlying molecule and we haven't disclosed what it is, so that's why I'm being a little bit cagey about it, and went about trying to enhance the solubility of it in a very simple way. So he took this underlying molecule and turned it into a prodrug. And what a prodroggy is, I'm sure you know Ben, but for the benefit pro drug. A pro drug.

Explain that to people.

Yeah, so psilocybin is a pro drug for psilocin. So you consume psilocybin, your body metabolizes a cybin and turns it into psilocin and that's what is active in your brain. And so Nathan took this other molecule that was active if you just ingested it, turned it into a prodrug, so attached a moiety to it. So when you ingest it, that moiety cleaves off and becomes that underlying active drug. But because he's added that pro drug molecule to it, it's become soluble. So we can turn it into a really nice medicine for FDA approval processes. And because we know what the experience is like, as soon as you cleave that molecule, he's added, it populates back to that original molecule for which there's lots of anecdotal trip reports. We knew exactly what the experience would be like and it was a duration of two to three hours. What we didn't know is exactly what was happening in the brain. So we set about doing our preclinical studies. And what we found is that this underlying molecule basically acts in the brain exactly like psilocybin. It hits the same receptors with basically the same strength. And so you basically have a psilocybin lookalike that's got half the duration. And from a drug development perspective, we know it's safe, it's been used historically, there's lots of information. And we know because it works almost exactly like psilocybin, it's going to be effective. But we've cut the trip time in half. So now instead of having to commit A whole day to it. You can probably do it in morning or an afternoon. And the indications we're going after for this are treatment resistant depression, but also postpartum depression. Because one of the big challenges with postpartum depression is you need a medication that a mother can take that gets out of her bloodstream fast because you don't want the baby getting any of that because of the intended risk. And what we're finding through our preclinical work is with FD104, you get this nice short experience, it's a morning, so you don't have to be away from the baby for too long, but it's out of your bloodstream extremely quickly. So it's kind of like the perfect medicine for targeting a depression affecting mothers who have such limitations in what they can and cannot take. So we're really excited by the potential of it.

Okay, so, so psilocybin would, would basically act as psilocin in the body on these five HT2A receptor agonists. It's basically like acting on the body's prime serotonin receptor. And what you've done with FT104 is it's operating on those same receptors, those five HT2A receptors. So it's an agonist, not an antagonist, but an agonist for those receptors. But unlike psilocybin, it doesn't bind to them for as long a period of time and doesn't. And also in terms of how long a period of time it takes before it binds to them, binds more quickly. So faster onset, shorter duration.

Yep. And faster offset. That's exactly right.

Okay, gotcha. So like, if you could give me an approximation, let's say soup to nuts. Somebody takes like whatever, 6 grams of psilocybin to journey with psilocybin. That's probably going to be anywhere depending on the person. Like, you know what, four, six, eight hours. It's obviously highly variable. In contrast to that, what would an FT104 experience be like?

Yeah, two to three hours.

Two to three hours, exactly. Okay, so yeah, I mean, probably about a good half to almost, maybe even a quarter of the time. Right?

That's exactly right. And that's why it's so perfect from a medical perspective, because now we can see more people. People can get in and out and they can have experiences. They don't have to miss an entire day. I mean they probably want to miss an entire day, but at least they have some optionality in that. And like we talked about having that space after your Ketamine experience, you probably still want to have the space after it. But if you're a new mom, you know, you probably want to get back to your newborn really quickly as, as soon as possible. So that's why it's really exciting from that perspective.

Okay, got it. So in terms of the, the use of it, many people will microdose with psilocybin for cognitive performance, you know, often using the so called stamets stack where they'll combine it with a little bit of lion's mane, a little bit of niacin and kind of get this creative breakthrough for the day. With something like FT104. Could you potentially see that being used as a nootropic? Very similarly.

I mean, in theory, we're not pursuing that. You know, the evidence around microdosing is still somewhat limited. We know psilocybin in large doses is really effective. We know MDMA in large doses is really effective. You know, in terms of like the clinical indications and endpoints we're looking for, the evidence around microdosing is, is not quite there yet. And there's another.

You mean the actual like clinical research? There's anecdotal evidence out the wazoo, right?

Tons of anecdotal, but not in terms of the clinical. In fact, the first major clinical study, which was Robin Carhartt Harris looking at it came out, I think late last year, suggested that microdosing is actually no more effective than placebo. There's a number of ways to sort of criticize and look at that study and say like that's not the proper conclusion and it still works. But that's like what one data point.

I have microdose and talk to a lot of other people have microdose. There's absolutely no way that what you feel and are able to do on a microdose is a placebo. I guarantee you. And I realize that's not, that's not a research study, but I guarantee you, dude, it's not a placebo with microdosing.

I hear you. I'm not trying to suggest it. I'm just saying from like a business perspective in terms of seeking clinical approvals, it's a higher risk bet than focusing on a large dose. You know, once the large dose is approved. Yeah. Then there's any number of ways to sort of analyze and look at differently. But that's not in our current thought process us for the time.

That's why I appreciate that because otherwise we'd be walking into a field trip health clinic and it'd be a Bunch of people wearing tie dyed T shirts smelling like patchouli. I like that people who have their pants pulled on all the way are steering the ship. Whereas the jokers like me in the back can sit back and experiment with, and then let you guys know what's interesting. And then you can, then you can take it to the research after that. Right?

We have a no patchouli rule at.

Field trip that no, no, no patchouli. Have you personally used FT104?

I have not personally used FT104 again because like, this is FDA scrutiny. We, we, we're very, very careful that people aren't using it and it's only going into animals and, and we're not putting it until people, until we have our approved phase one trial which starts early next year. But I have tried the underlying molecule that FT104 was derived from and my experience, experience was it's exactly as promised, which is very psilocybin, like, but you're back to yourself, so to speak, in a couple of hours as opposed to being, you know, in for a penny and for a pound with psilocybin or lsd.

Now isn't that going to be like pretty. It just seems to me like that'd be pretty profitable to have developed something like that. I mean, are there other companies that, that are just out there doing this and I'm just blissfully unaware, or is this kind of a big deal to actually replicate psilocybin and make it rapid onset, shorter duration, just as effective?

I think it's a big deal. I think it's incredibly exciting that we have what will become the first new chemical entity, psychedelic, to get approval. All the other companies right now are focused on psilocybin or dmt, the classic molecules which have that big business problem of how do you actually make money when it's a generic molecule, you don't get a long time frame of data exclusivity. With us, we're going to have a composition of matter patent on this. So we're going to have total control over FT104 for, you know, after you get approval. It's probably about 11 or 12 years.

11 or 12 years?

Yeah.

Geez. Do I need to delay this podcast coming out until then?

No, there's a lot of other exciting stuff that we can talk about between now and then as well.

No, but 11 to 12 years. Holy cow. So, so really you guys have developed this and you just got to sit on your hands for a dozen years?

No, no, no, no, no, no. Sorry. I may have misspoke or you may have misheard. So we'll get exclusivity on it for about 12 years. So we expect to get approval for this in 2026 probably. So we're still, you know, got four and a half, five years. But once we have approval, no one else can do anything with FT104 for a further, you know, 10, 11, 12 years. Whereas as soon as MDM MDMA is approved, Maps may have five years of data exclusivity before all the generic manufacturers can come in and start selling mdma, just like Maps is doing. So we just have a better business ROI investment thesis on it.

Right, Right. Okay, so, so when you say say approval, because I know you live in Toronto, so I gotta always take into account my northern neighbors.

You're from Canada or the U.S. no, I'm talking us. So we'll be focused on FDA approval in Health Canada would be secondary.

So in the US we could look at like four years from now something like this being approved and potentially available. And when that happens, would it be very similar to something like the current ketamine experience in a field Trip clinic where someone could go into Field Trip technically wouldn't even be able to access this molecule unless you guys have made it available to them in another situation or somebody does some cheap, I don't know, overseas knockoff of it. But basically they could come in and have a legitimate customized FT104 experience in an FT clinic.

That's exactly right. We're not going to restrict it to field trip clinics. We want this drug to be available to everybody who needs it. So we're going to make it accessible in any clinic doing good quality psychedelic therapies. But yeah, you could also come into Field Trip and have a field trip experience. Experience with the Field Trip drug. And I think it's going to be amazing.

So FT104 is obviously a big deal, the fact that you've opened up all these new locations now. And I'll list them all. If folks go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Ronin I'll link to Field Trip and my other podcast with Ronin and everything they're up to. But so that's a big deal. Rolling out in big cities. This FT104 work is a big deal. Is there anything else going on behind the scenes, things that you're excited about when it comes to what, what's, what's going on with Field Trip health as far as like what people can look for in these different cities where it's.

Opening up I, I mean, the clinical rollout is a, is a big thing. FT104 is a big thing. Our app trip, you know, it's growing like crazy. We've got some amazing content on there. We've got some other things kind of percolating in the works, but because we're a NASDAQ traded company, I can't disclose things until it's publicly disclosed through press release. But there's some other cool stuff happening within Field Trip. You know, we're innovating on, on community and group therapy models. So, so we're making it more accessible to people. We've launched training programs so therapists who are interested in becoming ketamine trained and will become subsequently psychedelic trained can do so. So, like, we're really trying to build the infrastructure to enable this psychedelic renaissance, at least on a therapeutic level. Level, you know, we're. What's really exciting is we're building that brand as well, because I think psychedelics, you know, it becomes a wellness thing, it becomes a lifestyle thing. Certainly there's a medical aspect of it, but we really want to be driving the conversation. We want to be up there talking with the Ben Greenfields of the world, showing people how, oh, geez, thanks, bro. Of course, how, you know, it's not about the medicine, it's about what you do with the insights that come out of the medicine, how you make your life better. You know, maybe that's protruding depression, but maybe it's coming up with creative business ideas or coming up with new content ideas or, you know, finding your reconnection to God or your religion or all of these wonderful things. That's what I'm really excited about. And that's not medicine. That's about life. That's about humanity. That's about consciousness. That's what's really cool. And so we're doing a lot of things to really lay the groundwork to make this something that's going to become available and, and relevant and meaningful across society. Having these conversations, opening people up, helping people see like, the wonder and the mystical aspects of our life and this existence. And so we got a lot of little things percolating in that respect as well that you'll start to see as they start to roll out.

Yeah, there's of course, all of the, all the chatter about, hey, we're just a bunch of people who have figured out how to make getting high, you know, legal and socially acceptable. And I run into that a lot, you know, especially for me, you know, being, being an evangelical Christian, you know, I'LL run into people at church and they're like, how, how, how could you even, you know, you know, use something like psilocybin? Isn't that the same as, as whatever, you know, being drunk in a, in a very well controlled set and setting? As you've just alluded to, the, the personal or professional or spiritual breakthroughs that one can experience when immersed in the use of one of these compounds can be absolutely life transforming. I think it's one of the reasons that God put these molecules on the planet in the first place is so that they could be used in moderation and responsibly in such settings. And the fact that we've figured out how to do it in a modern walk into the deck off of the Star Trek Enterprise type of lush setting in a, in a field trip clinic, you know, I, I, I, I think that that's amazing. A lot of people think you gotta go be like barefoot sitting in a bunch of poop in the Amazon, you know, picking out a mushroom from the, from the cow dung or you know, getting bitten by snakes to really make it a true experience, you know, off in your Peru adventure. But really, I mean like, if you can walk into a clean, safe, protected, whitewashed facility and, and have like the music and the soft robe and the, and, and the exact dose that you need and you're not worried about death or snake bikes or you know, snake bites or, or you know, having to get an airplane 14 hours later to fly home, you know, across seven time zones. I mean, like, there's just, there's a, there's a lot of benefit to this and I, I think it's, it's just really, really great what you guys are doing.

That's exactly it. Which is like, yeah, it's awesome. If you want to fly to Peru and do like that so called authentic experience with shamans in Peru or wherever you want to, wonderful do it. That's amazing. But for the other 99.7% of people who, that's not an option for, whether economically or just lifestyle wise, we want to make this something where psychedelics and the transcendence and the insights and the, and the spirit and all of these wonderful things that come out of psychedelic experiences can be a part of their lives. You know, maybe they don't dedicate their lives to it like shamans do, but if it can become a nice adjunct to your life and make your life better, like even 1 or 2% better, if we can make the lives of all Canadians and all Americans, 1 or 2% better 1 or 2% more empathetic or creative God, the world would be an entirely different place. Yeah, you know, speaking to like your, your Christian evangelical roots, have you read the Immortality Key by Brian Murarescue?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Brian's a friend of mine. That's a great book. And I mean like again, back to the whole Christianity thing, if you read the Bible, because I'm actually taking my family through the Book of Revelations right now, like the story of the end times. And, and you know, if, if you look at the beginning of the planet from a creationist standpoint, started off as a garden, but the end isn't a garden, it's a garden city. Right. And, and so this idea of tying ancient wisdom into modern science, the idea of, you know, 100 years from now a beautiful lush landscape of like, you know, vertical gardens growing on rooftops and these type of clinics where you can go in and, and, you know, have the same experience. Your ancestors would have been digging around in cow pies to do out in a muddy field, you know, thousands of years ago. But, but now you're in this type of more urban, safe city type of setting. I love that whole idea. Just because we're transferring from a garden into a garden city doesn't mean we need to have chronological snobbery about the way things used to be back in the good old days when we'd strap barbed wire to our feet and walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to school, it's like, well, actually I can get my Tesla now and that's great.

That's exactly right. And I'm super glad you mentioned the Star Trek Enterprise, because in an hour and a half I'm actually recording with William Shatner on his show. I don't understand talking about this exact subject. So I'm going from the Christianity conversation all the way to Star Trek Enterprise conversation in a single day. And it's pretty friggin cool to be able to do that.

Well, tell William Shatner I said hello. And one of my family's growing up favorite activities to do because my father was a paramedic was we would all gather around at dinner and watch William Shatner on 911 and watch horrific ambulance accidents and people getting injured horrifically while we stuff steak in our faces. So that's that. I actually recall William Shatner more fondly from that than I do from Star Trek because my parents weren't Trekkies. But, but tell them hi nonetheless. And Ronan, thanks for coming on the show and for, for doing everything that you're doing over at Field Trip Health. I've just, it's been a pleasure just watching your journey and being involved with it.

Thanks, man. Thanks for having me on. Thank you for being an investor and a, a supporter and an advocate.

Every.

Everything you do helps and we're all working together to make this world a better place. So it's, it's really awesome to be able to count on you as a friend, as an investor, as all of these wonderful things. So. So thank you.

Well, it's my pleasure, man. I like to support folks who are up to good things. So for those of you listening in, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Ronan R O N A N that's where the Shownotes are. That's where you can listen to my first podcast with Ronan. That's where you can hunt down a Field Trip Health. So you could go listen to Ronan's podcast Field Tripping. And I am off to. Actually, I got another interview coming up myself as well. So you go talk to William Shatner, I'll go talk to whoever I'm talking to and I'll see you on the flip side, man.

Awesome, buddy. Thanks so much.

All right, folks, thanks for listening in. I'm Ben Greenfield with Ronan Levy signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items. But the price is the same for you and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion llc, the makers of Kion branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support and with full authenticity and transparency recommend. In good conscience, I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.