Decoding Amanita muscaria: A New Era of Mushroom Healing

Podcast Highlights

• The path to Psyched Wellness.
• Why Psyched Wellness utilizes an Amanita extract vs. the whole mushroom.
• Amanita muscaria history and lore.
• Exploring the science of Amanita muscaria and Psyched Wellness’s “Calm” extract, AME-1.
• Calm’s dose-dependent effects and benefits.
• Anecdotal evidence on Amanita muscaria for sleep, gut health, and addiction.
• Calm’s market advantage as a legal food supplement.
• Jeffrey’s vision for Psyched Wellness’s future.
• How Psyched Wellness is educating consumers about Amanita muscaria.

Show Links

1. Psyched Wellness
2. Jeffrey on LinkedIn
3. Psyched Wellness on Instagram
4. Psyched Wellness on Twitter
5. Psyched Wellness on Facebook
6. Psyched Wellness on YouTube
7. Psyched Wellness on LinkedIn
8. Psyched Wellness’s preclinical study results
9. Professor David Nutt’s study: Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis
10. Radical Science
11. Ep. 172: Paul Stamets & Pamela Kryskow, M.D.
12. Ep. 189: JW Ross
13. The Ultimate Guide to Amanita muscaria
14. Ep. 190: Jonathan Lu & Shauheen Etminan, Ph.D.
15. Oura Ring
16. (blog) The Mushroom that Became Santa Claus
17. Types of Psychedelic Mushrooms; beyond Psilocybe cubensis

This episode is brought to you by Psyched Wellness. Their product, Calm, is an over-the-counter Amanita muscaria extract that may help to reduce stress, ease muscular tension and promote restorative sleep. Their team of leading scientists and wellness professionals has managed to successfully distill the restorative and healing elements from the Amanita muscaria mushroom. To be one of the first to try this breakthrough product, go to shop.psyched-wellness.com and use the code THIRDWAVE23 to get 15% off when ordering.

This podcast is brought to you by Third Wave’s Mushroom Grow Kit. The biggest problem for anyone starting to explore the magical world of mushrooms is consistent access from reputable sources. That’s why we’ve been working on a simple, elegant (and legal!) solution for the past several months. Third Wave Mushroom Grow Kit and Course has the tools you need to grow mushrooms along with an in-depth guide to finding spores.

Looking for an aligned retreat, clinic, therapist or coach? Our directory features trusted and vetted providers from around the world. Find psychedelic support or apply to join Third Wave’s Directory today.

Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.2 Paul Austin: Welcome back to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave. Today, I'm speaking with Jeff Stevens, the CEO of Psyched Wellness.

0:00:09.0 Jeffrey Stevens: So everyone recognizes the red and weight mushroom cap, but they don't really understand it. The psychedelic industry will use it when talking about magic mushrooms, when they're really talking about psilocybin, it's the image that they use. So there's a lot of education that needs to happen. So, having stories like Santa and soma and the Berserkers that we can pull to and say, okay, well, this has been around for a long time and here's the historical use and suggested use that has been in, but actually, here's the science today that supports it. And I think that's kind of how we work with that.

0:00:41.0 Paul Austin: Welcome to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, audio mycelium connecting you to the luminaries and thought leaders of the psychedelic renaissance. We bring you illuminating conversations with scientists, therapists, entrepreneurs, coaches, doctors and shamanic practitioners, exploring how we can best use psychedelic medicine to accelerate personal healing, peak performance and collective transformation.

0:01:16.8 Paul Austin: Hey listeners, we're excited to announce Psyched Wellness as our newest podcast sponsor. Their product, Calm, has been developed by leading scientists and wellness professionals and is an over-the-counter Amanita muscaria extract that may help to reduce stress, ease muscular tension and promote restorative sleep. For the first time in history, they've managed to successfully distill the restorative and healing elements from the Amanita muscaria mushroom. Their lab tested Amanita muscaria extract is detoxified and safe for consumption. If you'd like to be one of the first to try this breakthrough product, you can go to shop.psyched-wellness.com, that's shop.psyched-wellness.com and use the code THIRDWAVE23 to get 15% off when ordering. That's shop.psyched, P-S-Y-C-H-E-D, psyched-wellness.com and use the code THIRDWAVE23 to get 15% off when ordering.

0:02:28.4 Paul Austin: Hey, listeners, this is Paul Austin, founder and CEO at Third Wave, and I am so excited to have Jeff Stevens on the podcast today. Today, we go deep into Amanita muscaria, a Siberian mushroom, the red and white spotted mushroom that we know from Santa Claus, that we know from Siberian Shamans. And what we talk about in particular today is Psyched Wellness and a supplement that they've rolled out to help with sleep and anxiety that is derived from the Amanita muscaria. They've taken it through a certain extraction process, and it really is a beautiful medicine. I've worked with it myself, it really helps with anxiety. So, just a little bit more background on Jeff, Jeff has over 20 years of experience in capital markets, and has been an officer and director with several different public companies, in fact, he's taken three companies public, built teams and structured multiple M&A transactions while building a successful business. So again, we go into Psyched Wellness, Amanita muscaria, why and how it's useful for sleep and anxiety. If you've been looking to work with this mushroom, this tincture is a really good way to do that, and we talk about why in the podcast. Anyway, that's it for now. I do hope you enjoy my conversation with Jeff Stevens.

0:03:49.0 Paul Austin: Hey, listeners, welcome back to The Psychedelic Podcast. Today, we have Jeff Stevens, the CEO and director of Psyched Wellness, an innovative public company in the psychedelic space that is working with micro doses of Amanita muscaria, which we're gonna focus a lot on in our conversation today. Jeff, it's great to have you. Thanks for joining us.

0:04:10.6 Jeffrey Stevens: It's great to be here. Thanks so much for taking the time and having the interest in Psyched Wellness.

0:04:17.9 Paul Austin: Absolutely. When we were talking right before we went live, you mentioned, I think, that you were the third or fourth company to go public in the psychedelic space. At this point in time, I believe there are probably 45 to 50 companies that have gone public in the initial gold rush. And one of the key distinctions between your company and a lot of other companies is you're really looking at, how do we start to generate revenue, come to market with a product that people actually can utilize? And the way you've done that is very innovative. So I really, as I mentioned before, really wanna focus a lot of our time today, on Amanita muscaria, on the extract, on microdosing and all of that. But before we get into that, you come from a, I would say, not typical psychedelic background, and I'd love for you to just talk a little bit about, how did you become involved in the psychedelic space, how did working in cannabis prior to the psychedelic space help you or maybe even hinder you, and what is it that you are most excited about with running Psyched Wellness and just having a presence in this emerging industry?

0:05:25.6 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah, for sure. Paul, thanks a lot. Yeah, very passionate about all of those things, so happy to start at the beginning and work our way through it. Starting Psyched Wellness, it was myself and a core group of people that I've worked with previously on Bay Street, which is our Wall Street, just smaller, and putting deals together and working on building teams, financing, taking companies public. So my background was Institutional Sales and Trading, so not your typical psychedelic CEO background, although most of us probably have tried them just for different purposes, less spiritual and more so on Bay street sort of on the Thursday night scene. But I think for me personally, it was really just about looking at an opportunity, so working with this group, we'd worked on deals previously, sorry. And the idea was, let's build a team and start a company early. We looked at what was happening in the psychedelics, and we felt that there was gonna be a similar type of enthusiasm for that as we saw in cannabis eight, 10 years prior to that. So we built a team and we built our Board and Advisory Board, and we actually found the compound afterwards. So we actually identified Amanita muscaria after we'd already decided that we're gonna raise money and go after this.

0:06:38.1 Jeffrey Stevens: Obviously, the easy, lower-hanging fruit would have been doing something psilocybin, ketamine, DMT, but we identified Amanita muscaria, and what we really liked about it is we'd never heard anyone else say it before. So we found this mushroom that if you did a quick Google search, said is poisonous, and that's why most people sort of passed on and looked at other things. We rolled up our sleeves, we did toxicology, we did those studies to ensure that we could get a safe extract. And then from there, with our scientific board... For any of your listeners who are likely to be familiar with Dr. David Nutt, he's one of our board members. He joined initially as an advisor, 'cause we cold called him and he's like... He's on the scientific advisory board for COMPASS Pathways, and here's this little start-up, private company in Canada calling him up and saying, "Hey, we'd really like you to work with us on Amanita muscaria." And he's like, "You guys are crazy. I love it." He had actually written a paper on amanita about 20 years ago, and it just sort of dropped. Nothing really came of it. So he said, "Listen, I'll join as an advisor, and if I'm comfortable with the way you guys are moving forward, we can talk about joining as a full board member."

0:07:42.2 Jeffrey Stevens: So fast forward six to eight months, we go from funding privately to an RTO process of getting the company listed. Professor Nutt joined as a full board member, and was actually leading our pre-clinical studies that we did with KGK Science, which is a licensed contract research org here in Canada. So we spent about two years doing the scientific work-up, and our goal always was to move towards a new dietary ingredient and bringing this to market, because amanita had never been a scheduled drug. We had a unique opportunity to work with it as a food supplement rather than as a scheduled drug. And so instead of going directly into studying clinical trials and getting into that path, we had an opportunity where we could actually monetize this, create a brand, bring something to market which really would distinguish us from the peer group, because no one else really had that opportunity. So that was the focus and that's where we are, fast forward three years, we're now selling a product in the United States, under the Self GRAS. So we completed all those scientific studies, the pre-clinical studies, the safety studies, toxicology studies, and we took that... Compiled that into a dossier and submitted it for review. So as I said, we're now at a point where we've got a food supplement product in the market, which we market it for people to help them reduce their stress levels and relax.

0:09:08.3 Jeffrey Stevens: And generally speaking, you're gonna have a pretty restful evening if you take it a half hour before bed, and what we're finding is that people are waking up well-rested, without that grogginess. So, if you think about some of the other natural supplements that are in the market, or CBD, for example, Melatonin, often times people will feel a little bit groggy when they wake up the next day. And what we believe that to be, and we're doing some studies, not deep studies, but we're taking that data, that anecdotal data, and what we're determining is that people seem to be getting into a deeper sleep, so that REM sleep, and that's what's allowing them to recharge and feel well-rested. So there's lots more to do with this mushroom, we're very excited to have that first product out, and we look forward to doing more studies on it because we think we're just scratching the surface. But yeah, that's sort of a long-winded answer to your first question.

0:10:00.6 Paul Austin: Now, what's coming up is the... Let's say the ancient Vikings used to eat a mushroom that essentially would make them go berserk...

0:10:12.6 Jeffrey Stevens: The Berserkers.

0:10:12.7 Paul Austin: Yeah, these Berserkers. And anthropologically or historically, whatever, there's some hypotheses that this may be or may have been the Amanita muscaria. Not necessarily, some people also say psilocybin. And so to hear you talk about an amanita extract that's used for calm, peace, relaxation, is an interesting counterpoint to the way that I've always heard about amanita talked about, is as this really potent psychedelic that must be consumed in a very specific way. And so I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about the amanita itself. Why is it that you've created an extract of the amanita rather than just, kinda like with psilocybin, just selling a desiccated supplement of it?

0:11:09.3 Jeffrey Stevens: That's a great question, and I think that's really one of the reasons that this mushroom was never scheduled as a drug, because if you were to just pick it and eat it, likely get quite sick. And so if you've given the opportunity to have two of these that you can pick, one's gonna make you sick and one's not, and both are gonna make you feel high and excited, and some are more visual than the others, but you generally speaking aren't gonna go after the one that's gonna make you feel ill. So if you look at the composition of amanita, there's really three main compounds. You've got Ibotenic acid, muscimol and muscarine. Through our extraction process that we've got, our proprietary extraction process that we use, we convert the bulk of the Ibotenic acid into muscimol, 'cause muscimol is the compound that has the desired effect for us and is less toxic... Less... I don't wanna say toxic, 'cause toxic really brings a bad connotation to it, but it's gonna... The Ibotenic acid is what provides that nasty feeling, and oftentimes, are quite sick. So by converting that to muscimol, you reduce that element while you're taking it.

0:12:17.8 Jeffrey Stevens: For us specifically, what we really liked about it is, A, it's chemical-free, so it's a water extraction process. You end up with this extract that we are able to control, so you know each time when you're taking a bottle of our Calm, you're taking 2 ml, you know that you're gonna have the similar effect each time because it's standardized through that. So we're able to really... By doing an extract, you're able to control it. And I think when you look at any of the development of whether it be cannabis or psychedelics as this moves forward, I think what you're gonna see being a key driver is the ability to control the process and standardize it so that people understand they're gonna receive something that has the same effect or similar effect each time. And so, the approach that we've taken was always to do that, to do that next level, so it's a CGMP facility that we work within. We've got third-party lab testing of our batches, everything's controlled properly so that each time you get a bottle, you know that you're getting 2 ml and you're gonna have the same effect. But I think really for us with amanita, the history of the mushroom is incredibly important. And we look to that, because you don't have something that's been used for 5000 years through various geographic locations and their different communities, without wanting to look at that, honor it, and also use that for part of your evidence that this can be a safe mushroom for human consumption.

0:13:44.6 Jeffrey Stevens: We're not the first ones to bring it here. The Siberian shamans have been using it forever, really, in their ceremonial purposes. In parts of Japan, they still boil it and eat it as part of their culinary experience. So there's a long history of this mushroom being used not just for the medicinal side of it, but also for the culinary side.

0:14:10.3 Paul Austin: Hey, listeners, Paul Austin here. We'll be right back to this conversation with Jeff Stevens after a brief word.

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0:16:02.4 Paul Austin: I'd love to go into a little bit more detail around the history, and I will just highlight or amplify a few key things that I am aware of that have been talked about. One is the use of amanita as part of Soma, this ancient brew that was talked about in the Upanishads. I think Gordon Wasson said it was amanita, Albert Hoffman came back and said maybe it was psilocybin. So there's been some discussion of amanita in ancient India. There's also been, as you mentioned, the word Shaman, which is Siberian Shamans, we think, utilized amanita. There's even stories of how the myth of Santa Claus comes from...

0:16:46.7 Jeffrey Stevens: Exactly.

0:16:47.6 Paul Austin: The use of amanita. So I'd love if you could just... Sort of a fun, slight tangent, detour, what is that sort of anthropological context of the humans relationship with amanita?

0:17:00.7 Jeffrey Stevens: Well, you hit on some of the more popular ones that people will talk about. So, the idea of the Soma and amanita being the mushroom that's used in that purpose. It's hard to say. I don't think there's any evidence that says it's one or the other more, I think it's also... There's groups of people who are very passionate about these various mushrooms, and there exists a very passionate group of people for amanita, and they feel that the mushroom... There's a spiritual connection to it, and it is healing them beyond just... Like, whatever you need, it kinda has for you, which is kind of really cool. When it comes to the history of that and the idea of Soma, personally, from our experience, it's great. We can't really say yes or no. And so for us, it's just part of that supporting dialogue for the importance of this mushroom through history. But more so as I stated earlier, and I think is key for us and for anyone moving forward now, is that history of use, and so that you know that this has been consumed for years, so you know it's safe and you can move forward with it. The idea of the Siberian shamans and the story of Santa and the reindeers, it's a great story to tell around Christmas, we always talk about it because it sounds great and you could actually see how that could be, you could understand the shamans would hang the... Here we are.

0:18:26.0 Jeffrey Stevens: They would hang their amanita the mushrooms in the tree, upside down to dry them, and then the reindeer would eat them, and you could see how all that happened and they would come into their huts in the winter and come through the chimney 'cause the doors were snowed in. There's a lot of things that really resonate. Again, for us, those are great stories and they amplify the messaging for this mushroom because everyone recognizes it. It's the emoji on your phone, probably right? So everyone recognizes the red and weight mushroom cap, but they don't really understand it. The psychedelic industry will use it when talking about magic mushrooms, when they're really talking about psilocybin, it's the image that they use. So there's a lot of education that needs to happen. So having stories like Santa and Soma, and the Berserkers that we can pull to and say, "Okay, well, this has been around for a long time, and here's the historical use and suggested use that has been in, but actually, here's the science today that supports it." And I think that's kind of how we work with that.

0:19:22.6 Paul Austin: Man, I'd love to go deeper into that science because you mentioned David Nutt, who most of our listeners are familiar with, former UK Home Minister fired, 'cause he said that ecstasy was safer then riding a horse, and just created this invented this really interesting benzodiazepine that's like an alcohol replacement, and it's just sort of like a mad wizard scientist vibe. And you mentioned that 20 years ago, he had published a research paper on Amanita, which my sense is that was probably a big part of the reason why he was interested in what you're doing, because as as a company or one of the few, if not the only, who's really focused on this, so I'd love if you could just, what do we know from a scientific perspective about Amanita. And as a company from a company perspective, how do you wanna contribute or build on that literature, or are you not necessarily focused on that. Is really the key focus on just the supplement line and growing that and doing maybe some citizen science from people who are already utilizing your supplements.

0:20:28.5 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah, so first off, Professor David Nutt, an incredible human being, he's been such a great mentor for us as we lead this forward and move it forward, whenever we've required him to be involved, he's on the calls, he's giving his input, he grabbed some of the students, they collected all the data we could find on amanita, on muscimol, and helped us narrow down why we felt that this would actually be quite beneficial for people who are having trouble with sleep. I'm looking at the science behind how it works as a GABA agonist and looking at all of those, so he's been great. We really value his input, and the second part of your question is a little tricky because as a public company, you sort of live and die by the capital markets and your ability to raise capital and move forward. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, how we chose to go the path of CPG, consumer packaged good product and generate revenue, our goal was always to sort of have those two so instead of going, you start up as a psych-wellness and then CPG side, clinical side, and have the ability to further study this. The challenge right now, we exist in a market where they're just not funding research and development projects, so the access to capital is not there.

0:21:47.7 Jeffrey Stevens: So fortunately for us, we did do that two prime approach, where we can stay alive, we can exist and we can generate revenue and build on that with the supplement side, but we still definitely have designs on the ability to study this mushroom further. And that's what's really got Professor Nutt excited about it, he'd love to lead those clinical trials and be the person that moves it forward, so everything that we did scientifically was with the idea of that being the foundation of which we could do further work, so we've got the foundational work that we're using for our supplement, bring that product to market, we could also take that and then go to that next level. And we've identified a couple of key areas that we think our extract, which we call AME-1 could be quite beneficial and we'd like to look at that but it all comes down to timing and capital, and we don't have the luxury like a government to just go into debt and not worry about it. So we work with cash on hand and build a sustainable company, and when we get to a point that we're able to or the markets change and there's access to capital, we'll definitely revisit the ability to take this to the next level, 'cause it certainly is something we're quite keen to do.

0:23:00.9 Paul Austin: And my sense is as well, and I will follow up with more details on this offline, there are a couple of companies, that I know of, that have started to offer very inexpensive clinical trials with food-based products because they don't necessarily have to go through the typical bureaucracy of clinical trials. So I almost wonder... One of them is called Radical science, founded by the sky, Jeff Chen. There's another one as well that I know of, they're focused on CBD, they're focused on other non-scheduled substances, where it's essentially like you sell 1000 bottles of calm, you have a 1000 people who are utilizing your product, I wear something called an Oura ring. If the core focuses on sleep, could you potentially track and measure sleep outcomes as a result of using this versus not using this, so my hope, and this is some of the research that we've done through third wave. I know it's somewhat what Paul Stamets is doing with Citizen Science and microdosing, my hope is that there's a way to minimize the upfront costs associated with this so you can get more data and intel, which will eventually lead to just better outcomes and results, 'cause I think, like you said, it's a shame that you're in a position where you have to choose.

0:24:26.4 Paul Austin: And most companies feel that way because research is so capital-intensive and expensive, and I think there are novel approaches that can mitigate some of the upfront costs while still enabling the collection of certain data and details, that's my sense.

0:24:44.1 Jeffrey Stevens: Alright, listen, I agree with you, and the idea of maybe doing a functional claim as opposed to a full human trial and being able to do that are things that are on the rising force, but again, it just sort of comes down to that time. It's a business decision. At the end of the day, you have to sort of look at where you are and what you can do. So we do our best to make sure that we don't put the company in a position that it's gonna be difficult to see how you get through to the next year, so as much as we'd like to do those things, it just comes down to timing, but we're excited to explore them, for sure. And you mentioned the Oura ring while we were talking before before recording some of our customers, and we have a pretty core group that are pretty... They repeat customers and they're very passionate about it, and we just announced an affiliate marketing program for them because they've been referring a lot of customers, I thought, "Okay, let's reward the guys that are helping us build this."

0:25:39.7 Jeffrey Stevens: But some of them are actually wearing that Oura ring and they're collecting that data and sharing it with us, and that's how I was able to say anecdotally for some of these people why they're not feeling groggy the next morning is actually because they're getting into that deeper sleep, they know they're getting more REM and that's how they know, and so that's how they're identifying from their own experience as to why they're not groggy, versus if they take a CBD product where or a [0:26:04.1] ____. So I think there's a lot that can be done with the smaller scale and utilizing it for sure.

0:26:13.4 Paul Austin: Let's talk a little bit about these higher doses 'cause one question that's coming up on one thought that's coming up is we know that a lot of our listeners have probably microdosed psilocybin and they've done 100 milligrams, they've also done a gram of psilocybin or two grams of psilocybin, and we know that these high doses, that there are some of the classic psychedelic effects of eco-dissolution and greater neuroplasticity, dendritic sprouting, et cetera, et cetera. What does that look like for Calm? Let's say someone were to drink an entire bottle, they're just gung-ho and they're like, Hey, I would... I know dropper four does this, but what does 20 dropper fours do? 'cause this is something that we often think about even with microdosing policy and whatnot, How do you potentially sell a public micro-dosing supplement eventually, while ensuring that it's not just sort of... And I hate this word abused for these higher doses, this is what policy makers think of all the time, how do you approach that with Calm? Are there psychedelic effects at very high doses of muscimol or is it not necessarily psychoactive in the same way that psilocybin is?

0:27:19.1 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah, so it's a loaded question because like any compound introduced to the body is gonna be determined by the individual, so first off, when we were bringing this product to market, we were really trying to get a dosage level that was gonna work for the mass population, so something that was gonna have the desired effect, but not be at a range that would be too extreme for the general population, because when you look at our GRAS approvals our dosage of Calm is not at the high end of what we could dose through that again, but it was like, What can we do this responsible... And again, being the first to market with a legal for human consumption product, it's important for us to make sure that we can build that track record.

0:28:03.3 Jeffrey Stevens: It's important for everyone, not just us, but for anyone interested in the Amanita muscaria products or that compounds to move forward so for us, it was really key to make sure that we do that in a dosage that's not going to provide any adverse effects in general, so one to two mill is what we recommend two on the high end, if you were to take the whole bottle, you'd feel sort of inebriated, the feeling that you get with Amanita versus psilocybin is sort of more being inebriated, and then you likely you're gonna have a deep sleep it's not a party drug, it's not something you're gonna take for the visuals, you could have some disassociation if you took a lot of it, you could potentially get into a loop scenario, I think Paul Stamets has talked about that, that was not in an extract of it, it was, I think eating the mushroom itself, so you're getting both the hypotonic acid in the muscimol, but with ours, we've designed it purposefully for that, so as I mentioned earlier, there is sort of a core group of passionate Amanita people.

0:29:09.1 Jeffrey Stevens: For them our product probably isn't the right one, because they're gonna want a stronger dosage because they've built up to understanding how it works with their body, and they're looking for a certain experience that might actually require them to take half that bottle. But again, when you're looking at bringing something to market that you could find on the shelf at CVS, a cannabis dispensary, buy it online, there's different levels that you have to look at, and for us, it just made sense to focus on that.

0:29:39.4 Paul Austin: Now, part of what you're also interested in is gut inflammation, and I think one of the under-researched aspects of psychedelic medicine, even Amanita is what is its impact on gut health. We know now of the Vegas nerve that connects the gut brain access, we know that when we reduce inflammation in the gut, that also helps to create a more neuro-plastic brain, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about are you planning to do more research that overlap. What have you communicated from a public education perspective, why might AME-1 this muscimol extract be helpful for gut inflammation overall.

0:30:20.8 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah, so that was actually our lead chemist, Brian Tancowny, who's the guys, I think we know that from science, that muscimol and Amanita is good for pain and it's good for anti-inflammatory and let's do some stuff. And he had a relationship with the National Research Council of Canada. And so we did a deal with them where we're gonna provide them with the extract and they're gonna do some studies based on what they think it would work, and one of the areas that they wanted to focus on was gut health and the anti-inflammatory qualities of it. So that's been really an exciting side project for us, and it's really nice to have a third party like the NRC run that for you, because at the end of the day, they're motivated to do a paper on this, so we're in the process now of hopefully having one or two papers published on AME-1 and how it interacts with the gut, and what we're learning more and more is that gut health is overall health. So if you can help with inflammation, inflammation seems to be this, but a key root cause of most disease, and if we can help stabilize the gut, we think there's a great opportunity there as well, and that goes...

0:31:31.7 Jeffrey Stevens: When we talk about that community at large, 'cause they are sort of the ones that have been forging these mushrooms and making their own tinctures and teas and using it for years, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence from these groups, and I read all the time on this and I engage with these communities because that data is key to sort of leading us that where we might wanna study and say, okay, well, if people are finding that this is working for them at this level, we should explore that, so we've got a short list of ideas that are driven both from the science that Professor Nutt brings, but also driven by this community of things that they're using it for, that they feel that is beneficial and helps them for. So it's really cool.

0:32:11.9 Paul Austin: And what are some of those things. We mentioned gut health, obviously sleep and relaxation is one, are there any other sort of anecdotes or things that people are finding this to be helpful with from a personal health perspective?

0:32:26.3 Jeffrey Stevens: So addiction to alcohol, to benzos, there's a lot of people that are using it for addiction to benzos, there's a community of people who are so desperate to get off this is just destroying their lives and they're looking for help with that, we have people ask all the time, and again, we can't give medical advice, and we haven't done human clinical trials, so we can't do that, but we suggest that they talk to the physician because if they're on other powerful drugs, you always wanna make sure, you're not introducing something that could have an adverse effect, but.

0:33:00.2 Jeffrey Stevens: From our perspective, looking at these communities, those are sort of the top ones from an exploration side, when the R&D money is back and people are able to look at it, those are areas for us for sure, the reason we chose sleep, and that was actually Professor Nutt that chose it, 'cause his opinion on insomnia is people suffering from mental health, it doesn't matter, this PTSD or what that underlying root causes, typically, they're gonna also suffer from insomnia, sleep deprivation and so the work that you do with your therapist and the other drugs that you're taking to try and solve those problems gets undone when you go to bed and you're lying bed for eight to 10 hours, but you don't get sleep, so your brain isn't able to recover and to recharge.

0:33:46.9 Jeffrey Stevens: So he looks at it as insomnia, sleep deprivation is sort of the umbrella for all mental health, and if you've got an umbrella over top of it and you're giving people the ability to have the eight to 10 hours of sleep where they're recharging and their resting, now the work that you're doing on those other issues can actually have impact because you've now... You've healed yourself overnight. To start over and do that again. So that's for us. We actually think that sleep and insomnia is the biggest opportunity globally because everyone suffers from it, it's everyone from 15 to the death bed. Everybody suffers with how to do that, so when you look at a global opportunity, both from as a public company, from a financial standpoint, huge addressable market, from a moral feeling good about what you're doing. Everybody's suffering, my teenage daughter to my parents, everybody is suffering with sleep and looking for a natural solution because there's a lot of distrust right now when it comes to prescription drugs, and I just think that that opportunity is so key and that's what really drives us because with Calm, we have the ability to provide people with a natural solution that can assist them with that again, we can't say it's going to help you sleep 'cause we haven't done those studies, but it's gonna promote those feelings of rest and relaxation.

0:35:08.7 Jeffrey Stevens: And I think that's really key because people are looking for something to help them that they don't need a prescription for, and ours is over the counter, you don't need to see a doctor, you don't need to go to a therapist, and that really opens this up really when you look at psychedelics as a sector, so much of it's gonna be therapy-driven, and a lot of segments of society aren't comfortable even, might not even know how to find a therapist let alone comfortable going to one or spending the money for one, so I think we're opening that up in addressable to in the entire community and not just sort of those who can afford insurance.

0:35:45.6 Paul Austin: I love this. There are, I think, two things I wanna touch on here. One is this concept of sleep being the massive umbrella, and I love that framing, because when we look at chronic diseases, when we look at lifestyle choices, usually the core of... The center point of a lot of these issues is stress, and of course, one of the core symptoms of a nervous system being stressed, being in a sympathetic state, being always in fight or flight is insomnia and no sleep, and so having then and I love the frame around having then a supplement that doesn't have a bunch of bureaucracy and isn't that expensive, that is natural, that we've been using as humans for thousands of years that has now re-contextualized in a modern format to actually help us address what is the biggest issue today, which is a lack of sleep, which comes from just having these burned out stressed out Nervous Systems, and I think even this framing as a taking it instead of benzos, I think it's huge because a lot of people will have tried or have tried micro doses of psilocybin mushrooms or even LSD for anxiety, and what I tend to communicate, and more of the research is reflective of this, is these classic psychedelics are actually not ideal for anxiety, especially LSD, because there's a lot of dopamine with it, it's highly stimulating.

0:37:28.0 Paul Austin: But even psilocybin is often too activating. So if someone is struggling with anxiety maybe a microdose of psilocybin is better than a benzodiazepine, but it could, there's a high chance it could just make the individual more anxious or just as anxious. And so what I'm hearing in your framing is, and benzodiazepine withdrawal's a bitch. I mean, it's worse than SSRI. It's like one of the worst things, and it's a huge epidemic. So if there's a natural, affordable supplement that is plant-based that can help with that process, to me that feels like an enormous, not only research opportunity, but total addressable market of that, like you said, is, it's huge. It's huge, and the main thing that we're having to work through is simply, I think A, it is getting more science then on how, why is this potentially helpful for those who need to get off of benzodiazepines? What's happening neurobiologically? What's happening physiologically? And if you could speak to any of that, I would love to hear any sort of speculation or thoughts. And if not, just knowing that, oh my gosh, this is such an opportunity for massive returns on human flourishing and wellbeing, if we could do just a research study on 100 people who are on benzodiazepines overseen by a psychiatrist, weaning off of them with the help of a plant medicine that is incredibly affordable and accessible everywhere.

0:38:58.2 Jeffrey Stevens: Well, listen, Paul, that's a, your last comment actually is incredible, because that's likely something that we should do. And now that we've got our product to market and we're building a consumer base, we should start looking into that with some therapists in the US and to do that because I think there's something really, there's a great opportunity with this. Again, I wanna caution, it wasn't me saying this is good for benzo. That was people from these Amanita groups online who are anecdotally saying that's what they use them for. We haven't done the trial, so I can't say that. But I think the opportunity is tremendous. And what we're learning more and more is how this can help people in various areas. So we focused on rest and sleep because we felt that was an overlying opportunity.

0:39:46.6 Jeffrey Stevens: But we're learning, just from inbound emails from people about how, and my husband hasn't slept this well in five years. He tosses and turns and this is the first time that he just fell asleep and slept through the night, changed their life. Like, and then on the other side, the people who are suffering and these emails break your heart because they're in so much pain and suffering, they'll tell you anything because they just need help. Right? And they've tried traditional routes that aren't working. And so you feel really good bringing this to market because the ability to help people with that. And if we can get to a point where we can do those studies and open it up and actually suggest and make claims that this can help for that, even the better, right?

0:40:28.7 Jeffrey Stevens: It's just sort of, it's a timing thing really. It comes down to having the product in the market and getting enough people to do a group and work with the team and build it. But that's a great idea that we hadn't considered as yet just 'cause we've been so focused on commercializing and getting the product to market and generating sales. But that's definitely one I'll bring up with the team, because there's something there for sure. We work closely with some of the guys, other public companies in the psychedelic space who have clinics and have everything. So it'd be pretty easy for us to reach out to those guys and say, hey, we'd like to run something through yours collaboratively. So that's a great idea. Thank you.

0:41:06.6 Paul Austin: Yeah, I mean, this is a few years back now, I was talking with two friends in New York and we were talking about SSRIs and SNRIs, Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, that all and how a lot of people are now utilizing microdosing LSD, microdosing psilocybin to get off of SSRIs to be free from certain medications. And again, I'm not advising that, some people do need to stay on SSRIs. It's just, it seems to be helping out a lot with that psilocybin for SSRIs, but what I found just in anecdotes is LSD microdoses are really good for people who are on ADHD and ADD medication like Vyvanse or Adderall or Ritalin 'cause it has more of a stimulating effect. But when it came to benzos and there was nothing that ever popped up because the sense was microdosing might help, but it also might hurt.

0:41:51.7 Jeffrey Stevens: Right.

0:41:51.8 Paul Austin: And so this is, I think the beautiful part of this emerging industry is all of a sudden now we're finding natural medicine replacements for psychiatric interventions. And these natural medicine replacements are not physiologically addictive. They're not necessarily all that expensive and they're much more sustainable in the long term. So for me, this is just sort of another aha. It's like, oh, this is a shamanic medicine that if used within a modern context could actually help to address one of the biggest issues which is sleep. So I'd be curious as we extend this, and even to get into some of the, and feel free to share as much or as little as you want, but I don't want you to feel like you're giving up competitive secrets or anything like that. But I'm just genuinely curious about sort of distribution, like you basically have what some people would consider a legal microdosing supplement of a psychoactive mushroom. It is not scheduled by the FDA. Can you just basically sell it anywhere and everywhere? Are there specific limitations to that? Do you have to, for example, we interviewed someone recently on the podcast, this guy who has a euphoric drink called Feel Free, which is a mix of Kava and Kratom.

0:43:14.6 Jeffrey Stevens: Okay.

0:43:14.7 Paul Austin: And I think he has to be in communication with the FDA 'cause he is now, they're in a bunch of 711s and all over the place. How does that work with Amanita? How much conversation do you have to have with governing bodies? What, how easy or difficult has distribution been as you're looking to amplify this? What are some of the concerns that people share with you? Oh, we don't wanna have that in our shop because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I would just kind of be curious on the ground, what that looks and feels like for you at this point in time.

0:43:43.2 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah lets say it's kind of tricky, 'cause we're pioneering it really. So if you consider it's a food supplement, so it is treated like through the Self GRAS, we are a legal food supplement for sale in the United States. So from that perspective, we don't need any regulatory approval. It's been, it's gone through that proper protocol and has that stamp of approval. What we do find interesting is like anything, when the, when a new opportunity opens up, there's a rush to it. And so we started this three years ago, nobody even heard of Amanita muscaria. And anytime we went to a conference or we talked about it, well, you're not psilocybin, you're not ketamine, we're not interested. You're not a real drug, you're not a real this. We said, no, we're not a drug, we're actually a food supplement.

0:44:32.7 Jeffrey Stevens: What's really neat is there's functional mushrooms, which are great, which to be a functional mushroom, you have to be edible and you have to have some underlying health benefits. Well, we're both of those, but we also have these other qualities, which are really cool. And when you actually take our supplement, you feel it versus the others where you have to believe in it and maybe after a couple months you start to feel some of the benefits of it. So our chairman, Michael Nederhoff, he was one of the first 10 employees with Red Bull Canada. He was the president of JUUL Labs. He's a CPG rockstar. And he's like, "Jeff, the reason Red Bull was so successful is when you drank a Red Bull, you knew you drank a Red Bull." So you felt it. And we've got that and he calls it lightning in a bottle because when people drink this, when they take the caps, they take the 2 milliliters and within some within five minutes, some within 30 minutes, it is, it's a sense of calm that comes over you, you feel it, and you wake up the next morning and you feel really good.

0:45:26.2 Jeffrey Stevens: So when you have a product that people can consume and they can feel the effect, it makes it a lot easier for that repeat customer to come back and use it again. When we go into the retail landscape, again, because we're a food supplement, we have the GRAS approval, we're uncapped. We can be, we could go into a CVS, we could go into a Whole Foods, we could go into your smoke shop, we could go into a gas station. So my chief commercial officer, Matt Singh, he was Red Bull as well. Coca-Cola, Vital Pharmaceuticals, Bang Energy Drink he is, that's his world. So he's talking with all those groups. We've got couple distributors lined up now who we're just starting to put product through, and then dealing with some of the larger chains and get in through that.

0:46:08.8 Jeffrey Stevens: But for me, what I'm really excited about, and as a team we're working on this right now, but there's the cannabis dispensary opportunities. So if you think about the NSOs, they've got footprint everywhere. They can't really sell an illegal or a gray market product. Well, but we're the legal ones. So now they can actually right beside their CBD be offering a mushroom derived product similar to what they're trying to sell, CBD this is gonna help you relax and rest and sleep well. And here you go. Now you've got Calm that you can offer. So we're having those conversations now because I think that's a huge opportunity for these groups to put it through. And they've got the landscape and their consumers are already comfortable with the idea of an alternative. If they're using CBD, they'll be open to trying something with a mushroom on it.

0:47:01.7 Jeffrey Stevens: Oh, what's that? And it's priced in the same level. So we're excited about that. We haven't had any regulatory issue. We're starting to see regulatory issue because one thing that we didn't talk about, Paul, which is pretty important, the mushroom itself is legal. To sell a product for human consumption in the United States is illegal. So anyone else who's selling a product in the United States for human consumption right now, who hasn't done the GRAS, so they haven't done the preclinical studies, they don't have the science, they don't have everything we have to determine the toxicology and the safety and safe dosage levels. They're selling products that are not legal for human consumption. There's a dispensary in Florida that put out a press release and said, we are selling the first legal psychedelic mushroom products, and then the Department of Agriculture in Florida promptly called them and said, remove that product, or you're getting fined and shut down.

0:47:51.9 Jeffrey Stevens: So we are, to our knowledge, the only company in the United States right now that has a legal for human consumption extract of the Amanita muscaria mushroom, because we've done all the science, we've done all that work. So when we announced that our phone was ringing off the hook, every basement chemist wanted to buy our extract to make gummies, and we're like, listen, we didn't spend two years and millions of dollars just to give this away by the liter. So we're holding it tight. We're working, we're sort of doing a dance right now with some groups that we think would be good partners to work with on certain categories. And one of the neat things we did, Paul, as well, is we recognized last year, I think it was last year, that British American Tobacco, I believe was the tobacco company.

0:48:33.7 Jeffrey Stevens: They filed patents around the use of psychedelic compounds in vaping devices, but they omitted Amanita muscaria. So when we saw it, they did it for those other ones. We said, you know what? There's a huge opportunity here. So we filed provisional patents around the use of Amanita muscaria, Muscimol, AME-1 in a vape device cartridge. We, with Mike Nederhoff's experience as JUUL Labs president in Canada, we know the vaping industry intimately. We don't have any designs to get into that. It's a minefield when it comes to potential liabilities and how to map, but there is a huge opportunity to monetize that. So we're also looking at the ability to license that tech and or sell it out, right? So that someone else can work with it. It was really just sort of being opportunistic and saying, okay, someone missed something here. And they obviously see there's value to it, so we should take it now. So, but when it comes to our product that this is sort of the packaging here.

0:49:33.3 Paul Austin: It's beautiful packaging.

0:49:34.6 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah. It's nice. It's a simple.

0:49:36.0 Paul Austin: It's nice. Simple.

0:49:37.9 Jeffrey Stevens: You see what it looks like? It's a 30 ml bottle. It's got the dropper on top. We've got a 60 ml bottle coming out at the end of this month. And that was from again, our repeat customers who saying we love it, we've changed their lives, but $49.95 a bottle, like I'm going through two bottles a month is getting expensive. What can you do for us? So we're able to offer a 60 ml bottle. I think it's $74.95 is the price that'll be coming out. And that just gives people the ability to take what they need without feeling like it's too expensive for them. But again, even as we talked earlier, if you look at that compared to some of the other compounds that are coming to market through therapists at hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars for a session to go through it, I think we're still very affordable for the mass markets.

0:50:28.0 Paul Austin: Yeah. And you're sort of sitting in this interesting position where if we look at this from like a competitive analysis perspective, just to have a little fun with it, you're not necessarily competing with, at least, from my perspective, you're not necessarily competing with these underground microdosing supplements that are with psilocybin or LSD and you're also not necessarily competing with these Oregon facilitators who are gonna use high doses of psychedelic mushrooms in their thing. What, my sense is what you're more competing with are sleep supplements.

0:51:01.2 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah.

0:51:01.7 Paul Austin: In a way. And sleep supplements that, 'cause like you, there are certain sleep supplements I take that I feel, and those are almost always the best, now just as I'm reflecting on it. And so to go back to your point around like when you take this, you feel it, you notice it and you sleep that much better, I think the fact that it's simple, it's beautiful, it's just one ingredient, some of the other sleep stuff that I take is 10, 12 ingredients. And it can be, like you said, in cannabis dispensaries, in head shops. I even think of somewhere like Erewhon, I don't know if you know Erewhon, it's a SoCal thing in LA, but it's a very high-end grocery store that has a lot of functional mushroom things. And something like this would fit right in with kind of that group and that people of, people who are really into mushrooms who are on the pioneering edge. And, I want to try some, wanna try something new and are interested about how this could work for them.

0:52:06.3 Jeffrey Stevens: Well, Paul, afterwards, I'll get your address, we'll send a bottle to you, 'cause I'd like you to try it. 'Cause I'd love to hear from you your experience with it as well.

0:52:14.5 Paul Austin: So when it comes then to the vision of and I, yeah, would love to try it. I think that's natural. When it comes to the vision of how you see this growing and developing, let's say in the next 5 to 10 years, is the core focus for Psyched Wellness going to continue to remain on this one product? Are you looking to diversify, to leverage that Amanita extract into other things? And are you interested at all in sort of the emerging legal ecosystem for microdosing and psychedelics? Or is it really not all that important and relevant to you because you already have something that you can sell legally?

0:53:00.2 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah. Great question. So looking at that magic ball five years out ideally we've taken AME-1 and we've used that extract in various forms, meaning we've got our tincture, we've got gummies, we've got capsules. We're providing the consumers with options for that. And we can also do various dosage. As I mentioned this is on the low end, it's our first product, we wanted it to work for everyone, but we have the opportunity down the road to offer a higher dose for people who want that. So I would say that is sort of future iterations of what you could see from the company. We still have designs and would love to consider drug development opportunities and moving that forward, whether that happens in Psyched Wellness or if we look at spinning out a division, creating a new company that's got a new team that leads that and focuses on it so that you don't dilute what you're doing on this side.

0:53:54.8 Jeffrey Stevens: Because I think we've got a very, very cool opportunity as a first mover with this to build a company. So sometimes you say, do you wanna dilute that by raising money to fund something else? Or do you separate that, create a new company, spin it out? So those are things that are, that we've discussed as a team and the market will dictate. When the market's there to raise capital for R&D, that's likely something that we would table at that time. For us right now, it's really about ensuring we bring product to market. And what we're trying to avoid is some of these cowboys, and I'm not trying to offend anyone, but some of the groups that are bringing product to market now because they think it's a legal mushroom, our hope is that they don't do it irresponsibly and people get harmed, because if they're not doing an extraction, they're just pulverizing the caps and making a gummy or something, people are gonna get sick.

0:54:47.2 Paul Austin: With Amanita specifically there are...

0:54:49.0 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah.

0:54:49.3 Paul Austin: Okay.

0:54:49.7 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah. So for us it's really we want to ensure that we're moving forward in the most responsible fashion and trying to get that critical mass so that we have the ability to demonstrate that this is a safe product and there's benefits to it, because it'd be a real shame, not just for ourselves, but for everyone. If something bad were to happen with these guys who don't understand how powerful it could be if they don't treat it properly and something bad happens, and then regulators do say, okay, we have to look at this. The trend is our friend right now, like they're decriminalizing and legalizing psychedelics, but you just don't know.

0:55:26.2 Jeffrey Stevens: So there's never a guarantee that that doesn't, that fickle finger of fate doesn't come to you. So from our perspective, it's about always documenting everything, making sure we're doing it properly and doing it safely. So for five years out, my hope is that we're in a position that we've, we are the leader with Amanita. I don't have a desire to look at psilocybin or any other compounds. There's tons of great teams out there doing great work on it. They don't need more. They're, from my perspective, there's enough happening there. There's no one really doing it on ours yet. So we wanna maintain that first-mover advantage, not just on the CPG side, but also on the science side, and drive it forward.

0:56:04.0 Paul Austin: Yeah, and I think kind of my core reflection just throughout this conversation is the importance of education. And this is why Third Wave, I started Third Wave seven and a half years ago 'cause I looked at all the classic psychedelics, LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, Ayahuasca, and there was just a lot of misinformation or people didn't know anything about it, right? And so I think right now what I'm sensing where Amanita is, is people have heard about it, they maybe heard the Santa story, they obviously can recognize it because it's very it's the emoji and all that, and people don't really know much about it. Right? This is the first podcast we've done on Amanita. We've had this podcast for six, seven years. We're in the process right now of, we have like 20 guides on our Third Wave website about each psychedelic. We're gonna roll one out about Amanita here pretty soon.

0:56:50.7 Paul Austin: So we're starting to get there because what we're realizing is both through this conversation, I've had a couple other conversations in the podcast as well with people who have an unscheduled substance. It's called Syrian Rue they're the Magi people. I don't know if you know them. They're great. Phenomenal. And they're, so they're selling this MAOI and it could be combined with a microdose and it's unscheduled and they could sell it, but it's not necessarily psychoactive like the Amanita. So I feel like there are these gray market areas and the biggest challenge is like, how do you as a company, and this is sort of the final question I wanna end with. How do you as a company focus on that process? What are you doing for education? What are you doing to just amplify awareness about Amanita generally? So that way when people go into the store and they see it on the shelf, it's not, oh, well, what is this? It's, oh, I've heard about this and I wanna buy it.

0:57:46.9 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah. Listen, that's, and that's the biggest challenge as a Micro-Cap company starting out and building with a compound that people generally or a mushroom that people generally don't, they recognize, but they don't understand. So when I explain this to people, I say, if you think back to cannabis 10 years ago, you had a 100 companies talking about the benefits of THC and CBD and studies and working on it, amplifying that message to remove the stigma. And right now you really have one public company who's trying to do that for Amanita muscaria. So there's, it's a big task. And to control that and to try to manage that is by not just taking the easy money and selling our extract to everybody who wants it right now, you know?

0:58:30.9 Paul Austin: Right.

0:58:31.4 Jeffrey Stevens: But we could, there's a huge demand for it and we're the only ones that have it. But by doing that, we're not educating, we're not, and you're not putting product in the market that's safe. People don't understand it. So when these people call, I talk to them and say, listen, do you understand like your mushroom's legal, but an extract of that's not. Just pulverizing it and making a gummy is not, like you need to work with this carefully. And when we work with our distributors and our retailers, explaining to them what the mushroom is, what the benefits are, and then coming on podcasts and trying to do media and print, if we had a $20 million budget for marketing, you'd see a lot more of it. But we have to be very much a rifle approach, not a shotgun approach. So it's focusing on the areas that we're gonna be selling and educating there.

0:59:13.8 Jeffrey Stevens: If you go to our website, you go to our shop page, you're gonna learn a lot about the mushroom. But what we've done to make a safe product, the standardizations, everything that we've done for that. So it really comes down to trying to control our product as much as we can and the messaging that goes with it and hope that that is able to sort of build and create a snowball effect where it goes out. And the affiliate program was a big part of that as well. So if you have these people who are recommending us, if we engage them and they have an opportunity to benefit financially from that as well, well, they're gonna be more focused about learning about the product and teaching the product because they're gonna actually financially reward from it. Not just say, you should try this, it works. Well, you should try this, and this got this mushroom and this does this. And so our hope was that we create a little army of people who can take that messaging out and help further educate.

1:00:05.4 Paul Austin: I love that. Brand ambassadors, right? For a topic like this that have had personal experience, that know sort of the high level details and it's a slow but sure process. And what was coming up for me when you talked about the THC, CBD I was thinking like, maybe Amanita is like the CBN of the psychedelic space, right? Not a lot of people necessarily 10 years ago knew of CBG and CBN, but as people started to become more familiar with the different cannabinoids, they came to realize that, oh, for specific use cases, CBNs phenomenal for sleep. Okay, let's combine it with X, Y, and Z. So, and I feel like Amanita maybe is, I mean, it's different obviously 'cause it's a whole new mushroom itself. And I feel like there may be some ins there.

1:00:52.3 Jeffrey Stevens: 5,000 years of new mushroom. Right?

1:00:54.9 Paul Austin: Exactly.

1:00:55.0 Jeffrey Stevens: But it's funny, it is, right? Like it's new to us. It's new to our consumer...

1:00:58.5 Paul Austin: Very new to us.

1:01:00.0 Jeffrey Stevens: Yeah, it's funny.

1:01:00.2 Paul Austin: Yeah, it is.

1:01:01.1 Jeffrey Stevens: I'll just leave you one thing, Paul, if I may. But, so as the co-founder and CEO, I'm also the Guinea pig, right? So I've been using our extract from that first raw form that we did to this refined form that we're now selling. So over the last year I've been using it. And so my body has had a chance to sort of get familiar with it. And what I've noticed is I don't have to take it every day, every other day. I take it maybe once every three or four days, and I'll feel when my body is like, I'll go to bed, I'm like, ah, I need a little help. And so I'll take 2 or 3 ml of it every three, four days, and I'll just know when that happens. But one of the personal side effects that I've identified, which has been life changing for me, I skied for many years and I've got bad knees.

1:01:44.8 Jeffrey Stevens: And I'd wake up in the morning and I'd literally hold onto my railing walking down the stairs. I'm like, man, I'm 49, is this happening now? Like, and now I walk down the stairs, I don't even think about it. So last year, holding the railings in pain, wearing two knee braces skiing, this year on a ski trip out west, no, didn't even take knee braces with me, and I walk down the stairs. The only thing that I've changed or introduced into my daily routine is Calm. So...

1:02:13.5 Paul Austin: Interesting.

1:02:13.7 Jeffrey Stevens: Anecdotally, and we know it's an anti-inflammatory and we know it works on your pain receptors. So for me personally, I've had this experience where in addition to getting a restful sleep and getting to a point where I actually don't need it every day or every other day, but I, every three or four days, I've also noticed that these underlying benefits for myself in that. So that's where I say I'm really excited to see what happens with this. We've got people using the Oura Ring, we've got other people, we wanna do these studies because the more data we can collect on this is gonna help us understand actually areas that we might look at this, my mother-in-law uses it. She's got her arthritis. So we did a sample, we've got a cream that we're doing some samples on now, topical cream that we're looking at. So I think it's very exciting. I think that AME-1 is not just gonna be a tincture or a gummy. There's a lot that can happen from it. So I like, was it the hair club for men? I'm not just the CEO, I'm also a client, right? But it's cheesy, but I am.

[laughter]

1:03:14.0 Paul Austin: I mean, we all are, this is why I started the podcast myself. I just did a lot of acid when I was 19 and thought hey, the thing sells itself. I'll just be the spokesperson for it. And I feel like that's why so many of us are enthusiastic about it and congratulations. And it's probably been a slog, I can't imagine it's been easy. But you have a full product. If people wanna, let's say check this out, purchase it, get a sense for it, kind of what would be a good next step to actually get Calm?

1:03:46.9 Jeffrey Stevens: For sure. So right now, the easiest way to get it's online. So Psyched Wellness, psyched-wellness.com, and just go to our shop page and you'll be able to purchase it there soon. And we'll be announcing retailers as they come on, and distributors once we get our product through. So we hope to have those announcements rolling out where we actually have it in brick and mortar stores and sharing that information publicly. But yeah, right now, the easiest way is online. And I definitely think for $49.95, if you are suffering from trying to get a restful sleep and just generally you wanna give your body something that's gonna be good, give us a try. It works, the feedback we're getting is incredible and it feels good.

1:04:30.9 Jeffrey Stevens: It feels good to actually pitch something and believe it. Right? So the hardest, when we got that first trial bottle, then they came in and I had a, we did 250, it was our first batch, and I'm all excited and I took it. I was up at my cottage, my family cottage, and I laid down in bed and I'm not a spiritual type of guy. Like, I lay in bed and I felt like I was being wrapped with an emotional blanket. Like it was just this really incredible feeling. And I woke up the next morning and I said to my wife, "It works! This is great." Like, I was so excited. I gave it to my team, I go, "You have to try it." 'Cause obviously I'm the co-founder, I'm the CEO, I want this to work. I'm biased. And more and more of the feedback we're getting from people is, it's for the people who are really suffering, it's life changing. So that's exciting. It's exciting to have a product that you're helping people.

1:05:18.6 Paul Austin: I agree wholeheartedly. Psyched-wellness.com, click on shop, check out Calm. Jeff, this is fun. I think what you're doing is interesting, it's new. It's new, it's emergent, it's clever in terms of the loophole and the ability to work with a food substance. I think there's huge upside to it. So listeners, check it out. Jeff, it was an honor to have you on.

1:05:47.1 Jeffrey Stevens: My pleasure.

1:05:48.5 Paul Austin: Social? Or is Psyched Wellness on social at all as well? Any other...

1:05:52.9 Jeffrey Stevens: Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook for sure. It's a challenge. The social platforms are challenging for our sector, right? Because they will red flag you. And that's a whole other topic for another time. But we are there and we continue to reinvent ourself on those platforms when needed.

1:06:10.6 Paul Austin: Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, thanks again, Jeff, for joining us for the podcast.

1:06:13.4 Jeffrey Stevens: My pleasure. Thank you very much.

[music]

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