MIND THINGS
By Mind Things Co
Conversations with entrepreneurs, writers, investors, researchers and more.
MIND THINGSDec 30, 2020
#10 - Peter Reitano - The Middle Ground of Psychedelics
Peter Reitano is a serial entrepreneur and consumer marketing expert with over a decade of experience in scaling some of the worlds top brands.
Peter has built, advised, raised for, and sold multiple ventures, including High12, one of Canada’s top cannabis CPG companies. Most recently he founded Gwella, a wellness company with a focus on mushrooms and psychedelics.
Read more about the episode on Mind Things
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Show Notes
1:02 - What is Gwella?
4:18 - Creating a Product Forward Brand in the Psychedelic Space
11:11 - Building Products for the Middle Ground of Psychedelics
19:29 - MyMyco - Grow Kits for Mushrooms
26:51 - Why Companies Go Public Earlier in Canada
35:40 - Experience Running a Cannabis Brand
45:42 - Other Brands in the Gwella Pipeline
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#9 - Robbie Bent - Solving Loneliness With Ice and Heat
Robbie Bent is building Inward, a company in the mental health space combining physical spaces (ice baths + saunas) and the largest library of breathwork content in the world. Inward is building a cutting edge community for improving mental health in a fun and accessible way.
Prior to Inward, Robbie spent 4 years leading ecosystem growth at the Ethereum Foundation, a $180 billion cryptocurrency. He also runs a Clubhouse Show on Psychedelic Medicines, has done 4 Vipassana retreats and is an avid kitesurfer. You can learn more about him here and follow him on twitter @robbiebent1
Read more about the episode on Mind Things
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Show Notes
1:41 - Failure, Cocaine and Silent Meditation
12:35 - Ayahuasca and Letting Go of Addiction
24:13 - DIY Ice Baths and Building Community
36:45 - What Makes Breathwork So Powerful
49:38 - What's Next for Inward
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#8 - Emma Chasen - All Star Players in the Plant World
Emma Chasen is a Plant Medicine Educator & Industry Consultant at Eminent Consulting Firm
She has a mission to educate people on the science behind plant medicine, so that they may take charge of their own healing. After graduating from Brown University in 2014 with a degree in Medicinal Plant Research, Emma went on to coordinate Clinical Oncology trials with the Brown University Oncology Research Group. When her supervisor refused a cannabis trial in favor of another expensive pharmaceutical drug, Emma quit and headed across the country to Portland, OR.
She found her way to Farma, the popular Portland dispensary that takes a more scientific approach to cannabis; rejecting the Indica/Sativa binary and instead focusing on chemotypes to determine effect. She began her career at Farma as a budtender and was quickly promoted to General Manager and eventually to Director of Education. In this role she was able to focus on educational efforts and create a robust training curriculum that focused on cannabis science, product knowledge and empathetic patient care.
Emma now co-owns and operates Eminent Consulting, a cannabis consulting business that offers educational training and craft industry development for cannabis industry professionals and businesses. She helps brands develop educational marketing collateral and ongoing educational programs to further elevate their brand presence in a competitive industry. She also helps struggling and newly emerging cannabis businesses with business organization, and sets them up for success in both the competitive medical and adult use markets.
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Show Notes
2:03 - Getting a Degree in Medicinal Plant Research
8:05 - Budtending 101
10:10 - The Indica / Sativa Myth
15:57 - How Cannabis and Psychedelics Interact with Serotonin and Dopamine Receptors
18:01 - How Indigenous People Use Psychedelics
20:12 - Emma's experience with Plant Ceremonies
23:24 - Balancing Capitalism with Respect for Indigenous Culture
29:46 - Governing bodies in Cannabis and Psychedelics
32:51 - How Regulations May Change in the Next 10 Years
37:44 - What Emma Would Do With an Unlimited Research Budget
40:17 - Emma's Go-To Plant Medicines
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#7 - Andrew DeAngelo - Storytelling Is The Glue That Holds Activism Together
Andrew DeAngelo is a visionary leader with a proven track record of enacting systemic social change and developing best practices in cannabis. Andrew lends his vast cannabis business and political expertise as a consultant for hire to the global cannabis community at large, including several strategic partnerships with the world's leading cannabis-centric service firms.
Over two decades as an activist, Andrew worked on a variety of voter initiatives which legalized medical and adult-use cannabis in San Francisco, Washington D.C, and the State of California. As a co-founder and advisor to Harborside, Andrew has pioneered legal cannabis business processes and provided groundbreaking political engagement and thought leadership to the cannabis community — leading the design and development of gold-standard cannabis retail by innovating many “firsts” for the industry. This includes: introducing CBD medicines to heal severely epileptic children, implementing the first lab-testing program in the history of cannabis dispensing, creating child-resistant packaging for edibles, standardizing inventory tracking, initiating senior outreach, and successfully preventing the federal government from seizing Harborside in forfeiture actions against the company in 2012.
Andrew began his political career as an activist while studying for his MFA in acting at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. He has starred in several films and runs an entertainment production company, DeAngelo Brothers Productions (DAB), with his brother Steve. Andrew is co-founder and Treasurer of the Board for the non-profit Last Prisoner Project (LPP) and a founding Board of Directors member of the California Cannabis Industry Association (CCIA) where he served from 2013 to 2020. https://www.andrewdeangelo.com
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SHOW NOTES
1:44 - Feeling validated about changes in cannabis policy throughout the years
8:15 - Making compromises in passing new cannabis laws
9:50 - Why it's important to have "local control"
13:14 - The mechanics of activism
16:45 - Harborside, the dispensary Andrew started with his brother
20:00 - The Last Prisoner Project
26:44 - The plan to eventually release all cannabis offenders from prison
33:41 - Becoming an activist in order to be an operator
34:58 - Andrew talks about getting busted
42:03 - What Andrew is excited about with cannabis innovation
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#6 - Kori Harrison - There's Nothing More Alive Than Feeling
Kori Harrison is Head of Product at Field Trip
Kori is a lifelong learner, technologist, and writer. From corporate consulting in DC to building and investing in technology startups in Silicon Valley, mental health and journeys inward weren’t a priority for many years. A disciplined soul with an incessant craving for progress, she found consciousness-expanding practices at a time when softening and reframing narratives were especially needed. The improved well-being and self-discoveries she experienced with this work inspired a mission to help others find the same. This brought her to Field Trip, where Kori is now Head of Product leading Field Trip’s digital strategy to scaling psychedelic therapies globally. To learn more about her personal journey, visit www.koriharrison.com.
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SHOW NOTES
1:47 - On going from Type-A to calm and peaceful
9:39 - Kori's first ketamine experience with Field Trip
19:10 - Letting go and 5-MEO-DMT
24:40 - Working through things in a psychedelic experience and getting release
29:24 - On finding the right psychedelic medicine for you
32:27 - Why psilocybin is Kori's medicine
YouTube Clips and more info on this episode can be found at www.mindthings.co/kori-harrison
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#5 - Manesh Girn - The Psychedelic Scientist
Manesh is currently a PhD student in Neuroscience at McGill University and has been lead or co-author on over a dozen scientific publications and book chapters on topics including psychedelics, meditation, daydreaming, and the default-mode network. He is currently conducting research on the brain mechanisms underlying LSD, psilocybin, and DMT, in collaboration with Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and others from the Imperial College London Center for Psychedelic Research.
In his free time, he also runs a YouTube channel - called The Psychedelic Scientist - where he discusses the latest findings in psychedelic science in an easy to understand, but non-superficial, form.
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SHOW NOTES
2:01 - The Path to Becoming The Psychedelic Scientist
5:11 - Personal Experiences with Psychedelics
9:22 - The Case for Not Tailoring Psychedelics
13:03 - Can Psychedelics Enhance our Ability to Learn?
16:23 - How to Determine if Microdosing is Working
19:36 - How the Default Mode Network Influences Our Day-to-Day Lives
23:04 - What Inspired Him to Start The Psychedelic Scientist
26:29 - Why Psychedelics Won't Make You a Better Person
27:59 - Why Free Will Doesn't Exist
31:26 - Can NeuraLink Mimic a Psychedelic Experience
YouTube Clips and more info on this episode can be found at www.mindthings.co/manesh/
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LINKS
The Psychedelic Scientist YouTube Channel
The Psychedelic Scientist Instagram
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#4 - Dylan Beynon - The Lead Domino to Change the World
Dylan is the Founder & CEO of Mindbloom, an NYC-based mental health and wellbeing startup helping people expand their human potential with clinician-prescribed, guided psychedelic medicine experiences. There, he is partnering with clinicians, technologists, researchers, and patients to increase access to science-backed treatments, starting by reducing the cost of ketamine therapy for depression and anxiety by over 65%.
Dylan is a 10-year psychedelic medicine patient and 3-time tech entrepreneur with both $100M+ in funding and an exit in his prior startups, which were focused on increasing access to justice and democracy. Dylan graduated from The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania.
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SHOW NOTES
1:08 - My background with anxiety and being a Mindbloom patient
9:27 - Background on Mindbloom
11:50 - Dylan's personal experience with psychedelics
16:47 - How Mindbloom is making ketamine accessible with telemedicine
22:36 - The different ways to take ketamine
24:46 - Ketamine dosing
27:20 - What a Mindbloom experience is like
31:23 - The importance of focus when building a startup
36:27 - Should psychedelics be legal
39:28 - How Dylan is building company culture at Mindbloom
Full Show Notes, Transcript and YouTube Clips can be found at www.mindthings.co/dylan-beynon/
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#3 - Sarah Rose Siskind - Comedy is a Backdoor into Consciousness
Sarah Rose Siskind is a science comedy writer based in New York City. She's the cofounder of HelloSci.Com, a consulting group that makes smart people funny, and the producer of Drug Test, a show about Psychedelics.
Previously, she wrote comedy for Hanson Robotics, StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson on Fox, and several shows on Facebook Watch. She's written jokes for the White House Press Correspondents dinner and spoken at Comic Con! In the words of Marie Curie, "follow me on Twitter."
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SHOW NOTES
1:37 - Running a 50K on LSD
11:02 - Sarah's experience with depression
15:46 - Working at Fox Business and being a semi-pro Amazon reviewer
21:52 - Comedy and depression
28:57 - Psychedelic misconceptions
31:14 - LSD and Game Theory
35.38 - Solving her depression and an ayahuasca experience
45:29 - Becoming a psychedelic educator
51:58 - Working with Neil deGrasse Tyson
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#2- Madison Margolin - Making the Mainstream a Little Bit More Psychedelic
Madison Margolin is the co-founder and managing editor of DoubleBlind, a biannual print magazine and digital media company at the forefront of the rapidly growing psychedelic movement.
Also a Los Angeles/New York-based journalist, Margolin covers psychedelics, cannabis, drug policy, and spirituality. She’s written for Playboy Magazine, Rolling Stone, Nylon, VICE, LA Weekly, High Times, Tablet, and others.
A graduate of Columbia Journalism School and UC Berkeley, Margolin has traveled everywhere from pot farms in the Emerald Triangle to the shores of the Ganges River, and all over Israel-Palestine, exploring the role of plant medicine in religion, mental health, and conflict resolution.
She got her start in journalism with a column on cannabis at the Village Voice, after having lived in south Tel Aviv working with Eritrean refugees.
With more than 4 years of experience covering cannabis and other drugs, Madison has spoken on topics like social equity, cannabis feminism, cannabis journalism, and so forth at conferences like Digital Hollywood, the Association of Alternative New Media, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, The Rind's Women in Cannabis, Pepperdine's Cannabis Law Symposium, and more.
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SHOW NOTES
1:50 - What is DoubleBlind?
4:35 - Surprising parts of starting a psychedelic media business
7:06 - Giving back to indigenous communities and conscious capitalism
9:37 - Psychedelics, the Drug War and the Decrim Movement
17:46 - The role of DoubleBlind in the movement
19:53 - Not wanting psychedelics to become mainstream
22:28 - Dr. Bronner's as an example of conscious capitalism
23:59 - Growing up in the weed scene and having parents who are Jewish Psychedelic Hippies
26:56 - How Madison decided to become a psychedelic journalist
30:49 - Living in Tel Aviv, and the psychedelic culture in Israel / Palestine
33:43 - What's next for DoubleBlind
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LINKS
See the full show notes, transcript and YouTube Clips here
https://twitter.com/margolinmadison
https://twitter.com/doubleblindmag
https://www.instagram.com/doubleblindmag/
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#1 - Lucia Huang - Using Software to Improve Psychedelic Therapy
Lucia Huang is co-founder and CEO of Osmind, a digital health startup working to maximize innovative treatments to mental health. Osmind provides an electronic health record software (EHR) for providers serving patients with treatment-resistant mental health conditions. Their software and analytical insights help providers optimize care and contribute to research of new diagnostics and therapies. They now serve over 22,000 patients in 135 mental health practices in the U.S. Osmind was founded in early 2020 and is backed by General Catalyst and Y Combinator.
Lucia previously led business at Verge Genomics, an AI-driven neuroscience biotech startup aiming to cure ALS and Parkinson's. She previously invested in innovative healthcare technology companies at Warburg Pincus. Lucia graduated Yale with a B.S. in Chemistry and earned an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was also awarded a Certificate in Public Management and Social Innovation. Lucia is passionate about mental health and has devoted her career to improving healthcare, from life sciences to new technology innovation.
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SHOW NOTES
1:57 - Background on Osmind
5:13 - Current landscape of ketamine / psychedelic clinics
7:08 - Lucia's personal journey with mental health
10:45 - What it's like to receive ketamine treatment, using mood trackers
14:24 - Osmind's partnership with Caretaker, a wireless patient monitor
15:51 - How research and clinical care go hand in hand
18:01 - How psychedelics can be tested in a controlled setting
19:04 - Future of psychedelics - tailored drugs vs commodities
24:03 - How Osmind is building a community for people who are treatment resistant
25:54 - How Lucia's parents have come around to her working in psychedelics
26:48 - Should psychedelics be legal
28:15 - What Lucia is excited about in the psychedelic industry
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LINKS
See the full show notes, transcript and YouTube clips here
https://www.instagram.com/osmindhealth/
https://www.facebook.com/osmindHQ
https://www.linkedin.com/company/osmind
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Launch Trailer
An Introduction to Mind Things - How Psychedelics Will Change Your Brain and Change The World
I'll be talking with people in the psychedelics space - entrepreneurs, writers, investors, researchers and people that have had profound experiences using these substances.
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