🫠 Psychonaut POV

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Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that asks not what you Cyclists can do for us, but what we can do for you Cyclists. (Seriously, chime in with your requests. Replies are always open.) 👂

Payton Nyquvest has watched psychedelics grow from a fringe movement into a multi-billion dollar “industry” (though that word still makes him squirm). As founder of Numinus, he's navigated the wild swings of the boom-and-bust cycle, all while trying to build something that truly serves people seeking healing.

We asked Payton how a lifetime of chronic pain shaped his thinking about psychedelic therapy, what he learned from taking one of the first psychedelic companies public, and how he balances personal transformation with professional ambition.

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Before founding Numinus, you went through your own healing process with chronic pain. How did that experience shape your ideas around what psychedelic therapy could be?

Being born with severe chronic pain and spending my teens dedicating myself to all the verticals of health—physical, mental, spiritual—gave me a framework. When I finally turned to working with psychedelics, even in my first experience, it was clear that it could only be as impactful as it was because of all the work I had done before.

My first experience was with ayahuasca, and I went into that retreat as a last ditch effort. I'd tried everything. The real breakthrough came on the fourth night when I was brought to this radical hands-and-knees acceptance. When you're born with chronic pain, there's this inherent narrative of "I'm broken and I need to fix this." The question came up: could I just accept that maybe that's what my life is supposed to be? Not performative acceptance, but real gratitude for my life as it was.

From that moment of true acceptance, ironically, I never had chronic pain again. But I sensed that the structure that held the chronic pain was still very much intact. There was a clear message: it's fixed right now, but it's on me to keep it this way through ongoing commitment.

That moment taught me that the impact these experiences can have is really only as good as the internal and external resources you have. An experience can’t solve all your problems. You have to build the scaffolding to support lasting change.

Since launching Numinus in 2018, what's surprised you most about how the psychedelic industry has developed?

I’m surprised that despite all the talk about psychedelics not being a panacea, you still see a lot of that panacea narrative happening. It’s a popular and tempting idea that psychedelics are here to heal humanity, but I don’t agree that it’s that simple.

Something else that used to surprise me is that of the over 60,000 people who have come through our services, not one has reached out asking specifically to do "psychedelic therapy." Most people coming into the legal clinical environment aren't the psychedelic-aware crowd. They're just people who are really struggling and don't want to struggle anymore.

Most of these people are coming through a healthcare system that sold them an SSRI to fix all their problems. But psychedelics don't do that either. In fact, not only do they not fix your problems; they might show you a bunch more you weren't even aware you had. The work is on you to take the learnings from those experiences and apply them to your life.

There’s a languaging issue, too. We can talk about “preparation and integration” all we want, but it's not translating to the vast majority of people who don't know much about these experiences.

Numinus has evolved and pivoted several times since its early days as one of the first public psychedelic companies. What decisions have been most important to the company's growth?

The decision to take the company public is probably still the one that weighs most heavily on me. The original plan was never to go public. But it went from nobody thinking there would be a psychedelic industry to all of a sudden getting very frothy with money being offered at very high valuations. Seeing how much it was going to take to make psychedelic therapy accessible for people, the pressure to raise money was very strong.

I don't regret that decision though. Across the industry, that initial money led to dozens of clinical trials, clinics, and training organizations. That capital built the infrastructure that everything is now layered on top of. The big learning, though, is that public markets exist on financial results and rarely reflect real impact. Our highest valuation was when we owned one small clinic; when we grew to 20 clinics and training programs, our valuation was probably its lowest.

We've always looked critically at what it actually means to be a service provider in this space. It’s much broader than just offering psychedelic therapy. Even financially, the vast majority of our revenue was coming from traditional mental health services. Psychedelic therapy is very niche and probably will be niche forever. There’s much more work to be done around preparation and ongoing integration than in psychedelic administration itself.

In the future, I don’t think psychedelic therapy will stand alone. That’s partly what led to our decision last year to sell the physical infrastructure of our clinics, and focus instead on building technology and backend solutions for other providers who want to incorporate psychedelic therapy into existing practices.

You recently launched a new project called The Path. What inspired the new direction?

The Path came from my own lived experience having big moments of transformation and then learning how to hold the responsibility that emerged from them. Not every person going through these experiences needs to make it a core tenant of their life, but some will. We don't have great spaces to hold people who want to shift their whole lives into this way of walking in the world.

About four years ago, I had a lot of people reaching out—mostly executives or people carrying heavy responsibility in their lives—who were, say, two years into their psychedelic journey. They'd gotten the t-shirt, the shine had worn off, and they'd realized this is actually hard work. Many described an impasse, where their personal growth was pointing in one direction and their ambition in another. They thought they had to sacrifice one for the other.

In my experience, however, both growth and ambition are necessary, and they can support each other. We still live in a society where that's maybe a novel concept. I think it stems from the fact that in Western culture, we're lacking what pretty much every other culture in documented history had: a rite of passage into adulthood. The whole point is to dig deep and ask yourself: what matters to you as a human being? What are your values? Those questions can inform everything you do.

The Path has brought a community together who share a depth of commitment, discipline, and reverence for their own journey. It also provides access to facilitators who are capable of holding those experiences.

What's your vision for how Numinus and The Path complement each other moving forward?

I've always looked at Numinus as a more expansive offering, whereas The Path is much more about depth. The two have supported each other even in a personal sense for me, as I’ve been building a business in this industry while still being very dedicated to my own growth and learning.

I predict that there will be a lot more stories like mine, where people who are not previously psychedelic-informed come to psychedelics because they're really struggling, and it ends up shifting the trajectory of their lives. I never expected that suddenly I'd be taking hundreds of hours of therapist training, apprenticing with Indigenous groups, and going through all that I went through.

Not everybody who has a psychedelic experience through Numinus will want that, but there will inevitably be some who do and crave something deeper than what a clinic can offer. I’m not suggesting that everyone follow the same path as me into psychedelic therapy. Maybe what we really need is accountants who are psychedelic-informed to help the culture shift.

Either way, it's good to have a landing pad for people who want to move deeper in their journey. There are more people like that than you might think. These changes just creep up on people at different rates.

Want more from Payton?

Check out the psychedelic therapy training programs and clinical trials recruiting now at Numinus, or apply to join The Path. (Tell 'em Tricycle Day sent ya to jump to the front of the line.)

UNTIL NEXT TIME

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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.