A promising development in science in recent years has been the advance of technologies that take something natural and use technology to optimize it. This episode features a fascinating example: using tech to optimize psychedelic mushrooms.These mushrooms have been used for religious, spiritual and medicinal purposes for thousands of years but only in the past several decades have scientists brought psychedelics into the lab to enhance them and maximize their therapeutic value.Today’s podcast guest, Doug Drysdale, is doing important work to lead this effort. Dr. Drysdale is the CEO of a company called Cybin that has figured out how to make psilocybin more potent, so it can be administered in smaller doses without side effects.Cybin isn’t Dr. Drysdale’s first go around at this. He has over 30 years of experience in the healthcare sector. During this time he’s raised around $4 billion of both public and private capital, and has been named Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Before Cybin, he was the founding CEO of a pharmaceutical company called Alvogen, leading it from inception to around $500 million in revenues, across 35 countries. Dr. Drysdale has also been the head of mergers and acquisitions at Actavis Group, leading 15 corporate acquisitions across three continents.In this episode, Dr. Drysdale walks us through the promising research of his current company, Cybin, and the different therapies he’s developing for anxiety and depression based not just on psilocybin but another psychedelic compound found in plants called DMT. He explains how they seem to have such powerful effects on the brain, as well as the potential for psychedelics to eventually support other use cases, including helping us strive toward higher levels of well-being. He goes on to discuss his views on mindfulness and lifestyle factors - such as optimal nutrition - that could help bring out the best in psychedelics.Show links:Doug Drysdale full bioDoug Drysdale twitterCybin websiteCybin development pipelineCybin's promising phase 2 research on depressionJohns Hopkins psychedelics research and psilocybin researchMets owner Steve Cohen invests in psychedelic therapiesLeaps.org is a not-for-profit initiative that publishes award-winning journalism, popularizes scientific progress on social media, and hosts events about bioethics and the future of humanity. Visit the platform at www.leaps.org. Podcast host Matt Fuchs is editor-in-chief of Leaps.org.