In this episode of "In the Arena," host Evan Baehr explores the burgeoning world of psychedelic medicine with Cosmos Fielding-Mellen, CEO of Beckley Psytech. As mental health crises surge globally, could psychedelics offer a revolutionary solution?

Mellen, born into a family at the forefront of psychedelic research, shares his journey from documentary filmmaker to biotech entrepreneur. He unpacks the science behind psychedelics' potential to treat conditions like depression and addiction, explaining how these substances work on both a neurological and psychological level.

But this isn't just about the science. Baehr and Mellen dive into the business of bringing psychedelics to market, discussing the challenges of drug development, the role of venture capital, and the unique hurdles faced by an industry emerging from decades of stigma and prohibition.

The conversation takes unexpected turns, touching on:

• The limitations of current mental health treatments and why psychedelics might succeed where SSRIs have fallen short
• How Beckley Psytech is innovating to make psychedelic treatments more scalable and accessible
• The interplay between non-profits, academia, and for-profit companies in advancing psychedelic research
• The potential societal impact of widespread access to consciousness-expanding substances

As Mellen predicts a future where multiple psychedelics are legally prescribed medicines, Baehr pushes him to consider the philosophical implications. Could these substances, by fostering a deeper sense of self and connection, reshape society in ways that technology has failed to deliver?

Whether you're a mental health professional, an entrepreneur interested in emerging markets, or simply curious about the future of consciousness and healing, this episode offers a thought-provoking look at a field poised to transform how we understand and treat the human mind.

Transcript:

Cosmos Mellen
0:00:00
It is amazing the speed and momentum at which things are kind of happening now. I don't believe there's turning back. I believe in a decade from now, multiple psychedelics will be prescribable, available legal medicines for a whole range of psychiatric conditions.

Evan Baehr
0:00:25
The only way to solve our biggest problems is to have the audacity to try. Welcome to In the Arena. I'm your host, Evan Baer. In the Arena with Evan Baer is sponsored by Arena Hall. From ketamine-assisted therapy to corner store Kratom shops, we found ourselves amid a psychedelic renaissance.

Evan Baehr
0:00:46
Whereas once these drugs were widely stigmatized, doctors and healers can now deliver a wide range of exciting new therapies, harnessing the power of psychedelics. And it isn't just a revolution in science, it's a revolution in business. According to a recent market analysis,

Evan Baehr
0:01:02
the global psychedelic medicine market is projected to be over $12 billion in just a few years. As a brand new market, we're seeing a variety of new approaches to this kind of business. My guest today is Cosmo Fielding Mellon,

Evan Baehr
0:01:15
the CEO of Beckley SciTech, a company working on bringing a variety of psychedelic compounds to the market. Cosmo has a unique background, having grown up in a family famous for their commitment to plant medicine.

Evan Baehr
0:01:27
I get to talk to him today about what it means to strike out in this brand new market and the advantages of both for-profit and non-profit approaches to this brave new world. Cosmo, it is a real pleasure to get to spend some time with you. You bring such an interesting perspective, yes, at the cutting edge as the founder of

Evan Baehr
0:01:50
a venture-backed company that is right in the middle of the question of how we can use psychedelics to alleviate some of our mental health crises. But you also come to the table as a storyteller, as a serial documentary film producer, and it's just such an interesting background you have as a founder, so really excited to explore a lot of those things with you.

Evan Baehr
0:02:10
I'd have to ask, kind of, when did you get interested in this, but I know you really come from sort of a dynasty of sorts, I don't know if that's the right phrase, but a family that has been on the cutting edge of this for a long time. When did you actually start actually really thinking

Evan Baehr
0:02:22
about this topic?

Cosmos Mellen
0:02:24
Well, thanks, Evan, and yeah, lovely to be here and really good question. So my mum and my dad have really devoted their entire lives to psychedelics and the kind of potential that psychedelics have for kind of bettering humanity and kind of society. My mum is the kind of more famous figure these days. So she's been running a non-profit called the Beckley Foundation since the 90s, but really that was a late chapter. She'd been doing it really since the 60s, working to kind of raise awareness on how

Cosmos Mellen
0:03:03
psychedelics work and can be used safely and wanting to conduct really good science on how they work. of for her it started when she you know personally experimented with psychedelics and realized that you know they could be really very very beneficial not just on a kind of consciousness expanding sense but also on a kind of mental health perspective and a kind of cognitive enhancement angle as well and really

Cosmos Mellen
0:03:33
decided that was her mission in life was to try and help humanity by raising awareness around psychedelics. And my father was her partner in doing that for a long time. But this was, you know, as I'm sure you're aware that, you know, psychedelics back in the 60s, you know, even very early 60s, kind of, they were actually legal and you're allowed to take them. Back then in the 50s and 60s, there was some excitement from researchers around the world on how these drugs might help people overcome conditions like depression and addiction. And there were also

Cosmos Mellen
0:04:05
studies going on with the CIA thinking maybe they could be used to kind of, you know, as mind control. So there were lots of different people exploring how these compounds could be used. And then really what happened was that it got out into the public and they started being used just by the general public and became very, very popular, got very much associated with the counterculture and got banned quite quickly. And at that point, the research on psychedelics kind of ground to a halt. So that was in the mid 60s. And then there was this kind of very long, barren period where no research was done really.

Cosmos Mellen
0:04:44
And so my mother set up the Beckley Foundation, which is a non-profit in the 90s, where there'd been about 30 years of basically no research on psychedelics. And the mission of the Beckley Foundation was to reignite scientific interest in psychedelics and kind of use science to destigmatize these compounds

Cosmos Mellen
0:05:06
and really explore how they work in the brain and how they can be used to help people when it comes to their mental health.

Evan Baehr
0:05:13
Gosh, when your mom was starting this, it must have felt like she was a pariah. Like, give us a little color on her decision to do something which I imagine felt very controversial.

Cosmos Mellen
0:05:24
I grew up in the context of, you know, Cosmo's mom was this very odd character who was kind of known to be very kind of interested in the benefits of psychedelics when they were a very kind of stigmatized subject. So what she did with the Beckley Foundation, she didn't have

Cosmos Mellen
0:05:42
any qualifications, she's an amateur scientist, but by setting up a foundation, she was able to bring really respected academics onto the advisory board of the foundation. So they weren't just kind of working with this kind of like oddball Amanda Fielding, they were working sounding foundation called the Beckley Foundation. And by bringing on people with credibility to be attached and involved in the work,

Cosmos Mellen
0:06:08
it gave her and her mission more credibility as well. So what you guys are doing now at Beckley SciTech,

Evan Baehr
0:06:15
you talk about one of your core missions is commercializing some of these psychedelic substances in order to treat what you call neuropsychiatric disorders. Give me a quick primer on when you're looking across these neuropsychiatric disorders, what are those and what is the scale of the challenge, the problem that you see of these disorders across

Cosmos Mellen
0:06:41
society today? I mean, neuropsychiatry basically means, you know, the, the, the big ones, uh, depression and anxiety and addiction, you know, those are the kind of broadest groups. And there is, you know, an epidemic of mental health conditions in the modern world. So, one in four or five people now will suffer from a mental health condition in their lifetime. And the numbers are only going up, right? And at the same time, there's actually been a real shortage of innovation in this space

Cosmos Mellen
0:07:28
in terms of kind of treatments for these kinds of conditions over the last few decades. So the last big innovation in treating things like depression were SSRIs, which is called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, like Prozac is a kind of famous SSRI. And so that was back in the kind of 80s and 90s, that was the big innovation. Now, there are many limitations to those types of treatments, right? And while they do work for some people, they don't work for a considerable number of people and they take a long time to take an effect.

Cosmos Mellen
0:08:06
You have to take a pill every day indefinitely and they have many side effects. And so really there's this problem that is getting worse and worse mental health conditions. And then at the same time, there's been this real shortage of breakthroughs in how to treat these problems and a real need for more effective ways to deliver them. And that is where psychedelics come in, basically.

Evan Baehr
0:08:35
Well, a quick snapshot here, just from some data granted only for the United States from the Center for Disease Control or so. In the last basically six years, from 2017 to 2023, the percentage of the population diagnosed with depression sometime over their lifetime,

Evan Baehr
0:08:51
went from 20% to 29%. But among some demographics, it's pretty shocking. So among young people, age 18 to 29, in 2017, about 20% would be diagnosed with depression in a lifetime, and that went to 34%. So up about 14%.

Evan Baehr
0:09:08
So that's one in three. You're on a subway in New York City, there's some young people around, one in three, so one yes, two no, will have depression in their lifetime. A 50% change in six years feels extreme.

Cosmos Mellen
0:09:21
It's shocking and kind of slightly mind-blowing. It is a major, major problem, and on so many different levels from a kind of public health perspective, from a public finance perspective, from so many different levels,

Cosmos Mellen
0:09:39
but also ultimately just from a kind of human perspective. There are so many people suffering from these conditions.

Evan Baehr
0:09:45
I'm curious if the source of the rise in depression, in what ways that is related to why we might theorize that psychedelics would be more effective than SSRIs. It looks like about a third of people who are diagnosed with depression end up on an SSRI, but broadly the rates, I mean at least 50% of people

Evan Baehr
0:10:05
on SSRIs say it is not really working. What do we know about sort of this recent rise in depression and what does that lead you to conclude? You know, do you think the mechanism of action of a psychedelic is likely to be a more effective one

Cosmos Mellen
0:10:22
than what SSRIs do? Look, I have a personal bias, so I certainly do believe that. But I think if we take a step back, I think what's really interesting is that we're still only beginning to understand how the brain works and what's going on in the brain and how brain activity on a kind of neuroscientific level relates to psychological symptoms like depression. And again, what's interesting about psychedelics is we're kind of working backwards because we know so many people have been using these drugs and have reported them to be helpful in treating conditions like depression and addiction.

Cosmos Mellen
0:11:10
And now we're trying to understand why is that the case, right? And the Bechtle Foundation did this brain imaging study, the first ever brain imaging study on LSD and psilocybin. And what it showed was there was a down regulation in this area called the default mode network in the brain and increased connectivity to other parts of the brain.

Cosmos Mellen
0:11:30
And why that matters is that the default mode network in really simplistic terms is somewhat comparable to what psychology would call the ego, right? Your kind of thoughts that you normally kind of fall back into in your default, your sense of the past, your sense of the future,

Cosmos Mellen
0:11:48
and in conditions like depression and addiction, the default mode network is kind of overly active. So you're kind of stuck in a negative spiral of rumination, right? Right? And what a psychedelic does is it reduces the activity in that part of the brain and allows connectivity to other parts of the brain. It breaks that pattern and allows you to form different patterns, which hopefully kind of breaks the pattern of rumination and negative rumination and allows you to make different patterns of thought and behavior.

Cosmos Mellen
0:12:23
Right? So that's one way it's working. There's another way, which is kind of on kind of neurogenesis. So what we've seen in, in kind of in vitro studies is that when you give a kind of brain cell, a psychedelic, you can see that there's what's called synaptogenesis. So the synapses start growing. And this is really important for our current understanding of how the brain works and how you can overcome mental health conditions is that it creates this opportunity for neuroplasticity, it's

Cosmos Mellen
0:12:52
called, where you can, again, it allows this opportunity to kind of change the pattern and activity in the brain, right? So that's the kind of physiological stuff, right? But then the other important thing is that there is a very, very pronounced and intense subjective experience when someone's given a psychedelic, right? And there are lots of ways that these subjective experiences are trying to be characterized, but what people often report is a sense of connection to nature, a sense of connection to something bigger than themselves,

Cosmos Mellen
0:13:28
a loosening of one's sense of self, having very big emotional breakthroughs, reflections on your own life and seeing them from a different angle. There's an idea of kind of, it's called a psychodynamic experience or a mystical experience. And that to me is also a major driver of the efficacy

Cosmos Mellen
0:13:50
because it's a psychological way of helping people change the way they see themselves in the world and their relationship to the world and gives them this opportunity to change things. That is something that normal, like normal antidepressants don't do, right?

Cosmos Mellen
0:14:08
So that's what, to me, is so unique about these compounds, this kind of amazing opportunity to really change a person's perspective on their place in the world, and that can really help them overcome these kind of chronic conditions like depression and addiction.

Evan Baehr
0:14:25
I had a great conversation with Matthew Johnson out of Hopkins who sat with many thousands of people in the sort of integration period following a usually psilocybin-based guided meditation and he kind of went from scientist mode into, I don't know, theologian or philosopher when he's asking about what's really the agent here, what explains the sort of breakthrough of people that are stuck in these treatment persistent depression or anorexia or these terrible disorders. And one of the ways he described it, he said, there's a common sense that people emerge from

Evan Baehr
0:15:05
this trip with a profound love of self, that they kind of encountered themselves in a way that, if they had any pattern of self-harm or low view of self, that they came out and they're like, I am this beautiful three trillion set of cells, this beautiful creature that can do these amazing things in the world, so it was kind of this

Evan Baehr
0:15:29
cognitive rational breakthrough of a change of view of self. Does that resonate at all with how you see it?

Cosmos Mellen
0:15:36
Yeah, totally, and I think that the thing that is so remarkable, and you know, some of the research they've done at Johns Hopkins that Matt was involved in, you know, patients reported the psychedelic experience as one of the five most meaningful experiences in their lives. And that is just not something that normal antidepressants do. And so I think, you know, for me, if you think about people with addiction,

Cosmos Mellen
0:16:09
often you will hear cases of people overcoming addiction by having some kind of earth shattering moment of realization, right? Normally it will be something bad happening, right? So whether it's an overdose or a diagnosis of some terrible disease, or, you know,

Cosmos Mellen
0:16:27
being left by your loved one. But it could be, on the other side, falling in love or some kind of event that happens that helps them change their perspective and overcome their addiction. I suppose what's interesting from a kind of psychological perspective is that what one's trying to do with a psychedelic is reliably induce one of these experiences. So rather than waiting for something serendipitously

Cosmos Mellen
0:16:56
to happen to help you overcome your addiction, you're actually able to induce one of these kind of life-shaking events that changes your perspective and helps you change your patterns of behavior that you were otherwise stuck in. You're tackling a massive problem.

Evan Baehr
0:17:10
I mean, at least a third of Americans have some version of mostly treatment-resistant depression, plus this whole list of other disorders that we talked to. The market is obviously massive. You are, unlike Matthew Johnson, in the sense that you spend your day as the CEO

Evan Baehr
0:17:25
of a company that's raised outside capital. Give me the thumbnail sketch of,

Cosmos Mellen
0:17:29
what is the business of Beckley SciTech is that, you know, from the Beckley Foundation, you know, there was a lot of research that had been done in partnership with groups like Matt Johnson's group at Johns Hopkins and amazing researchers around the world. There'd been a lot of really brilliant research done in the late 90s, early 2000s and kind of 2010s, that is now considered the renaissance in psychedelic science. It brought psychedelics back into scientific legitimacy and showed how they were working

Cosmos Mellen
0:18:19
in the brain, as we were talking about just then, but also showed proof of concept that they can actually be really beneficial for people with treatment-resistant depression or post-traumatic stress disorder or addiction. And so then the next step was okay, amazing, we're kind of doing that from an academic perspective, from a scientific perspective, we're showing that now, that's great. How do we take the next step to actually not just show the science but actually make these

Cosmos Mellen
0:18:46
drugs legally available and prescribable as medicines. And that was why we started Bechtle Cytec, right? So it's really to build on the foundation of work that's been done by the early researchers and take the next step, which is build a fully fledged drug development program around these compounds and develop them as approvable medicines. And so to do that, you need some additional things in your armory, right? So firstly, you need a hell of a lot of money. It's very, very expensive

Cosmos Mellen
0:19:24
developing pharmaceutical medicines. So we had to do that. And the best way to do that is set it up as a company, right, that can raise investment. And we also needed to bring in real drug development expertise. So what we wanted to do was marry the kind of deep knowledge and expertise that we have from the Beckley Foundation and marry that with a kind of best-in-class drug development team. So actually develop a drug through the FDA process and make it approvable by regulators. And so that's what we've tried to do. We brought amazing people

Cosmos Mellen
0:19:56
like the former chief scientific officer for neuroscience from Eli Lilly and the former head of medical affairs from Janssen. Amazing people, it's amazing that we've been able to get people like that and it's because the science is so good.

Evan Baehr
0:20:09
Help me understand the competitive landscape and the race for this, but I have to imagine as Big Pharma, as other new market entrants see the changing legal regulatory landscape, a lot of people have to be racing towards this and there might be some existing compounds that they can run after. So sketch for me the competitive landscape and how do you see you guys uniquely competing in that?

Cosmos Mellen
0:20:33
There is so much unmet need and so many different mental health conditions within the kind of neuropsychiatric space that there is no way a single company could possibly do it all. And generally speaking, if you look at SSRIs, for instance,

Cosmos Mellen
0:20:51
like there are multiple SSRIs that have been developed and approved by different pharmaceutical companies. And so it will be kind of a new class that comes to market at different, you know, over time. But that is generally a good thing because different people respond to different drugs in different ways. And there'll be different patient segmentation and different particular characteristics

Cosmos Mellen
0:21:10
to the different drugs. So I suppose the way we see it is there are kind of first generation psychedelics, second generation psychedelics, and then potentially third generation psychedelics, right? So the first generation of psychedelics are the ones that are kind of most well characterized and researched drugs, like psilocybin and LSD and MDMA, right? So there's actually now, you know, a really strong body of scientific evidence showing that these drugs can be administered

Cosmos Mellen
0:21:43
safely and they can be effective for a range of psychiatric conditions. So we started with Beckley Scientific and we were like, okay, how can we do something that is meaningful and clinically meaningful and differentiated from what others are already doing? Where do we offer some meaningful advantage to patients? And for us, we decided to focus on short duration psychedelics. And the reason for that is the way the basic treatment model works is people go to the clinic to be given the drug and

Cosmos Mellen
0:22:19
then they are under supervision for the entire duration of the drug administration, right? So there are qualified people in the room, two qualified people in the room with the patient. They've had some preparation beforehand and they're given the drug and under supervision for that entire duration of the experience. And then subsequently they're given what's called integration therapy to try and help

Cosmos Mellen
0:22:40
process the experience. The challenge with the first generation drugs like oral MDMA and oral psilocybin is that they are long in duration, right? So psilocybin is six plus hours, LSD is eight plus hours, MDMA is six plus hours. So when you start thinking about the sheer scale

Cosmos Mellen
0:23:02
of the patients, the numbers of patients who need these treatments, and then you think about the resources required to administer these treatments, and it's requiring two qualified healthcare providers to be in the room with a patient for an entire six to eight hour experience, that is a resource intensive

Cosmos Mellen
0:23:24
and therefore expensive treatment right and and there is a question about how scalable that treatment is. So what we are trying to do, our focus at Bechtle SciTech is that we think we can make these treatments more scalable by developing much shorter acting psychedelic as treatment. If we can show similar levels of efficacy,

Cosmos Mellen
0:23:47
but the treatment, instead of it taking eight hours, it takes one or two hours, then you could treat far more people. It would be a more cost-effective treatment, a more resource-efficient treatment, and that's what we're focusing on.

Evan Baehr
0:23:58
And especially with average time that a patient spends with a physician being I think single digits of minutes. The thought that you would need two people for eight hours makes me imagine the entire healthcare system just completely crashing. So you guys being able to deliver something

Evan Baehr
0:24:14
of a similar outcome in an eighth of the time or less is pretty amazing. I also see that you talk about on the site you're developing work in what you call psychological support and digital. And maybe you can talk about that.

Evan Baehr
0:24:26
I imagine in other pharmaceutical development pathways, the race is who can make the pill and get healthcare insurance to reimburse it, and then coach doctors on how to prescribe it, and good luck. It sounds like you guys wanna be doing much more

Evan Baehr
0:24:40
than just making the compound. What does that entail?

Cosmos Mellen
0:24:43
So yeah, look, it's a really good question, and the whole field of psychedelic drug development is figuring this out together. And the reason for that, to your point, is that this treatment paradigm is very different to the normal treatment paradigm. If you just look back at what we were talking about with SSRIs, right,

Cosmos Mellen
0:25:04
essentially, you'll go to the doctor with depression, you'll be given a prescription for SSRIs, and you'll say, take this pill every day and hopefully after 8 to 12 weeks you should feel better and then you stay on the treatment until your psychiatrist or GP tells you you can taper off. But some people stay on those treatments for you know years and taking a pill every day.

Cosmos Mellen
0:25:31
That is very different to what this treatment paradigm involves which is really you say okay what we're looking at is a single administration of a large dose of a psychedelic that is meant to induce a profound subjective experience in the patient and that is delivered in like under supervision in a clinic right it's not the drug entirely on its own it is also there is psychological support offered to the patient because it's a big experience that people are being given and therefore they need to be prepared for that

Cosmos Mellen
0:26:10
experience and they need to be supported during the experience and they need to be given some support to try and process the experience after the experience as well. So that's what the psychological support involves. It's the combination of those two things. And so the psychological support and the clinic where the drug is being delivered is in old school psychedelic research terms, is basically designed to optimize your set and setting to make the most of the psychedelic experience basically.

Cosmos Mellen
0:26:42
And then we can touch on digital. The idea for digital really is like, can we find ways to support the patients, but also use digital tools to try and A, help prepare them beforehand, B, take load off the kind of, reduce the burden on the healthcare providers, and C, potentially ways to follow on the treatment by providing kind of additional kind of digital interventions in the future that help people stay well as well.

Evan Baehr
0:27:16
You've worn a few different hats. You've been in and around a few different arenas, obviously non-profits. You were on the media side. You're very familiar with how academia can drive and advance research.

Evan Baehr
0:27:30
You're probably somewhat familiar with what sort of big companies like Big Pharma can do. Contrast a little bit, what advantages does it give you and how is it different to be tackling this problem by building a scalable venture-backed business? What is unique about that vehicle?

Cosmos Mellen
0:27:51
Good question. I mean, look, I think they all have their pros and cons and I think they Important parts to play in in this overall movement right so non profits like the foundation have been really instrumental in getting. This research picked up to be able to do things that i'm gonna make you money but are extremely valuable to the kind of comments right and and i think there's there are things that non profits can do that venture-backed companies simply can't do. And so there's huge value in those.

6
0:28:32
Like what?

5
0:28:33
What's wrong with that?

Evan Baehr
0:28:34
They can lose money indefinitely. That's something they can do. I'm skeptical because I think a lot of non-profits end up in a business where your customer as a non-profit is the donor and your product to that customer is the marketing material that's trying to make the case that you're making a difference. And I think that creates a lot of inefficiencies where,

Evan Baehr
0:28:56
on the for-profit side, I mean, your customer and your investors are ruthless. What's the case for what role and what advantages can a non-profit have in this ecosystem?

Cosmos Mellen
0:29:06
I mean, I can give a concrete example, right? So, the work that the Bechtle Foundation did between, let's say, 1998 and 2015, where it initiated the first ever brain imaging studies on psilocybin and LSD, which showed for the first time a neuroscientific explanation for how psychedelics

Cosmos Mellen
0:29:29
can work in the brain and actually might be helpful in treating mental health conditions. It then did these small proof of concepts with actually Matt Johnson at Johns Hopkins and did psilocybin for tobacco addiction study, which showed a proof of concept for that. Now, it also developed the first ever treatment resistant depression clinical trial for psilocybin treatment resistant depression. Now, that over a time frame of 20 years, right?

Cosmos Mellen
0:30:04
I mean, now there are many, many, many more studies that have been done. A biotech company like mine simply couldn't possibly have survived that long being that far away from market and being that early in a taboo subject.

Cosmos Mellen
0:30:25
It just wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for non-profits like MAPS and the Beckley Foundation and Hefta initiating and supporting the early research that validated the subject so that then companies like us, we could develop and show, hey, look at all this exciting science. Guys, give us some money and we'll take this and develop it into a product. But we just We just couldn't have done that. So do you see, like without the non-profit playing its part,

Cosmos Mellen
0:30:54
we simply wouldn't have a psychedelic

Evan Baehr
0:30:56
drug development industry. I've been persuaded. I like your line of argumentation. I think that the interesting thing is we will meet many young people who want to go tackle a problem.

Evan Baehr
0:31:06
And because of the nature of their motivation, something that feels like it's good for the commons, the assumption is that you should tackle it

4
0:31:14
through a non-profit vehicle.

Evan Baehr
0:31:15
And obviously your excellent points about, gosh, we should actually be encouraged by the massive amounts of generosity and philanthropy around the world. People and foundations and ultra-high net worth individuals want to, out of the generosity,

Evan Baehr
0:31:27
spur on the good of the commons through support of these critical areas of research. And then your point, what you're doing now is by capitalizing this venture-backed startup, by being able to recruit and pay for and build the culture and afford the technology

Evan Baehr
0:31:42
and the marketing and the storytelling. Private capital and a amazing culture about changing the world are some of the ingredients really needed to commercialize and take some of the stuff made possible by the non-profits and really bring it into the market.

Evan Baehr
0:31:57
And I love also the work that you guys are doing on the technology side, just this really interesting area of after the treatment, what does integration look like and how is a patient's journey continue to be supported. And so in my mind, it's almost the, it's you need the excellence of product development that you'd see in a headspace or any of the sort of the mindfulness or coaching apps combined with these compounds that you're developing is a really novel, wild way to imagine treatment

Evan Baehr
0:32:24
in the future. I bet you get this a lot. Would you just cast a little bit, in a decade from now, do you imagine many people being able to access psychedelics through prescription,

Evan Baehr
0:32:38
through over-the-counter? How will technology play into this? What are some things that you might imagine we'd see in 10 years from now?

Cosmos Mellen
0:32:44
Yeah, no, look, I think it's a good question, and I think it's really, a really, really exciting time. Having had the benefit of watching this field over the last 25 years, through partly the Beckley Foundation, et cetera,

Cosmos Mellen
0:33:02
it is amazing the speed and momentum at which things are kind of happening now, right? And we've reached a tipping point. I genuinely don't believe there's turning back. I believe in a decade from now, multiple psychedelics will be prescribable, available legal medicines for a whole range of psychiatric conditions. And I think there will

Cosmos Mellen
0:33:26
also be the kind of next iteration will be an enormous amount of innovation around the technologies can help supplement and optimize the kind of psychedelic treatment itself. There's already kind of early signs of what people are looking at with virtual reality and with digital therapeutic. That's another wave of innovation that will happen.

Cosmos Mellen
0:33:49
That's kind of like waiting in the wings. A lot to happen over the next decade.

Evan Baehr
0:33:52
Maybe you can end here on a bit of a philosophical or even theological reflection. So hear me out. When we think about the development of treatments for disease, let's say for a particular kind of cancer, a compound gets developed and it gets approved and gets rolled out and so across at the public health level, we have people that were going to have a disease now don't

Evan Baehr
0:34:16
have that disease and they can continue on living a healthy life. Psychedelics feels like a really different adventure for our society. To see that we've had a 50% growth in depression, there's sort of this society-wide lament or depression or just difficulty encountering the world. And as we've discovered on this call,

Evan Baehr
0:34:42
it's not that this compound has this particular serotonin reuptake pathway that now you have more serotonin in your brain, we fix it. Actually, the method of treatment, the way it works, is you could possibly have hundreds of millions of billion people in this world go through a journey

Evan Baehr
0:35:04
where they get a much deeper view of self. We're not talking about compounds that target particular cancer cells to stop them from growing. We're talking about helping many people in the world have a much more intimate connection with themselves.

Evan Baehr
0:35:21
Reflect on that, like imagine a use case where much of society is much more tied in to who they are with the right view of themself. What does that mean?

Cosmos Mellen
0:35:29
Well, look, that's what I'm in it for. So I think you're saying it in a really interesting way. The one nuance that I would think about, it's not just your sense of self, it's your sense of connectedness. Connection is a term that I think comes up frequently,

Cosmos Mellen
0:35:52
and psychedelics can help reestablish connection. That's just a personal view. But I think why it's important is that it's not just about connecting to yourself, it's about connecting to those around you and to nature and to the world. And if you think, if you expand those kind of rings of connection out and think about it on a kind of scaled level, the potential for changing and improving

Cosmos Mellen
0:36:23
Our society is absolutely enormous, right? So if people have a fuller, deeper connection with not only themselves, but their loved ones and even humanity in general and even the natural world, think of all the good things that could come about that I think we all know we want to happen over the next few decades.

Evan Baehr
0:36:47
There's a great irony. I had an early stint working at Facebook during the early days and a version of the early mission statement of Facebook was making the world a more connected place. And so just the great, sweet, sad irony to think that...

Cosmos Mellen
0:37:06
Yes, like the opposite of that.

Evan Baehr
0:37:08
What we've been running after is this massive innovation in technology and digital connectedness, which in these early days seems to be a massive driver of a lot of these psychological responses and sense of isolation and sense of loneliness. Turkle's book, the title Alone Together, even when we're with each other,

Evan Baehr
0:37:29
technology somehow has cut off our ability to connect with each other. And so it might be that Beckley will actually be the real deliverer on the mission of making the world a more open and connected place. That has really expanded how I think about this

Evan Baehr
0:37:47
and makes me even more encouraged about the work you guys are doing. Thank you for being a crazy enough person to endure your childhood with eccentric parents, with probably a mom that was called Looney by your friends, and then picking up the mantle.

Evan Baehr
0:38:01
I'm just inspired by how you keep picking up different tools of filmmaking and storytelling and advocacy and non-profit, and now in this vehicle, what an amazing combination of skills and resources you have to bring to bear on what's obviously one of the biggest problems that humanity is facing.

Evan Baehr
0:38:18
So I will go forth this week encouraged to know about your work,

Cosmos Mellen
0:38:23
and really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure. Thank you.

3
0:38:28
This episode of the In the Arena podcast is sponsored by Arena Hall. Thanks for listening This episode of the In the Arena podcast is sponsored by Arena Hall. Thanks for listening

Evan Baehr
0:38:33
and join us next time for more conversations about how to solve humanity's biggest problems.