Lessons - The New Mental Health Revolution | Jose Muñoz - Psychedelic Research Pioneer

In this lessons episode, explore how ketamine assisted therapy uses neuroplasticity to support lasting mental change. Discover how intention and repetition help reshape habits and thinking patterns, understand why integration determines long-term outcomes beyond the experience, and uncover how personalized protocols turn insight into real life behavioral improvement. For neuroplasticity, if you're saying that this ketamine improves neuroplasticity, that is the requirement of learning like a new thing, right? Like neuroplasticity. So in theory, could this be used to like fast track the learning of a new skill as well? Because whenever you do something- What can I say? Absolutely. Because if you do something, I mean this is probably like the off label. The off label youth. But I mean, if you think about neuroplasticity, if you do something 10,000 times, that is what you're increasing for that particular thing. Absolutely. The skill that we're working with is happiness here. That's the skill that we're allowing people to really work on. And happiness is incredibly subjective. It is the idea that you can change habits, skills, ways of behaving, ways of thinking. There's a lot of people that think in a very negative way. I myself have a lot of people I know that the concept of being inherently pessimistic, somebody that just looks at the world and if it's a rainy day, they automatically their whole day is going to go from that type of pessimistic outlook. That's all in your mind. Of course. Really a powerful tool to start thinking positively and getting your brain to kind of do it without thinking. That's a habit that psychedelic medicine can help you. Any form of habit that you want to change, you're actually in this neuroplastic window state. I allow you to learn much faster. You have to figure out a way to exercise that particular habit while you're in that window. When I even think about this neuroplastic state, it could be anything from playing the piano to learning a language to all of this is required to have some sort of, if you had a way of fast track, the pathways that are built while you're learning that particular thing, that could be an incredible, almost like a, I don't think kind of of mean it's actually considered a new topic. But I mean, the function is there from a human optimization standpoint. Absolutely. I think our company itself, even from a cap table perspective, people like Aubrey Marcus being one of our main investors, and this concept of utilizing the medicine to become the best version of yourself. Hence looking at things such as mental health is one of the main reasons why we do what we do. Very cool. Learning is repetition. It has different components, but repetition is one of the key aspects of it. So in psychedelic medicine, I really want to reiterate this because it's a very important factor that we strongly believe in the company and the industry as a whole. Psychedelics, again, do not do the trick alone. So there is important aspects such as intention setting, actually understanding from therapeutic standpoint, why am I going to go into a psychedelic experience? Why am I actually taking treatment? Instead of taking just a daily pill from a surgical industry has been teaching us for a long time, why am I actually going to try to take a deep look at myself and be able to change the way I think? And that intention is actually what allows you to have a much more effective treatment. And then most importantly, to your point is the aspect of integration. It really is the key to prosperity and long-term change. It is the idea that whatever experience you go through, whether it's positive or negative, you need to learn, adapt, and generate insights from. And that is really the powerful aspect that psychedelics medicines bring is the key to open the door to a successful integration or to a breakthrough integration effort. So if you, okay, so now you're in this state for an hour and a half every single week. So what's the actual protocol that somebody would go through once they take ketamine? In our case, we believe that life is very hectic, that people need the opportunity to heal and become forward of their day-to-day life. And that for us becomes the comfort of your home, becomes the idea that we want to empower yourself to be able to make the change that you need. So in our case, the protocol initiates by doing a thought provoking exercise of intention setting. By asking yourself questions and journaling about why is it that you're going to go into a psychedelic experience, as I mentioned before, the idea of generating breathwork exercises for you to be able to go into this calm state. And then while you're on the experience, letting your brain discover and explore these different type of questions that you've put out to yourself. I think scientists know this a lot because it has happened and multiple, let's just call it, this covers, have happened right before or during a sleep. When people go to sleep thinking of a problem or thinking of an issue and sometimes wake up with a solution. Writers, for example, wake up with a sentence that they would like to put in their next lyric. And that itself is the power of the brain of allowing yourself to go into a meditative state or a state in which the frequency in which your different areas of the brain communicate come up with a certain conclusion. That is really the aspect of the journey itself of one hour and 15 minutes. It's a deep dive meditation experience, which you have the ability to explore different concepts that are at a speed in a way that is quite unique. And then afterwards, you then need to try to dissect these type of insights, things that you're being able to see to think about and try to apply them to your day-to-day. Almost like getting perspective to then share it big. What are the different insights that you would like to put forward in your life? And when you're in this state, because it would be hard to understand what this is like unless you've actually done it. When you're in this state, you're lucid, like you're aware, and you can choose what you want to focus on. There's a lot of things that... It's not like, because I've heard with high-osca, you don't actually choose 100% of the time what you're able to focus on. Absolutely. In the case of ketamine, in the difference with many other psychedelic substances, is that you do have in a much more direct capacity control over the experience, especially in the low dosages that wonder met as a company is doing in the industry. Really, one of the very few is not the only one, a large scale, that it's currently doing lower to the medium dose of ketamine. You're very much aware. You do have and feel some form of the sedative component of ketamine being an anesthetic, how it originated as a substance. But because you're in a subanesthetic level of dosing, you actually go into the experience having control over the thoughts. It's true that what we've built is the idea of you being able to go into a music journey that curates the experience, and you very much see how your thoughts and experience navigates based on the music. So it's not that you necessarily have the pure control over every single thought, but you're very much aware. I mean, even when we're sitting here, you don't have 100% control over thoughts anyway. Absolutely. So it's a very powerful and unique opportunity for people that have never tried something like this, that have been taken traditional forms of medication, and things haven't changed the way they thought they would or things have now progressed and have the feeling of feeling a stuck. It really brings them an opportunity to test a psychedelic experience in this case coming from ketamine as a substance, where they can feel control, they can feel safe, and yet be able to feel something quite unique. Okay, so what is the actual results of using ketamine? I want to actually go into the business of building a company like this as well, because it's very interesting. You completely pivoted industry. It's like a complete 180, which is like it's also like it's also like an incredible story like it's a CEO for you to be able to do that too. It's not always easy to go into a brand new industry you've never worked in, raise a whole bunch of money, build a company, and build it successfully, and I know it's still like it's early-ish, but you've done quite well. So I want to figure out like the business of building a ketamine company, but the results. Okay, so let's actually like I want to sort of highlight what this does for people. What are the results that you've seen on people that actually take this? The ketamine clinics are now all over the US, I think, and that is probably one of the more popular and probably only legal if I'm not mistaken. Currently in the utilization of it for mental health, the utilization of it on an off-label use by clinicians is out of the main substances. Yeah, you can consider from CO7 LSD. It is. It is very new. It's an exploding industry. It's a blue ocean market. How new is this? How new is this? That's the really special aspect. Ketamine has been utilized for the past five decades. You mentioned that like 50 years, almost. Yeah, and it's also substance that has been utilized on the ER setting as an anesthetic because it had incredibly safe profiles for the utilization of large dosing on anesthetic. And then doctors, such as for example, Dr. John Crystal out of Yale University, started to understand and discover the different antidepressive effects that ketamine has a substance had. So in terms of it being new as a substance has been available for a long time, but it is starting to be accessible for people in these new off-label use. One of the main aspects of this that has allowed it is technology and telemedicine platforms that have been able to go into states in which a statistical analysis has been done in terms of the resources for mental health that people have. And in some states, you have one therapist for every 4,000 people. So it's a very interesting way of looking at this as an opportunity that never existed before. From how big the demand is, is incredibly large. And I think that as a company, something that I want to reiterate is this is very noble. A lot of people are catching into it. But we need to do this in a very responsible way. And I think there's only a handful of companies that are really taking the hard look at the science and wanting to do this from a research standpoint in generalization of data. And the true understanding of what these medicine is doing for people. Okay, like I'm assuming when there's financial opportunity, there's people that may not follow all the rules and you know, dot the eyes and grossities. You just actually mentioned before we start recording. Now there's a ketamine task force that is going out and looking at some of these companies. What are the, what are the potential negatives? Like what, what could the abuse, like within the other form of medication, the maluse of it, the idea that people might start using it, or clinics start just dispensing it without the appropriate efforts and the appropriate reasoning behind it. But you mentioned something about effectiveness. And what have we been seeing? Yeah, positive from India. So let me, I'm going to explain this in two ways. One is through a statistical explanation of what we've been seeing so far in data. And two is the actual impact that we're making in the world. From a statistical standpoint, patients that have gone through wonder met and have done one month's treatment, 95% of them have showcased an average reduction in their levels of anxiety and depression of 42%. And that is a very, very impressive, very impressive numbers. Now granted, we launched three months ago, there's a lot of things that need to happen. A lot of more of a larger population with already been seen hundreds and hundreds of patients, but there is a lot more to come. And a lot of more research and data analysis to be done for it to be. How do you measure that? Primarily through subjective serving, like the psychiatrist industry hasn't mentioned before, does things such as the pH Q9 or the J87 or the sad 10 surveys that ask you about your well-being. But what I really want to hone in is how can this actually change your life? It's not a survey that says that you have less anxiety. Is you changing your life? Are patients are eroded using their anxiety? Yes, but they're moving out of the country. They're getting married. They're getting divorced. Some people are decided that they're going to spend more time with their kids. Some people are starting to work out. There are some people that are starting to travel. There are some people learning a new language. There is actual physical and real change happening people's lives through the decision-making, conscious decision-making that has come from the treatment. And that is really why I believe that these personalized experience or personalized impact that we're having on people actually has a positive effect in mental health. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.