The New Health Club

My guests today are Daniel Goldberg and Tim Schlidt, founders of the Palo Santo fund. The two them an their really impressive team got a big plan for the coming years: investing across the new psychedelic ecosystem and funding a new paradigm in well being.Palo Santo’s diversified investment fund is helping to increase the supply of clinically effective and accessible mental health and addiction treatment solutions needed in today’s world. Daniel Goldberg began seeing mental health as part of a spectrum and not something that needs to be so pathologized.As a founder of Palo Santo and Bridge Investments, Daniel has been actively investing with and supporting inspired entrepreneurs for 20 years. Years ago he saw the transformational potential of psychedelic medicines and has developed a deep network of relationships across the psychedelic research and business communities. His passion for the space is purpose‐driven and science informed. He is thrilled to be a part of Palo Santo’s mission of supporting promising treatments while ensuring widespread access to safe, legal, and effective solutions. Tim Schlidt brings extensive knowledge investing across life sciences and healthcare services, and has held a lifelong passion for understanding and improving treatments for CNS disorders. He believes psychedelics are poised to shift the paradigm in mental health treatment and his primary mission in co-founding Palo Santo is to invest in companies and solutions that allow for broad access to those most in need of mental health care. Prior to co-founding Palo Santo, Tim covered the life sciences and health care services sectors as a private equity investor at Madison Dearborn Partners and an investment banker at J.P. Morgan and Greenhill. We talk about Daniels and Tims personal psychedelic experience they had BEFORE the founding of Palo Santo, the shift and the incredible change they saw coming, when a new generation of scientists engaged in psychedelics, about the psychedelic pharma model and what compound is Daniels and Tims favorite and we chat about what will possibly be happening and what I will see, if I would dare to take 5 MEO DMT: but that will happen on the next episode.

https://www.palosanto.vc

Dave Rabin is an MD, PhD, a neuroscientist, board-certified psychiatrist, health tech entrepreneur & inventor who has been studying the impact of chronic stress in humans for nearly 15 years, particularly non-invasive therapies for treatment-resistant illnesses like PTSD. He is the co-founder & chief innovation officer at Apollo Neuroscience and the co-founder & executive director of The Board of Medicine. In addition to his clinical psychiatry practice, Dr. Rabin is currently conducting research on the epigenetic regulation of trauma responses and recovery to elucidate the mechanism of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and the neurobiology of belief. He is a practitioner of ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP) and is trained in MDMA assisted psychotherapy. With Molly Maloof, Dr. Dave Rabin is co-hosting the psychedelic news hour on clubhouse.(https://www.psychedelicnewshour.com/) We Talk about listeners on Club House that call in high and how to give them a little integration therapy on air . We talk about why epigenetic trauma is such specific thing, hardly explored, but now a really big topic in the psychedelic context and we talk benefits of Ketamine therapy done at home and of course we talk about Dr Rabins company Apollo.

Apollo Neuroscience was born from research at the University of Pittsburgh. David Rabin and Greg Siegle PhD worked together at the Program in Cognitive Affective Neuroscience to develop and scientifically prove out the Apollo technology and discovered that certain combinations of low frequency inaudible sound waves (vibration that you can feel, but can’t hear) can safely and reliably change how we feel through our sense of touch, and that we can measure those physiological changes in near real time.

Think of Apollo as a smart bracelet that you can wear around your wrist or ankle and works to give you stress-reducing buzzes in times of need. It syncs to the brand’s app, so you can control its touch therapy functions from your phone.I used Apollo often during the pandemic last year and I fell asleep much easier with it, so I can highly recommend it. Apollo calms your nervous system down in very gentle, but effective way. And since you are a part of amazing the The New Health Club Community, you get a 10% discount on the order of the Apollo. Just head over to www.apolloneuro.com and put in the promo code “newhealth 10”

Apollo Partner One Sheet

Dr. David Rabin's website

Apollo

Apollo Research

What if Palestinians and Israelis would do an ayahuasca ceremony together? Would there ne more empathy and mutual understanding after the ceremonies? Scientist Leor Roseman and Peace Activist Antwan Saca really wanted to see what happened then. And so they arranged it, and created a study for The Imperial College in London. They recently launched the study “Relational Processes in Ayahuasca Groups of Palestinians and Israelis. Leor Roseman is a postdoc at the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Imperial College London, where he received his Ph.D. and MRes, under the supervision of Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and Prof. David Nutt. His research is focused on the neural and psychological correlates of the psychedelic experience, and the therapeutic application of psilocybin for depression. Currently, Leor is investigating the psychosocial potential of psychedelics. Antwan Saca was born in Jerusalem to a Christian family from the city of Bethlehem. He has spent his adult life working towards the dream of peace and justice in the Holy Land. He spent five years at the Holy Land Trust serving also as director of programs, where he experienced community-healing approaches that strengthened his interest in non-violent compassionate activism. Since then, he’s focused on community dynamics and the many forms of personal/collective experienced and inherited trauma that influence conflict resolution in the Holy Land. He believes that healing the pain of the past is a prerequisite for healthy relations between nations and—ultimately—peace. Antwan serves as an associate at Leaders Quest.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.607529/full https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/leor.roseman13 http://www.leadersquest.org

What if some people undergoing psychedelic assisted therapy rather have a picture of Manchester United or Britney Spears on the wall, instead of a buddha and yoga poses? Is this a question of class, just a different idea of spirituality and power objects? This is my favourite topic in the episode with Ben Sessa today. Dr. Ben Sessa is consultant psychiatrist, psychedelic therapist and chief medical officer at Awakn Life Sciences , UK’s first on-the-high-street provider of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. Awakn is researching, developing and delivering evidence-based psychedelic medicine to treat addiction and other mental health conditions, and is aiming to open 15 to 20 clinics across the UK and EU in the next 24 months. Patients will be able to self-refer or be referred by their GP (including NHS). Ben focuses on MDMA-assisted therapies, since the substance is further along in the research and legal processes then psilocybin.Though in the meantime, Ben and his team work also with Ketamine as a therapy tool. The need for psychedelic assisted therapy seems higher then ever. Ben tells me, 30 to 40 % of the British population is drinking in a harmful bracket now in the last 12 month of the pandemic. We talk about rather different ways of using psychedelics like ketamine for addiction, MDMA for obesity or psilocybin for anorexia, something Ben, as a fan of creative psychopharmacology, is interested in. We also address what happens, if depression and anti-depressants can become part your identity and how you might be able to get rid of your own old stories about yourself with the support of psychedelic assisted therapy.

http://www.drsessa.com/ https://awaknlifesciences.com/

My guest today is Zac Kamenetz. Zac is a rabbi, community leader, and aspiring psychedelic chaplain based in Berkeley, CA. He holds an MA in Biblical literature and languages from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union and received rabbinic ordination in 2012. He is also the founder of the Shefa Foundation, for Psychedelic therapy grounded in Jewish spirituality. He was part of a psilocybin study that dosed clergy of various traditions with psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in psilocybin mushrooms. This conversation is not only exploring new territory like judaism and psychedelics. Zac and I talk the future of psychedelic therapy, in Zac case that could be jewish psychedelic teraphy, with a “jewish set and setting” as Zac describes it. We talk epigenetic trauma and experinces, the new openeness towards religions and psychedelics and why there might be the new health clubs shuls one day. Zac and I talk about how non-jewish people, like me, should start talking to other non- jewish people about the Holocaust, and how psychedelic insight can contribute to this: the recognition and the embracing of pain, guilt and responsibility. I did not expect the conversation and the podcast with Zac would turn into a psychedelic integration session. For me. But the german and jewish history is something that has been on my mind since forever. And now it is time to bring it back as a result of a psychedelic experiences. https://www.shefaflow.org/ https://2021.jewishpsychedelicsummit.org/

Today, my guest is Lars Christian Wilde, the President, Chief Business Officer and Co‑founder of Compass Pathways. Compass is a “mental health care company dedicated to accelerating patient access to evidence-based innovation in mental health.” as they describe themselves. Compass was one of the first companies engaging in a bigger vision of the substance psilocybin. But back to Lars. He is a special guest to me, since I like his open mind. I remember talking to Lars in one of our first podcasts about vaccine against depression in the future. I also remember how openly Lars talked about his treatment-resistant depression and anxiety disorder and the effects it had on him and the people in his life. He told me about his treatment with psilocybin, that helped him tremendously to begin a new life with a different mental health set. I am always a fan of people, especially entrepreneurs in the psychedelic field, that share their psychedelic experiences and are personally affected by the power of psychedelic substances. In 2020 lot of things have happened at Compass Pathways. In September 2020 the company became a public company, listing their stock on Nasdaq and raising $146.6 million. Compass became one of the most exciting company in the field. Lars and I catch up, what is happening in the Compass World right now. How does a psychedelic public company feels and works different? How does the Compass and Sheppard Pratt collaboration look like, since Compass is opening a Centre of Excellence in collaboration with The Sheppard Pratt Institute for Advanced Diagnostics and Therapeutics in Baltimore, Maryland, to do more research. Their psychiatry department exists since the 1800s. We talk about how Compass works with the Charité hospital in Berlin and how to do conduct a study in times of Covid at all, we discuss COMP360, a psilocybin therapy trial for treatment-resistant depression designed by Compass for future treatments of depression (https://compasspathways.com/)

I am happy to have Jeremy Weate, board member of Universal Ibogaine, as my guest on the show. He spent 15 years working as a consultant on natural resource governance, providing advice to governments, companies and civil society organisations in over 20 countries. Jeremy also has a decade-long interest in the medicalization of ibogaine in a holistic treatment setting. He visited Gabon in 2016 and was initiated into Bwiti. In 2018, Jeremy helped set up Tabula Rasa Retreat in Portugal, now one of the leading ibogaine treatment facilities in the world. He has organized ibogaine conferences in Vienna, Porto and London. He has a PhD in European philosophy from the University of Warwick, UK. Jeremy and I talk about the face and rules of modern addiction, the coming importance of Ibogaine and why you can’t keep a good molecule down, which is a british, understated way to say: Ibogaine will become a mayor player in the new word of psychedelics treatments. He is now a board member of "Universal Ibogaine" (https://www.ibogaineinc.com/) a Vancouver based company which aims to build a global network of holistic ibogaine-assisted addiction treatment clinics, operating under the brand Clear Sky Recovery, utilizing a proprietary Ibogaine assisted psychotherapy treatment protocol. The treatment protocol has successfully disrupted opioid addiction for over 3,500 people and delivers up to 95% successful detox.

I talk to, Charley Wininger. Great guy, experienced psychedelic pro. He is a licensed Psychoanalyst and Mental Health Counselor for individuals and couples. Charley is an author and an expert on Psychedelic Drugs, the 71-year-old is a also a relationship counsellor who calls MDMA the “relationship super glue” and just published the book called. “Listening to ecstasy” When reading about Charleys book, I was wondering: is our connection on a neural level the most important one? Charley must know. In is book he talks about his “MDMA” journey with his wife Shelley, since the two of them, you could say, became relationship scientist with the support of ecstasy. Since the ideas of marriage and relationships have changed big time and we seem to need new tools to understand each others minds and hearts. Charley and I talk about the rediscovery of MDMA in the context of the psychedelic renaissance. And how MDMA could supports couples therapy in the future and what that would mean for love. Enjoy Charley explaining a new possible “relationship glue” called MDMA. https://www.charleywininger.com/

Today’s show is all about meeting a legend called Stanislav Grof. Why “legend”? Simply, Stan was around when the first wave of psychedelic research started, but more than that, he was a thriving force in bringing psychedelics into psychiatry and helping to create a scientific base to explore psychedelics as a tool. Today, Stanislav is one of the most important sources for the new mental health industry and new psychedelic therapies. I talked to both Stan and his wife Brigitte, collaborators and partners of several years, and also because Stan had a stroke a few years ago, he feels more comfortable with Brigitte by his side. Honestly, I could not believe that this conversation was happening, the possibility to talk to someone from the first wave of psychedelics.

Stan is a psychiatrist with over sixty years of experience in research of non-ordinary states of consciousness and one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology. He was born in Prague in 1931 where he also received his scientific training: an MD degree from the Charles University School of Medicine and a PhD from the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences. He was also granted honorary PhD degrees from the University of Vermont in Burlington and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, CA, and the World Buddhist University in Bangkok, Thailand. Dr Grof’s early research in the clinical uses of psychedelic substances was conducted at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, where he was principal investigator of a program that systematically explored the heuristic and therapeutic potential of LSD and other psychedelic substances. Essentially, Grof was one of the first doctors using LSD in psychiatry! In 1969, Dr. Grof became Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, one of the most important universities now researching psychedelics now. In 1973, he was invited as Scholar-in-Residence to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he developed, with his late wife Christina Grof, Holotropic Breathwork, an innovative form of experiential psychotherapy that is now being used worldwide.

Esalen is the famous institute in California, where all the great masters of consciousness were teaching (Alan Watts was one of them). Dr. Grof is the founder of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA) and for several decades served as its president. Currently, Dr. Grof is Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness in San Francisco, CA. In May 2020 Stan and Brigitte Grof launched their new training in working with holotropic states of consciousness, the Grof® Legacy Training.

More Stanislav and Brigitte Grof resources: Stan Grof’s website Brigitte Grof’s website The Way Of The Psychonaut (film) The Way Of The Psychonaut (book)

Today my guest is Brian Muraresku and his book has a similar game changing effect as Michael Pollan’s “How to change your mind”.… except that Brian makes us rethink psychedelics and religion. So just what will the pope have to say? Brian Muraresku graduated from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit and he has been practicing law internationally for fifteen years. In 2016, Muraresku became the founding executive director of Doctors for Cannabis Regulation. In arbitration with the NFL in 2018, Muraresku represented the first professional athlete in the United States to seek a therapeutic use exemption for cannabis. So, what brings the man on a podcast about psychedelics? Brian and I met in an unusual place—yet a very one common for our times—in a Zoom Meeting.This is where I learned about Brian's recently released amazing book, “The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name”. The Immortality Key is incredible, a journey into the psychedelic origins of the world's great spiritual practices and what those might mean for how we view ourselves and the world around us. Brian researched for 12 years, was able to get in the archives of the Vatican and check if there are any psychedelic hints (pssst …there are!). He travelled Europe to find out how ancient rituals were supported by psychedelic experiences. So did the Ancient Greeks use psychedelics to find God? And did the first Christians inherit the same, secret tradition? Brian's book and theories changed my whole idea coming from a Catholic culture, and growing up as a Catholic girl. So what if our cultures and religions were always based on psychedelic rituals? Just imagine…(https://www.brianmuraresku.com/)