FLHLF - What Will Catalyze Psychedelic Stocks?

2023-05-21 19:30:00 ET

Summary

• Psychedelics being pulled into the mainstream by medical research.
• Filament Health CEO Benjamin Lightburn on clinical trials, microdosing and real revenue generation.
• Psilocybin and why of all the psychedelics it probably lends itself best to a recreational market.
• IP strategy, differentiation, and the ability to service more than just the pharmaceutical market.

Listen on the go! Subscribe to The Cannabis Investing Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify .

Transcript

Rena Sherbill: All right, Ben. Welcome to The Cannabis Investing Podcast. It's nice to have you on the show.

Benjamin Lightburn: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

RS: It's great to have you. I just heard you give a talk on the similarities and the differences between cannabis and psychedelics, something we talk a lot a lot about on the podcast, really fascinating, edifying stuff. So appreciate all that you shared.

I guess, let's start with what Filament Health ( FLHLF ) is? What's your place in the ecosystem? What are you trying to do?

BL: So I'm CEO and Co-Founder of Filament Health. Filament Health is a developer of naturally derived psychedelic drugs. We've developed over the last few years, technology that have created the first ever psychedelic drugs that come from natural sources.

When we got started in the psychedelics industry, three or four years ago, up to that point, all research into psychedelic medicine had been done with synthetically manufactured substances. And we knew that over time, people would prefer to have natural psychedelics, or at the very least have a choice between natural and synthetic. And that's really what we set out to solve, or to provide for people.

Just look at cannabis, right, what's the percent consumption of synthetic cannabinoids versus natural cannabinoids, even medically, right? 99.99 percentage of all people's experiences with these substances, with natural substances. And we think that the same thing is gong to be true with the eventual psychedelics market as well.

RS: One of the things that came up in the panel, and something that we've talked a little bit about is the dearth of research around cannabis and how specifically in North America, it went straight -- not straight to rock, but kind of medical direct, but there was no period of time where all this research was happening, which is a divergence from the psychedelic space where it's all research, very little recreational talk. And something that somebody shared with me was, how psychedelics is really benefiting from it, even though it's hard to see how, in the investing space. But in terms of like, the knowledge share that's out there or the research -- the real research that's been done, do you have an opinion or feeling about that in terms of the juxtaposition there?

BL: It's definitely true that psychedelics is kind of being, actually kind of pulled into the mainstream by the medical research. Whereas in cannabis, it was more like, you already have a humungous market for cannabinoids. It just happens to be an illicit market. And there was kind of the medical research kind of played a little bit, second fiddle to how do we get the cannabis market out of the hands of organized crime and like those kinds of other factors. Whereas with psychedelics, it's been, you have leading medical institutions around the world that are kind of starting with these groundbreaking clinical trial results. And that's forcing people to not be able to ignore -- to be able to ignore psychedelics as well.

So it has been kind of opposite, whether that's good from a fundraising perspective, I'm not so sure, because the medical research is very long and very expensive and requires a lot of money and it requires investors to be very sophisticated and to know that it's gong to take a very long time. And the important things in the psychedelic market are, patents and IP, differentiation and how -- why is my specific unique psychedelic drug going to be the champion and the winner? And I don't know, it's a lot different than cannabis where it's like, we just want to have legalized weed so we can smoke weed.

RS: Yeah. Do you think that helps with the regulations at all in terms of the research and the clinical trials?

BL: It does. So right now, you can do a lot of things federally with psilocybin that are legal in the United States and in Canada, in a lot of different jurisdictions. And obviously, pharmaceutical development is one of those things that psychedelics aren't illegal, they're not banned substances. They're controlled substances. And so if you have a proper DEA site license, the proper import permits and export permits, you can actually work with psychedelics. I mean, we do it all the time.

So similarly with manufacturing rules, in cannabis as we heard on the panel is kind of this mishmash hodgepodge of rules or no rules governing what sorts of GMP do you need to adhere to, what sorts of pesticides can you use, all that kind of stuff. In psychedelic, since -- again, since it's only federally legal drug development or pharmaceutical research that's been done, that already comes with rules, like there's already rules on how to make a drug candidate. And so you can follow them. And so from that perspective, it's a lot more clear what you can and cannot do with psychedelics.

That's all going to change once we start having state legal markets, for psychedelics, for recreational psychedelics, and others. And so I think we're going to eventually end up with a lot of the same challenges, if the federal government doesn't move quickly enough to kind of head off what's going to happen in the state houses.

RS: Somebody, I think it was you that said this, I'm not positive, but we're talking about the notion of people that go through psychedelic therapy, become attached to the service provider, as opposed to necessarily the product that they're taking. Can you talk about that relationship, and also kind of like the business model? And so if you're producing psilocybin, do you also want to be kind of training therapists, or how does that kind of symbiosis work?

BL: And this would predominantly be just for like the therapeutic psychedelic market. I think, for an eventual recreational market where we take the products home and consume them on our own time, without a therapist present, it will be kind of similar to cannabis and that, like you have brand affinity and stuff like that. But similarly to when you go to the doctor and get a medicine prescribed, like the doctor is supposed to prescribe the best medicine for you. And you're not really supposed to have that much of a say, or a choice in the product selection.

And I think that will be to a certain extent true for the therapeutic psychedelic market. And I think also that of the price that the patients pay, the lion's share of that will actually go to the therapist and the therapy and the facility and all that sort of stuff, because you can imagine it's going to be very expensive to administer these substances.

I sort of like to use the analogy of going to get a massage, right? Going to have psychedelic therapy is kind of like going to go get a six hour massage for your soul, right, for your soul. And because you have to have a trained provider in a room, that's like a safe space, that's in some kind of a clinic. And what would a eight hour massage cost? 1,000 bucks, right, something like that. And that's before you've even given people the drug.

So the drug, you might pay another, $100 or $200 on top of that, or whatever it is. But the point is, is that the lion's share of whatever people are paying is going to have to be going towards the actual clinic and the therapist, unless you think people are going * to be paying $10,000 for their therapy.

RS: And speaking of psilocybin in particular, there's a lot of talk of -- well, I don't know how much talk but there's talk of the recreational market. And in the investing circles, I think there's a real divergence of opinions in terms of how big the rec market is going to be? Is it really rec? What it looks like?

For me, personally, my experience and kind of what I've learned about it, it seems that psilocybin is the most adaptable to a recreational market, especially in terms of it's not clinical right now, but micro dosing and the effectiveness of that. How do you think of that? And also -- well, let's keep it there for a second.

BL: I would agree that psilocybin of all the psychedelics probably lends itself best to a recreational market for a number of reasons. It lasts about the right amount of time, like it's six to eight hours, whereas like LSD can be like 12 to 18 hours. And you know, I'm a father and my friends are parents and we're like, well, make sure you don't take LSD after nine o'clock, because then you might not just -- you lose one night sleep, you might lose two night's sleep or you really can't do that.

The other thing about access to the compounds, mushrooms grow everywhere on planet earth, and they can be cultivated and grown inside. And so there's not a danger of say, like with Peyote Cacti, like people running around and like stealing endangered species or over harvesting them or anything like that. And we also have a lot of information about the safety of consuming psilocybin. It's the most widely consumed psychedelic. People aren't dying in the streets or really reporting any problems associated with psilocybin.

Yes, they can have bad trips, but a lot of people will actually tell you that the bad trip is actually sort of like the whole point, right? The bad trip is like bad memories or past trauma or things of that nature coming to the surface. There's a -- we run our clinical trials at UCSF. And the UCSF Psychedelic Research Program has --

RS: At San Francisco?

BL: In San Francisco. They've run hundreds of patients through on psilocybin, and they have these medications called trip blockers that are there. There are other medications that can actually block the effects of a psilocybin trip. And they said that even though they've had a number of people that have had very, very challenging experiences while tripping on psilocybin, not one of those people actually asked to be -- to have their trip blocked, is because they kind of knew that it was -- this kind of difficult process was actually related to their healing, right, perhaps remembering trauma and being able to kind of compartmentalize. It was just one of the steps that they knew they had to take to embark upon a healing journey.

RS: When you were looking at the psychedelic space, or if you were looking at the psychedelic space, was there a period of time where you were deciding how to get into it, and in which way?

BL: No, we always knew, because my whole career has been on the commercialization of different plant extracts. And we knew right from the get go that people would want naturally extracted psilocybin. I mean it's very obvious. The idea, it's not exactly like a crazy new idea but nobody had done it. And we also knew that based -- myself and some former colleagues from other companies, we knew that we had a lot of experience, making natural extracts, doing GMP manufacturing, filing for IP and patents and stuff, working with the government.

The one thing we didn't have was any experience related to pharmaceutical development. So that's where we added new team members, and have also been getting a lot of experience. So the plan was always -- we knew what the plan was really even before embarking on it.

RS: And how do you speak about micro dosing?

BL: I would say that the jury is still out in terms of formal clinical research. And so the proponents and detractors both point to various things. The detractors say, oh well, great, you got some people to self report that their mood was enhanced, like big whoop dee doo, right. But then -- to which I would say, well, there actually haven't been any clinical trials done on a disease population, right. And it's actually very hard to measure any clinical benefit in a well -- in a non-diseased population, similar to like with dietary supplements. You actually can't measure anything that would be considered to be a disease because you're not allowed to claim anything about that disease with a dietary supplement.

So that's why micro dosing up till now, it's been all self reported, things related to wellness and mood and focus and concentration, to which the hardcore people, they like scoff at that, and that's all that's wishy-washy, woo-woo, whatever. We have a number of trials that are upcoming that will be looking at disease population, so people with depression and anxiety and things like that. And they will be receiving a micro dose of our product. So we're really looking forward to seeing whether we can get some actual good research for micro dose, because it has a number of big advantages.

Number one is that you can actually do a believable placebo control for micro dosing research, because the person doesn't know whether they got the micro dose, or the placebo. If you give someone a high dose of psilocybin, they know whether they got psilocybin rather than the placebo. And so that is essentially a giant asterisk on all psilocybin clinical trials, all psychedelic clinical trials.

The other really interesting thing about micro dosing, is that if you can get the benefits without a six to eight hour high dose therapeutic session, well think of what that means in terms of ease of access and cost, right? If we can just take a daily pill and set it and forget it, millions more people will be able to have access to this medicine. So it's -- because of those implications, I think it's very, very important that we research more and try to find out if it works, because if it does, it's very, very, very exciting, especially obviously for a naturally-focused company, because if someone's going to be taking something daily, you can you can bet that they're going to take a natural product.

RS: I don't know if you saw the New Yorker cartoon where there's a group of people or you saw it?

BL: Yeah, the people that are in the treatment group are dancing around naked, in tune with each other. It's a perfect cartoon because it summarizes a lot of different issues. Like in a normal clinical trial, if you know that you got the placebo or not, that's very really bad. Because -- so as an example, someone can show up for a clinical trial that has serious depression. They've read in the news that psilocybin might help their depression. And when they get the psilocybin in the trial, now they know that they got the psilocybin. And so they might have -- it might just be a what's called expectancy bias, which caused their depression to get better, right.

So when I said it's a big asterik on all psychedelic research that's been done, it's actually true. And then thinking about the flip side of that, if they know they got psilocybin, and they know that psilocybin is good for their depression, but then it doesn't work for their depression, their depression can actually get worse. And so you see actually suicidality amongst the non-responders for the psilocybin arm. So there's a lot of implications for all of this stuff, which are very serious and need full consideration.

RS: How do you solve for that? And also are you guys doing those clinical studies in house?

BL: We are doing clinical styles -- clinical trials like that, what we've done for our first clinical trials, we're using a within subject design, which means that we're comparing two drugs that are both psychedelic. One is psilocybin, and one is psilocin, both of which have been extracted from the magic mushroom, but the people don't know which one they they're getting.

The therapists ask them, like how high are you now, and measuring their blood pressure and heart rate and blah, blah, blah, but obviously the participant doesn't know whether they're getting psilocybin cells, and both of them are making them high, right? How do you solve this problem in larger clinical research? Is a very, very good question. And there is no answer.

We've proposed actually to the FDA using similar drugs like ketamine as a control or as the active placebo. But unfortunately, that wasn't actually met with a very enthusiastic response from FDA. They just suggest to use a completely inert placebo. Paul Stamets actually has very strong opinions on that. What's the ethicality of giving a placebo to someone in a clinical trial, where they know they're going to get the placebo or the active dose? It serves no purpose, right? And given that the placebo arm serves no purpose, is it ethical to give them the placebo when we could be giving them psilocybin?

So it's all these very -- all these interesting ethical questions that arise when doing a psilocybin research.

RS: It's like where spirituality meets science, and how do you navigate that?

BL: For sure. So the thing that this the sort of curative properties or the therapeutic properties of psilocybin comes from, if you get something that's called a full mystical experience. And so there's this thing called the mystical experience questionnaire. And this is kind of like, therapists best way to put spirituality and mysticism in paper in a survey that people can…

RS: Let's quantify this.

BL: Let's quantify this. And so you get asked a question, my favorite question is, to what degree are you experiencing oceanic boundlessness out of 10, some, much or a lot. Like, it's amazing, but we need like something right? It needs something. And these are things that are very, very hard to measure.

RS: Yeah, man. So how do you see it playing out in, maybe I know, there's a lot of headlines and news around what's happening in Canada. People really trying to push the envelope. There's been Oregon and Colorado, how do you see it developing specifically in North America ?

BL: Well, I was going to talk about Australia, which actually just recently announced that they are going to reschedule psilocybin from their most restrictive schedule to their second most restrictive schedule, and they announced a program whereby people, physician, psychiatrists will be able to actually apply for permission to prescribe psilocybin out in the real world to patients. So they are probably the furthest ahead.

In Canada, it's -- the legal status is similar to in the United States. However, Health Canada has what's called a special access program. This allows patients to apply on a case by case basis to take psilocybin. And Health Canada has been giving out approvals to people who are -- that have serious depression or have end of life distress. And so we've been supplying that program, free of charge for patients for the time being. And it's been working really quite well. And I think we've gotten over 100 different approvals now. And this program only started within the last year.

RS: Are you the sole provider there?

BL: We are actually the sole provider at the current time. Anyone can be authorized but yeah, to our knowledge we are the only ones that have been providing recently. In the United States you have federally regulated drug development for psilocybin, MDMA, a lot a lot of different compounds. MDMA is the closest, psilocybin is the second closest. In my opinion, they will get approved as pharmaceutical drugs. But this will not be like a full scale legalization.

What you see in Oregon is a state regulated legal market for only natural psilocybin. And that market just opened up this past January. No licenses have yet been given out. So it will be interesting to see like, what is the scale of this market? How does it work? In practice? There's a lot of questions about how are you gong to get taxed, like all these similar things that cannabis people have been wrestling with for years and years with the added wrinkle that this psilocybin has to be consumed at a treatment center in Oregon.

So they've taken a very, like cautious treatment center, actually its not even called treatment centers, it's called a service center. They want to -- they remove all language to do with therapy or treatment. The person that gives you the psilocybin is called a facilitator, not a therapist. The patient is called a client, not a patient. And this is very deliberate to stay as far on side of the federal rules as possible, because of course, the FDA governs everything to do with medicine,

RS: One of the questions from the investing community is what's the catalyst that brings maybe volume up, maybe, prices up, like your share price is up? What catalyzes, the industry? There has been talk of the FDA approving MDMA as one of those huge catalysts. What are your thoughts on that?

BL: If I knew for sure, I probably wouldn't tell you. Yeah, we've seen a number of very positive announcements come out about psychedelics for over the last 12 to 18 months, and yet they have not had any effect. In my opinion, I think it's going to be a broader macro economic trend, back towards favoring high risk, high return investments, which we've seen kind of dry up broadly over the last 12 to 18 months.

And unfortunately, the pain in that regard, I think we're -- unfortunately we're still seeing more and more pain with the news that's coming out about Silicon Valley Bank ( SIVBQ ) and about the repercussions that that's having. We're in a bit of a tough time. And it's very unfortunate, because the results about psilocybin and about the number of people that could be helped, it just keeps on getting better and better. And we -- I mean, we have legal psilocybin in Oregon right now. We just -- but companies are imploding because they can't get funding, right.

So Synthesis Institute announced that it was one of the leaders in providing the therapy and therapy training for the Oregon market, imploded the other day, and I think is filing for bankruptcy. So I would encourage the investing community to look very closely at psychedelics and the time to invest is when every other -- when others are fearful, right, and then sell when others are greedy, right, as the famous quote goes. And now's the time that others are fearful because this is a market that's here to stay.

I mean, we see it every day, right? There's people, real people getting real help from these substances. And it's a new market too. It's a -- like the market for end of life distressed patients to take psilocybin, sure, there are a few that are going and getting magic mushrooms now, but the market right now really doesn't exist. But I bet you in 10 years, it's going to be relatively common for people with a terminal cancer diagnosis to take psilocybin to help them deal with it and help their family deal with it and all these different things.

So we're creating a whole new market from scratch, and it needs funding and investment. Otherwise it's going to have a lot of trouble coming into existence.

RS: Yeah, it's the cannabis and the psychedelics industry are so similar in that regard. There's so much good stuff happening and yet capital is dried up, investor dollars are dried up, retail investors are annoyed and pissed off. Like what happens from here on out? And would you say that it's macro concerns from the investing community that's stopping them from investing right now?

BL: I think it's mostly macro concerns, like in my opinion, the psychedelic sort of like legalization and rollout is actually happening quicker than anyone expected. We can go pull up investor decks from 2019-2020, where they are saying that we're gong to have legal psychedelics in Oregon in 2023. And then in 2024, 2025 we're gong to have in Colorado. In Canada we have this special export program. Australia having the rescheduling.

I think things are coming faster. And the clinical trial results have held up. And I don't think you can point to really anything from the industry itself, other than the fact that the valuations it was able to attain two, three years ago were just ridiculously way too high. And so there's been a pullback from that. In my opinion, the pendulum has swung way too far, considering, what the possibilities are for the market.

RS: So how do you survive, let alone thrive?

BL: Well, that's the name of the game is survival at this point. Frankly, speaking, for most companies, like even the large well capitalized companies, they've been trimming their programs. They've been reducing headcount. You find there are pockets of, of smart, good, sophisticated investors that will support the right stories. And so we've been fortunate enough to find such investors and raise money from them to continue our operations.

The other thing that we're fortunate enough to have is revenue. So because of our IP portfolio, and because we're the only ones with natural drug candidates, we've been able to license these out to other drug developing companies, but then they also need to go and fundraise too. So it's being very cautious with your spending, don't spend any more money than you need to. And, do your best to find what few pockets of investment do actually exist? It's still out there, it's just very hard to find.

RS: And what would you say about -- there's been talk of the importance of the patentability in the industry. And then there's also the notion of how do you patent these medicines, drugs, however you call them? I call them medicines. How do you how do you think about that?

BL: It's one of the very important hot button issues in psychedelics. Because the psychedelic center for now is basically just drug development. It's kind of fitting into this biotech drug development mold. However, that mold usually requires you to have a patent on the molecule that you've developed, because it's so expensive to develop a drug and takes so long that you had better be able to get like 20 years of monopoly on your patented drug.

In the case of psilocybin and other classical psychedelics, it's not possible to get a patent on them, because they've been known to science for a long time, and they are natural compounds which are not patentable to begin with. So this creates a problem and you see companies coming up with all kinds of different strategies in order to overcome this problem.

So the most famous one is COMPASS Pathways. They're the ones that are developing psilocybin for treatment resistant depression. They have a patent where they have a very specific non-naturally occurring synthetic polymorph of psilocybin. There's doubts as to whether that polymorph is real or not real. But in any event, it's a very, very specific and narrowly defined form of synthetic psilocybin. It's not a patent on just psilocybin in general.

Controversially their patent application also included such things as elements of the therapy, like the soft furniture in the room, and the decoration of the wall and the music. And that was very, very controversial, because you're essentially trying to patent elements of therapy that have existed in the public domain forever, like -- are essentially go back to 1950s when we had psychedelic therapy ongoing. These are things that have been known for a very long, even touching of the patient below the elbow. So like touching them on their hand, was even in that patent application.

Other things that people are doing are coming up with new synthetic analogues. So chemicals that are similar to the original psychedelics, but are different in some way, and therefore patentable. They can get the patent, but they can't leverage the long history of use of the original psychedelic compounds. So it really is just pure psychedelic drug development.

Our strategy is to develop technology to enable the creation of naturally derived psychedelic drug candidates which has never been never been done before. So we have a number of patents on the technology that we developed in order to do that. So extraction methods, purification methods, ways to make a standardized, stable product. That's our approach, and we think it's a good one because we get the benefits of using the gen one well known classical compounds like psilocybin, but also the benefit of some kind of IP protection.

The other thing that's different about our drugs is they're considered to be what are called botanical drugs, meaning that they're actually complex mixtures of all the metabolites in the magic mushroom. So it's not just psilocybin. It's also psilocin * and baeocystin * and all these other compounds, meaning that our product is very complex and therefore almost impossible to replicate, especially if the technology that we use to manufacture is actually patented.

RS: And what would you say concerns you like going forward, what's something that is you fear happening, and maybe what do you think investors should be paying attention to in that regard?

BL: One of the things that concerns me is, I feel like we may -- there have been a number of stories that have come out recently about sexual misconduct or some kind of abuse that occurred during psychedelic therapy sessions. So there is a famous one uncovered by New York Magazine in their podcast. Unfortunately that happened during one of the MDMA trials.

And I think as time goes on, more and more of these stories are going to come out. Mostly, I think, with underground therapy sessions and things like that, that are unregulated, but other questionable procedures will be coming out. And hopefully, hopefully, a trickle doesn't turn into a flood. But that's definitely one thing that I would keep my eye on.

But another thing for investors specifically is that we don't know, really what the split is going to be between the pharmaceutical psychedelics market and the kind of state legalized sort of recreational market. And so it might not -- say like all states legalize, sort of like semi-legal semi-medical psychedelics, that might not be very good for a drug company that is also trying to sell its version of pharmaceutical psychedelic therapy.

So I'm not really worried about that, because I think all forms of access are good. And in fact, as a natural focused company, we can serve both of those markets very, very easily. But that's one thing I would be watching out for if I was an investor. If we're invested just in drug development how do we mitigate the risk of these state-regulated markets kind of undercutting us? Well, for instance, the Australian market, the TGA, their regulator acknowledges that there is no approved psilocybin drug. And yet they are actually going to allow people to prescribe psilocybin.

RS: I was going to ask in terms of being a public company, was that deliberate? Was that something you knew from the get go that you were going to do? Was it a product of circumstances?

BL: It was our plan right from the beginning. Our plan did shift a little bit. One of the interesting things about the psychedelics market is that it was very hard for people initially to get traditional VC and biotech money in to fund their businesses. And you did have like a willingness for retail shareholders and just individual people to come in and show a very big appetite to invest in companies to buy the stock in the open market. And so companies -- right, these companies at the end of the day need money. And they're gong to get money from the best terms and the least -- in the least diluted way that they possibly can.

So I think that is what led a lot of psychedelics companies to go public much earlier in their lifecycle, then would be traditional. We waited a little bit longer. We waited until we had an actual facility and actual products and actual licenses, and things like that. But many companies went public without anything. And then unfortunately overtime failed to get anything. And now you're seeing many of these companies go under and go out of business.

So like I said before, you had a huge run up, a huge boom. And now you have psychedelics winter. It's very, very cold.

RS: You spoke of on the panel, kind of the racial -- the racist undertones of the whole prohibition against cannabis and psychedelic…

BL: Undertones, overtones.

RS: Overtones…

BL: It was just explicit.

RS: Exactly. Yeah, you're right. Thank you. In terms of repealing that prohibition, what do you think gets us there? And do you think that the pharma industry is something that's preventing that, and are you in touch with people in the pharma industry in terms of collaborating or moving forward?

BL: We are. We are in touch with a number of pharmaceutical companies. They seem to mostly be sort of forming the internal opinion of whether psychedelics is real or whether it's here to stay before jumping in, in a big way. What gets us to repeal the prohibition? Well, I mean, in Canada, we have legal cannabis. So we've already seen steps in that regard in other jurisdictions.

I think we have to just keep pounding the message that the war on drugs has failed. It was a racist flawed idea to begin with. And the status -- the sort of the default state of humanity is to have these substances, not to have them prohibited, like the way that they are now. One of the nice things about psychedelics, I think, more so than cannabis, is that it reaches across the aisle, right? So you have veterans with PTSD that are going to Iboga Retreats in Mexico or using psilocybin and it's working and things like that.

So and also the problems that psychedelics can help address are they don't care whether you're left or right, like whether people on both sides of the aisle have just as many problems with addiction and depression and PTSD and the list goes on and on. And I think because of that you are seeing legislative and legal change probably happen a lot quicker for psychedelics than you did like -- what do they say, took 20 years for cannabis. I think we're gong to see a lot quicker than that for psychedelics.

RS: Do you think the psychedelic companies are going to be able to get strong enough to be the leaders in the space? Do you think they're going to be acquired by the pharma industry or similar players, biotech, what have you?

BL: That's a great question. I think probably most of the pure pharma psychedelics companies, they probably want to be acquired by big pharma. And whether -- back to your earlier question, whether that is a help or a hindrance to broader access is a very good question. Like, maybe the existing framework is good for them, because you can still sell pharmaceutical drugs, even if -- of psilocybin even if psilocybin is still a controlled substance.

So I don't know, we'll see. It's a great question. Like how can companies build enough critical mass so that they can -- we can build like a pure psychedelics industry of psychedelics players. I mean, that's definitely something that we'll be striving to do for sure.

RS: We'll be watching. Anything left to share with investors that you would point to?

BL: I would point to the stream of excellent clinical trial results that keeps on coming out, anecdotal and clinical trial evidence. These substances are showing to be highly efficacious against intractable conditions. It's an industry that is here to stay. It's very small to begin with, but it's here to stay. And so with valuations where they are right now, it really is essentially, like you can get in at a valuation, most companies are cheaper than where they were, like four or five years ago, right.

So in the meantime, like the offering of the companies is way less risky and the market and the macro environment is way less risky, because we were starting to see legalization coming up. So I think it's a -- I mean, I buy shares in my own company and in other psychedelics companies. It's a very attractive time for investors to get in. It's not a question of if this industry. It's how big will it get, and how long will it take to get here?

RS: How do you go about looking how to invest in other companies? What are you looking at, like what metrics?

BL: Definitely IP strategy, differentiation, ability to service more than just the pharmaceutical market, ability to service more than one market. If it's a drug development company. What is their experience and have they have they got other drugs approved before? Have they been able to raise money? Have they been able to raise money during the market downturn? That would be something to look at. I mean, I also know a lot of the people too in the industry, so personal relationships as well. So yeah those are some of the factors.

RS: Awesome. Ben, thanks for going so deep, and thanks for sharing so much insight with us. I really appreciate it.

BL: You're very welcome. Thanks for the great questions.

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