My guest on the show today is Amanda Eilian. Along with Lisa Blau, Amanda is an investor and co-founder of Able Partners, NYC. Able Partners is an investment fund focused on supporting visionary, early stage brands in the positive living space. If her name sounds familiar, Amanda was also an investor at Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP.
Listen to Amanda and you’ll get a flawless lecture on the current state of investment in psychedelics. But more than that, she also explores why psychedelics are on the rise. One reason is that our increased (and overly commercialised) search for wellness is a sign of a heavily inadequate social system. Classic wellness practices such as yoga, mindfulness, talk therapy, healthy eating and meditation apps are just not enough anymore to help us navigate modern life. She suggests that the effects certain societies and surroundings have on us can’t be resolved with simple “wellness” and “mindfulness” slogans any more. (Until today, no one could really tell me what mindfulness actually means - even when I lived in California).
Even though it’s popular to showcase our “spiritual practice” on the socials, often it doesn’t really improve our lives to the extent that it evangelises. It’s all too common that we just perform these practices for our audience just to conform to the current practices of “wellness”. It’s hard to admit that even after following a year of regular yoga classes that we are still left despondent and questioning ourselves. We would rather not say that we are just not able to meditate, and we don’t want to admit that we might need other tools outside of these traditional avenues of wellness to help find the way back inwards. I truly believe that we’re at a very crucial moment in time, when our worlds, the places and state of minds we choose, are not working for us anymore as human beings. This again, is where psychedelics can potentially help us.
The New York Times featured Amanda’s company Able Partners recently in the article “The Capital That Ate Wellness Is Going to Eat Your Mushrooms. Venture capital arrives for psychedelics”. A truly enlightening read.
Amanda plays an important part in introducing psychedelics to the lifestyle and wellness world. Able Partners is also focused on areas that historically have stigma attached, that often results in underserved markets - i.e. Amanda is investing in companies in the mental health, sexual wellness and nutrition spaces. Some examples include Moon Juice, Synthesis, Goop, ATAI and Compass Pathways along with many more.
In this episode, Amanda and I talk Covid times, the new era of mental health, and why there is a problem with our old idea of wellness. Please enjoy the episode!
Oh yeah, this episode is also sponsored by Dr. Bronners! As you know by now, The New Health Club Podcast features the special “Heal Soul!” series in collaboration with Dr. Bronner’s, the activist soap company from California. Dr. Bronner’s is a family-owned company founded in 1948, that is dedicated to honoring the vision of its founder, Emanuel Bronner, by making personal care products of the highest quality and by dedicating profits to promote a better world for all. The Bronner family started making soap in 1858 here in Germany, and carries on the family soap making tradition today, by using the company as an engine for progressive social change.
I got to know Dr. Bronner’s when I lived in Los Angeles and when I went shopping at Trader Joes, I made sure to pick up some of the delicious peppermint soap that all of us were using. It was just such a California thing, which I loved, but there is more to it. Dr. Bronner’s dedicates profits to organizations working in support of regenerative organic agriculture, animal rights, community betterment, criminal justice reform, fair pay and fair trade, and drug policy reform – which includes the responsible and equitable integration of psychedelic medicine into American and Global culture.
And please check out the February 27 episode of The New Health Club to hear my interview with their CEO, and world-renowned psychedelic therapy activist, David Bronner, as we discuss how psychedelics might heal Holocaust trauma.
Articles for you:
Inside Toronto’s Newest Psychedelics Clinic - Investing News.
Medical Psychedelics Working Group to campaign for drug rescheduling - Health Europa.
🍄 The New Health Club #26 - Amanda Eilian: What if Mindfulness is Not Enough?