🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter that’s been fortified with vitamins and minerals. (Part of this balanced breakfast.) 🥞

Jeeshan Chowdhury raised $20 million to bring mescaline to market. When his startup didn’t make it, he got so stuck he started debugging his brain with magnets. (Founder mode, amirite?) Now he’s back at it, building neurotech that picks up where psychedelics leave off. 

We asked Jeeshan what it takes to make a molecule attractive to investors, why cults might start circling psychedelic centers, and how he turned his own brain into a test case for his next company.

We just added more dates for our most popular experience.

At $750, Althea’s Pick is the most affordable way to have a legal psilocybin journey with a licensed facilitator.

Every booking includes the journey itself, plus prep and integration support, because that's how this work should be done.

FYI, the facilitators leading these groups are some of the most sought-after in the space. We're not cutting corners or asking you to compromise on quality.

It’s simple, really. We want more people to have access to this medicine, so we made it easier to get in the room.

I came to psychedelics not because I was enlightened or visionary, but because I was desperate. I'd sold my first company and assumed once the pressure was off, things would get better. Instead, they got worse. Therapy, SSRIs, and coaching helped me keep my head above water, but there was something I wasn't reaching.

In 2019, I got connected to a psychedelic therapist in the Bay Area. After the standard prep work, we had a session. The best way I can describe it is that the muddy waters I'd been drowning in my whole life finally cleared up. I could look underneath and see what was holding me down. I'd always known about my adverse childhood experiences, but only intellectually. In that state, I could actually reprocess them.

Sharing this experience with others felt like part of the healing. So I started talking about it openly at YC events. The more I talked about it, the more people told me I should build something in this space. Sam Altman was still at YC at the time and had become interested in psychedelics. He told me whenever I was ready, he'd write me a check. I wasn't sure I wanted to sign up for founding a company all over again. But when I finally decided to, I called him up, and sure enough, he wired the money that same day.

We made a series of decisions that, looking back, were each defensible but collectively didn't work. We chose mescaline because elders and scientists kept calling it their favorite psychedelic, yet no one was developing it. We chose alcoholism because PTSD and MDD were already being covered, and alcoholism was massively underserved. And we built a reciprocity model, putting 10% of the company in a trust with Indigenous communities, inspired by what OpenAI was doing with its capped-profit structure at the time.

The market didn't care about any of that. We were in what I've started thinking of as the Wonder Bread era of psychedelics, where capital markets want processed, patentable analogs, not natural molecules with thousands of years of real-world evidence. Those “whole-grain” psychedelics are impossible to defend as IP.

Like others at MAPS and Lykos, we went in believing we could do things differently. Call it an extension of what Carl Hart terms psychedelic exceptionalism. We'd had profound experiences, and we were going to reform capitalism and build something new. But we were over our skis. We raged against the machine, and the machine raged back.

That said, not everything we built died with the company. The mescaline synthesis we developed lives on with Usona, who can run with it if they choose. The psychedelic companies making real progress, Compass and Usona among them, look like boring, experienced biotechs. They didn't drink the Kool-Aid. I mean that as a compliment.

It's not going to be psychedelic-assisted therapy. That model lost. What's coming looks more like dialysis clinic infrastructure. Treatment centers will treat the acute psychedelic experience as a liability to manage, not a ritual to protect.

What I'm excited about is something like the Nourish model. Nourish had already built a decent business connecting people to dietitians through insurance, but it got supercharged when GLP-1s arrived. Payers were terrified by the cost of ongoing GLP-1 prescriptions, so Nourish stepped in to pair patients with a dietitian and help them build better habits, reducing long-term usage. There's a version of that waiting to be built for psychedelics. 

The reason that model works is durability, or lack thereof. The reality is that most psychedelic treatments aren't going to be one-and-done, and that's actually what makes it a great business. Spravato is the proof. Nobody wants to say it out loud, but it's a blockbuster drug precisely because patients are on it indefinitely. Poor durability provides a real incentive for payers to fund aftercare. The therapy model won’t die. It’ll just get moved to the before and after, where it already fits inside the existing system.

It won’t. We're going to have people leaving treatment centers, wide open and vulnerable, without any of the protective structure that traditional ceremonial contexts would build around that state. Different forces will fill that vacuum. 

AI is already filling some of it, and that’s concerning to me. The same properties that make people more open after a psychedelic experience make them more susceptible to sycophancy, confirmation bias, and going down rabbit holes. If you're in a malleable state and AI is only telling you what you want to hear, that is not integration. 

And then there are cults. If I were running one, I'd figure out where the psychedelic treatment centers are and open up right next door. Cults are already skilled at identifying people at a crossroads, and now they'll have a steady pipeline of people coming out open and relatively unsupported. Beyond traditional cults, decentralized movements like the manosphere or any group that recruits during moments of identity flux are all looking at the same opening.

The deeper problem is that an open state isn't inherently good. It's just malleable. So some level of public psychedelic literacy is going to matter enormously. I don't know exactly how that gets built, but I think it has to.

After Journey wound down, I spent a long time in a loop of self-doubt and rumination. It was my first real L as a serial founder, and I took it hard. Eventually, through the network I’d built in psychedelics, I connected with a team doing non-invasive brain stimulation. It was a compressed, lower-dose version of Stanford's SAINT protocol, combined with d-cycloserine to increase neuroplasticity.

Together, we started exploring whether these tools being used for treatment-resistant depression could be made accessible to healthy people who are just stuck. I tried it on myself first, targeted at the part of the brain where rumination lives. I woke up the next day and it felt like someone had turned the volume down on my inner critic. That work became Pharia Health, which I've been building since.

What I’m carrying with me from Journey is the same core belief. You are not what happened to you, and you can choose to be something different. We might just need more tools. Psychedelics give a lot of people insight, but insight alone is not change. There's a whole category of people I think of as being in “insight hell.” They know exactly why their childhood wired them a certain way and they still can't interrupt it. I know why my childhood led to people-pleasing and perfectionism. If knowing were enough, we'd live in a very different world.

See how Pharia’s neurotech helps the brain access states of focus, presence, drive, and emotional steadiness.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.