Dylan Beynon | The Power of Ketamine Therapy to Treat Anxiety and Depression

Srini Rao:Dylan, welcome to the unmistakable creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Dylan Beynon: Thanks, Trini. I'm super pumped up to jam with you today. Yeah,

Srini Rao: it is my pleasure to have you here. So I found out about your story by way of our mutual friend and former podcast guest, Matton Graffel. And he told me that you were the founder of Mindbloom.

And then I remembered the hundreds of ads for Mindbloom that had rolled through my Instagram feed. And I knew that I immediately wanted to talk to you. So I want to start by asking you, what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping where you've ended up with both of your life and your career?

Dylan Beynon: My parents had a major effect on my motivation for building Mindbloom and really my entire career and life journey. I think as many Americans are starting to learn mental health is largely considered the number one public health crisis in the United States today. Overdose and suicides have become the top two leading causes of death for Americans under 45.

Depression is the number one cause of disability worldwide. And what we see is that a lot of our existing treatment options just aren't getting the job done for people. So the problem is getting worse and worse every day. And the reason I bring that up is because I grew up in a family that was obliterated by the mental health crisis.

So my mother and my sister were both severely mentally ill. And they both had schizoaffective disorder, which is essentially schizophrenia and another mood disorder, as well as on and off again problems with addiction. And for both of them, we tried all the traditional treatment options. Antidepressants, anti anxiety meds, talk therapy, group therapy, rehab, treatment facilities.

And unfortunately, none of them worked for either of them. And my mother died of a fentanyl overdose after being homeless for 15 years. My sister also died of a fentanyl overdose shortly after that and would have been homeless as well. And the reason I bring that up when you ask about what they did is that I think part of the challenges that we had as a family trying to treat them stemmed from our inability to access.

care in addition to the treatments not being effective enough that we tried. So my adoptive stepfather who raised me is my hero. He was a city bus driver and a mailman before that. And so we were a working class family. In the 70% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck psychiatry is the least insured specialty.

And we've made a lot of progress over the last 10, 20, 30 years in terms of helping people access behavioral health care treatments, but still not good enough. And so for us we had trouble figuring out what to do because there was stigma and we weren't really a highly educated family.

I was the first person I found to go to college by light year. We had trouble affording it. And a lot of things we tried didn't work for them. Yeah. Big motivation for me building a mental health care company was to bring more effective treatments to people to save them before they're past the event horizon.

My mother, my sister were at one point and to really increase access to those treatments. How old were you

Srini Rao: when both your mother and sister passed?

Dylan Beynon: So there's past and like when I functionally lost them. So my sister died almost a year ago and my mother was a year before that.

But I lost them when I was like a child. So my mother was as long as I can remember, very mentally ill. And by the time I was probably seven, eight, nine, like very young she was severely mentally ill that the house was very chaotic and violent and very quickly, I just distanced myself from her.

When I was around 16 years old, it became so bad that ultimately my father who believed that he needed to stay together for the kids he now realizes this was a fallacy. The wrong strategy we had to leave and she was homeless shortly after that when she didn't have us to support her.

Yeah. And my sister was about the same, dropped out of school when she was in 8th grade and went to live with my mother when we left because she wanted that freedom as somebody who was having her own issues and with addiction and that was probably, Yeah, the beginning of the end for her, how she was able to come back from that.

So

Srini Rao: numerous questions come from that largely around sort of your own social development because that's a really traumatic experience, I think, for anybody to not have a major parental figure specifically a mother and then to see her degrade as well as a sister at the same time.

So I wonder one, how you didn't become a victim of your environment, like how did you overcome your environment? Because I feel like there's always two versions of this story, right? There's the people who do become the product of their environment in a negative way. And then there are people who overcome their environment.

So what do you think it is that enabled you to overcome the environment? And then talk to me specifically about what drives somebody to use fentanyl? Because my sister's a doctor and all I ever hear is how horrible it is, but I don't know what leads to it. And like, why would somebody. Who has mental health issues, like turn to fentanylable things.

What leads to that?

Dylan Beynon: So to answer your first question, how why, where I've gotten to, or what I've done in my life is anomalous based on my background. I think there are two big steps here in my journey. So early on, I had such a deep passionate, like fierce desire, need to get out. And I think I was fortunate that I had a very loving father who supported me and gave me a lot of affection and encouragement.

And I was good at school at a really young age and a lot of encouragement. First of all, I played football for 12 years and so I ended up putting my head down in school and graduating valedictorian was captain of the science Olympiad team, captain of academic decathlon yeah played football for 12 years and a little bit in college.

I ended up going to college on a an Ivy league college on a full scholarship. I was Musk got to The University of Pennsylvania, the Warren School of Business. And so I think that was like a really important sort of first step to get to a place where I I wasn't going to end up like my mother and my sister.

But to your point, I think it took me a while to realize I grew up in a really traumatic environment. I often get asked about the scar that I have on my neck, little red scar right below my neck above my sternum. And the reality is like the way I got this scar was when I was probably about 12 years old.

My mom just stabbed me with a butter knife for no reason. She was just in a psychotic, schizophrenic episode. And I think at the time I had just pushed all this stuff aside and it's yeah, it was crazy background. Yeah, it was really challenging I'm really strong and I got through it.

When I was in college, I happened into studying cognitive science and behavioral science, which led me to positive psychology and positive psychology is University of Pennsylvania where I went is had some sort of top leading professors and thinkers in positive psychology at the time.

We've had a lot of them. Yes.

Srini Rao: And I remember one of them was like, yeah, the UPenn psychology is like positive psychology department is like a happiness

Dylan Beynon: Olympics. Yeah. And I just stumbled into it I was just interested in, I was actually interested initially in behavioral economics for reading Freakonomics in high school.

So that led me to behavioral economics, which led me to cognitive science, which led me to positive psychology. And as I started studying and reading positive psychology, I had this epiphany that I was not happy. And that all the decisions I was making to be very achievement focused and very selfish were not going to make me happy.

I had a lot of, I was very tribal. I had a lot of conflicts with the people around me. I got in a lot of like street fights. I had a very pessimistic outlook on people in the world. I didn't like people. I didn't like meeting people. I didn't like parties. I thought I was going to need get mine which I think was a coping and defense mechanism from growing up around people who weren't able to take care of themselves, much less me.

And so as I started reading about this, I realized I needed to make some changes because I'm a tech entrepreneur by craft, but I think I'm like a scientist by philosophy. And that's one of the things that led me to psychedelics. So when I was about 20 years old, I did psychedelics for the first time.

MDMA first, and then soon after psilocybin and it was completely, as you hear from a lot of people and sound exaggerated, but it's the reality, simply life changing for me very quickly catalyzed a massive transformation in me and how I related and connected to others turned me very quickly from a pessimist into an optimist and a humanist and yeah, help me get through, I think a lot of these traumas that I had dealt with and experienced in a way that made me at least start to become a much healthier person for myself and for the people around me.

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Let's one

Srini Rao: talk about... What leads somebody to fentanyl, but also one thing I'm really curious about is how media shapes perception. As a media creator, because if I saw, if I heard the resume version of what you just told me, valedictorian football player Ivy league scholarship, I would have

Dylan Beynon: never

Srini Rao: in a million years guessed that you came from the back that you did the two rows that there's in such conflict for me who came from this like Indian family where I'm the son of a college professor and being an overachiever is just the expectation.

So talk to me about that aspect of it as well, because like people that you were in school with know this. Like I would never guess the high school valedictorian headed to an Ivy League school and a full scholarship comes from a family of

Dylan Beynon: addicts. Yeah. I I Bucks friends like to talk about how, where I grew up in Anaheim, California, or we called it Anna crime is is a rough neighborhood to say the least.

Yeah, my, how far from where I'm from? What far from

Srini Rao: me? Where'd you grow up? I'm in Riverside. I'm just going to have raging waters all the time, for the large part. Raging waters.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Every time I see raging waters, I always think of San Dimas High School. And so I, yeah, I grew up in a really rough neighborhood and bars on my our windows in the condominium.

Dylan Beynon: And I tell people about that. They're like, yeah, that makes sense. I get you grew up like working class, not so a lot of us I remember one time I my now wife, who is also the head of engineering at our company, MindBalloon we've been here for about 14 years, met in college.

She was visiting my dad who still lives in the condo that I grew up in. And we got into an Uber and the Uber driver picks us up. He's like a tough looking dude. He's tatted up do drag. Like he's It looks like a tough guy and I start chatting with him and I'm like, Oh, do you drive her?

Do you like drive around here often? He turns right. He's I try not to. This is like a really rough Negro. And I said, that's from a horrible ex police like I'm just saying it. So I can't. Okay. So yeah, it does surprise people. People I'm half Jewish, half Irish.

So you see how I look and where I come from and people definitely assume that Yeah, like everybody else. It was actually, to be honest, it was it was a big culture shock for me when I went to college. I was transferred out of the Warren School of Business at UPenn because I just felt like a fish out of water even though physically I looked like everybody else.

Except maybe the clothes I was wearing, which were from TJ Maxx, not, and Marshalls, not sort of Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers. I I felt like I was talking about a completely different world and understanding where they came from what they talked about and I actually, I think we were talking earlier before we started the interview here that I listened to an episode earlier today with one of your previous guests, Simone Stolzoff who wrote a really incredible book on relationships with work.

He was a fraternity brother of mine in college and getting into a this fraternity where I was able to connect with people who are radically different than me. Bye. Really high quality humans was a major catalyst for my sort of development there. So

Srini Rao: two things to come back to both your mother and your sister why would fentanyl be a attempt to treat mental health?

And the other question that comes from that, you were pretty young when

Dylan Beynon: all this

Srini Rao: started to happen. So at what point did you realize this is actually a mental illness? It's not, I have a mother who's awful. Like, where do you make that distinction? Cause at that age, I can't imagine even trying to process that.

Dylan Beynon: Yeah. So I'll start with that and then we can talk about fentanyl. That was actually one of the major sort of breakthroughs I had that really psychedelic medicine also helped me with and as well as a deep sort of exploration and study of Buddhism and meditation. So growing up, I think one of the mindsets I had that helped me for a while, and then over time I needed to get to another level was understanding that That having a by me mentality and something to me mentality, one of the things that's on my sister, for instance, actually wrote my one of my college entrance essays on this was that she had a very to me.

victim mentality about the situation my mother. So every, all her problems and her issues with drugs and her issues with authority, which I had similar ones, were not her fault. She was a victim of her circumstances. And couldn't do anything about it. Whereas early on, I think I developed a buy me mentality that things could happen by me, that I have an internal locus of control and a lot of agency.

And despite getting dealt what a lot of people, at least in the U S would consider a challenging hand I could play that hand as best as I could. And for instance When but I still had, I think at that time, I know I had that time, just a tremendous amount of anger directed towards her, which of course affected how much anger I had towards everybody.

I remember the sort of story I had that led into the the moral lesson about having a buy me mentality for my college entrance essay was I was at football practice and I was captain of the team at the time. And the police came out, we were probably about almost a hundred guys on our team.

This is Southern California football. It's like a, it's a big program. And I turned to one of my teammates who sold weed and was like, Oh, you're like, you think they're coming for you? Do you want me to give you a head start? And they come

,

over and they talk to my coaches and the coaches look over perplexed and signal to me.

And I think they're going to ask for my help with something. And I walk over and they grab me, turn me around and cuff me in front of my entire team. And the story was that my mother had called the police and told them that I had run her over in my family's car, which was a hundred percent fabricated.

It was again, something that happened to her in a delirious hallucination most likely. And it took like hours for them to get ahold of my father while they're just yelling at me and grilling me, calling me a liar. And so I think from experiences like that it was. And didn't have yet the emotional or social or psychological sort of maturity and perspective.

I was able to use that anger to fuel me to maybe achieve in like a traditional sort of materialistic sense. But I had tremendous amounts of anger and resentment still. And it wasn't until later that I came to really deeply understand that it wasn't her fault. Of course, she didn't want to be.

violent and miserable and homeless for 15 years and eventually die of an overdose, like literally in an alley behind a hotel in LA. She was super, super sick and it's incredibly tragic. And that tragedy destroyed her life and it destroyed my sister's life and in a lot of ways destroyed my father's life and a lot of the people around us.

And I still see and see my father he hasn't yet I think, and still harbors a lot of anger and resentment for what our family could have been. And what our lives could have been like if she had been healthier. Let's get to the root of this. So we go from fentanyl to psychedelics. We talked fentanyl in particular, because like I said I only know a little bit about it from what my sister has told me since she's a doctor. And she's this is like one of the most dangerous things that, you know, around.

Srini Rao: Because based on the sort of media I've consumed about fentanyl, I would have never associated with something that people use for mental health purposes, or is it just something people start using and just become addicted.

Dylan Beynon: So overdose deaths in the U. S. have 5x in the last 20 years, and fentanyl is a major driver of those. There are, I think, a lot of reasons people use fentanyl. I think the primary reason is that it's cheap opiates. And so a lot of people who are using heroin will switch to fentanyl because it's so affordable.

If you look at the lethal dose of fentanyl, for instance, it's A couple, like a few grains of sand and it's so small, it will blow your mind. And a lot of people also are using fentanyl because they got addicted to pain pills, Oxycontin, for instance. And then the supply was pulled from them once we had the opioid epidemic and now they're seeking alternatives because they're addicted to painkillers on the street.

So my mother, my sister and I share different types of overdoses. My mother overdosed on methamphetamine laced with fentanyl. It was an accidental overdose in terms of the fentanyl being accidental or adulterated. And then my sister was actually quite frustrating. In addition to tragic we just put her into a very not affordable 90 day inpatient rehab facility.

And she came out ostensibly being, really committed to not doing drugs for for the foreseeable future. And just a few weeks later intentionally did fentanyl and overdosed which is a common occurrence where somebody overdoses in rehab or overdoses right out of rehab because their body doesn't have the tolerance that it used to, or is still recovering from the withdrawals from something like opioids.

And then they can't handle it. So yeah, I was I was, my my father was the first person he, as soon as he found her body in her room, I was the first person he called and was on the phone with him when the paramedics got there, when the police who were not very sympathetic got there and it was quite challenging.

Srini Rao: Let's talk, psychedelics because I was in college in the late 90s when ecstasy started to become really popular as a party drug. And I like, I'd be lying if I told you I did a fair share of it. And there was a point at which I realized I was like, if I don't stop, this is going to destroy me.

But you have taken a different approach. And I feel like the approach now is I'm sure that still goes on. There's a fine line, I think, between recreational use of this stuff and therapeutic use. So talk to me about that fine line and how you get from that to actually being able to start a company where we're talking about this for real therapeutic.

Dylan Beynon: Yeah, I actually don't personally love the distinction between recreational and therapeutic. From a like a use standpoint, the way I think about it is like escapism versus call like enhancement. So I think there are people who you know, abuse drugs cause they're trying to escape from something versus are using it to try to improve their their lives.

So I think depending on where we see like legalization efforts go the different levels of using something in a way that's going to be a therapeutic even if it's not necessarily in a clinical setting, but that's obviously not where we're at with the healthcare system today.

The way that Mindbloom does it, which is the largest provider of psychedelic therapy in the U. S. We've done over 300, 000 psychedelic therapy sessions since launching in 2019. As we do at home ketamine therapy, which is today's only legally prescribable psychedelic therapy in the U. S. And we are prescribing it for people with anxiety or depression, and we're helping people not just anxiety, depression but an entire suite of different mental health care issues.

So we have, or are about to launch programs for all kinds of different health care issues that people can tackle, such as alcohol use, grief, loneliness burnout finding purpose financial abundance OCD, insomnia, PTSD, et cetera. We use a psychedelic therapy modality to try to help people and which we'll talk about.

So successfully help people get better clinical outcomes than if they just took the medicine by itself. And so that includes both psychiatric care. From a psychiatric clinician, a psychiatrist, or psychiatric nurse practitioner. Just like if you went into a psychiatrist's office, but all over Zoom.

Includes one on one and group coaching from specialized coaches called guides who are helping people prepare for, go through, and integrate all of their experiences through a succession treatment program. And each session itself is done with an eye shade, headphones on, with people really going inward for the one hour that they're experiencing the ketamine therapy with difference.

music and programs that guide them throughout the experience. And so as a result we have been able to get people significantly better clinical outcomes not just in legacy treatments like talk therapy or SSRI antidepressants, which 40 million Americans are on but even in person ketamine clinics which are about five times the cost.

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Dylan Beynon: because you're not selling on Shopify and what does it sound like with Shopify?

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Dylan Beynon: to bringing those ideas to life was anything but clear.

Srini Rao: If only a platform like Shopify had been around then, I could have transformed those ideas into reality with a lot less struggle. It's really remarkable to see how far we've come and how platforms like Shopify are empowering entrepreneurs to turn their visions into tangible businesses.

Dylan Beynon: So whether you're hustling from your garage or gearing up for an IPO, Shopify is the only tool you need

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Srini Rao: all lowercase. Go to shopify. com slash unmistakable to take your business to the next level. That's shopify. com slash unmistakable. Talk about the science behind this because like my experience with psychedelics has always been that I definitely am hallucinating like crazy.

Like I wouldn't be going anywhere or doing anything. But from what I understand when we're talking about it from what you call an enhancement or therapy, this is all done in micro doses. Correct me if I'm wrong. So walk me to the science of why it works first. What is ketamine the chemically doing to the brain that leads to these positive outcomes versus say

Dylan Beynon: an SSRI.

Yeah, so one is that the, in terms of the mechanism of action the simplistic sort of explanation would be that ketamine as well as other psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin or magic mushrooms, ayahuasca Is creating a state of neuroplasticity in the brain and so neuroplasticity means your brain is more easily able to create new pathways or essentially to rewire itself.

And so for some people, if you put them in a neuroplastic state, the brain will just rewire itself in a healthier way. So if you have depression. Then you have these pathways that are ruminative and negative and bad, and oftentimes past looking anxiety is similar, but it's like future looking and more anxious and constricted addiction, similar o c d, similar trauma, similar they're all sort of these ruminative disorders where people are repeating the same patterns.

If you help people prepare for, go through, and then process the experiences afterwards, oftentimes you'll be able to leverage that neuroplastic state to help people get even more of the treatment and to better rewire their brain such that they'll have a healthier You know emotional patterns, behavioral patterns that will persist as well as create an upward spiral of behavioral and mental health.

What about

Srini Rao: people who don't necessarily have mental health issues per se? Because I know that this is also a common sort of Silicon Valley thing, right? Like microdosing mushrooms, big thing. I know Tim Ferriss and Michael Pollan have both talked and written about it. What about that aspect of it?

Do you see that as well?

Dylan Beynon: Yeah, I guess first I should say that it's explicitly micro dosing. So we... So Mindlimbs providers, we have about 250 medical providers treating patients in 38 states, reaching 85% of Americans today. They are starting people at a low dose and then titrating them up over their treatment programs to the therapeutic dose that's helping them get the best possible outcomes.

For some people that might feel like a microdose. For most it's. closer to a meaningful therapeutic dose that feels distinctly psychedelic for a lot of people. And same in a lot of the research that's going on around psilocybin assisted therapy, which is currently, I, I believe just finished phase two clinical trials and is entering phase three clinical trials, the last phase of clinical trials right now.

The dose they're providing people are a few different ones but they are like distinctly Meaningful doses, , that are, that I would think would not really qualify as a microdose. Which is usually called 10 to 25% of a full dose. So let's talk about the regulatory issues around this, because I think probably you'd have to give us a bit of a history lesson of how we got here in the first place with the fact that all this stuff was illegal.

Srini Rao: I've seen a few of the documentaries around D M T and I remember, I think it was a guy named Rick Dolin or something. who had said, he's people in the hospital, he's a doctor, he said, you told people back then that you were doing research on psychedelics, they would look at you like you were out of your mind.

I have a feeling that's not the entire story that capitalism and big pharma played a big role in putting us here.

Dylan Beynon: I think there are a lot of different hypotheses. So the prevailing viewpoint is that the Nixon administration passed the Controlled Substances Act which gave the DEA essentially power to Start regulating what drugs can be prescribed, what drugs can't be prescribed which is also something that sort of gets agreed to by the, with the FDA when a drug is approved schedule one, two, three, et cetera.

And so schedule one drugs are drugs that are considered to have no medical purpose and like a high risk of like addiction or abuse. So at this time there is a huge backlash against psychedelics. Potentially driven by a lot of the sort of narrative and dicks around the counterculture movement of the 60s that put them squarely into this extremely medically use very dangerous camp.

And then once the drug is in schedule one, it becomes. So hard to research it because it's illegal. And so that point, all of the research came to a grinding halt. And it took decades now for the research to get kicked back up again. And then once the research did. It's very clear from all the clinical research and academic research that these psychedelic medicines have tremendous therapeutic effects.

Both MDMA and psilocybin have been designated breakthrough therapies by the FDA, which is an incredibly rare designation, says this is so effective and so important given how bad existing treatment options are that we have to fast track this. And the Biden administration has also essentially put out a a letter of commitment to fast track these drugs and it's a bipartisan issue on both sides of the aisle, want to bring these to veterans, bring these to addicts where we're in a mental health care crisis and we're losing it every day But that did take a long time and and also over the time built a ton of stigma, which is also slowing down patient adoption and provider adoption given that when you look at the actual clinical research, that a lot of these medicines are 10x better products than what exists.

Srini Rao: So I know I have taken my, I took antidepressants for almost two and a half years after a really breakup made a mess of my head. And I still remember this day, one of my friends said how'd you stop? And I was like, I was on a surf trip and I was surfing like six hours a day and I forgot to take it.

And by the time I was done with the surf trip, I was like, you know what, I don't need these anymore. So I guess that for me segues into the next question. I remember Naveen Jain, we had him here, this always stayed with me, and he said he was on call with the pharma company, and that CEO said the best drug we can make is something that somebody has to take for the rest of their life, it's the ultimate subscription business.

When you think about somebody's mental health, the idea of treating it like a Netflix subscription is pretty fucking horrifying. And so I wonder at what point does it stop? Because. I'm hoping based on your research and the work that you guys done, the whole point is that like it does what it's supposed to do

Dylan Beynon: and you don't need it anymore.

I had a, I think we were raising our series A round of funding a few years ago. I had a very prominent, minus list venture capital investors, quite famous. Say, this all makes a lot of sense to me. The thing I just can't really get is based on all the clinical outcomes that you have here, which we just published last summer into the largest peer review clinical study in 70 years of psychedelic therapy and 20 years of ketamine therapy history, demonstrating that our at home ketamine therapy protocol and with psychedelic therapy around it is literally the best treatment for anxiety depressions ever existed.

It was like based on this, it looks like you're going to cure a lot of people and then you're not going to have recurring revenue. Is that right? Because people's mental health care journeys are very dynamic. People go through a lot during their life, right? Might be okay, but then you have.

You're death in the family,

,

you might be okay and then have an issue with addiction. But in general, this is gonna put a lot of people into remission and they're not gonna have to get a recurring drug like your necessary anxiety med. And he is doesn't that seem like that's gonna be like, bad for business?

'cause eventually you're going to I've cured everybody. , something. Unfair question

Srini Rao: when you think about it from the pure numbers standpoint, like in my mind, that's exactly what I'm thinking as you're saying

Dylan Beynon: this. Yeah, except for how big the problem is, right? We have what, a quarter of Americans have a diagnosable mental illness.

And that's just now, not their whole lives. We have 40 million Americans on Esther Surprise. As I mentioned, suicide and overdose are the top two leading causes of death for Americans under 45. And... Oh, that's problems getting worse. So if you can solve the number one public health crisis, there's probably some alpha in there that makes it worth your while, even if even if you're just curing it.

Yeah, I would want to be the company that comes up with a cure to cancer, even if it puts chemotherapy out of business. Yeah. We started this conversation talking about accessibility. Mental health. And it's funny because like I always had health insurance and despite being depressed, it took like just going off the deep end until I finally got myself into a therapist office.

Srini Rao: I was 36. And I went once in college, even though we had free access to it. And I never went back. And I don't know why to this day, because if I had known that I was like, man, I would absolutely not just used it. I would have abused it. So talking about the accessibility issues here, like how do we, how do you make this accessible when we're talking about people that come from the kinds of backgrounds that you do?

Because if I remember correctly, when I looked at the subscription price or the cost for this, I thought to myself, okay, this is even for me, who is not from the backgrounds that you're talking about, I was like, okay, this is a so talking one, what you guys are doing for accessibility, and then the role that...

Government has to play in this in terms of subsidizing it and making it accessible.

Yeah. So when I started Mindbloom, this was late 2018, I was, it was very serendipitous. I wanted to do something for my third company, specifically in mental health care, because everything we've discussed today Two, I was really looking at opportunities in telemedicine because I was fortunate to have some friends who had built some very large telemedicine companies.

Dylan Beynon: So two of my fraternity members from college one is the CEO of hims and hers and the other started a company called Candid, which is a very large direct to consumer Invisalign company. And so I had learned about those models and was really bullish on how that could help increase access to some mental health care services given that I grew up in a family with paycheck to paycheck and how expensive and hard it was to access mental health care for us.

I kept coming back to psychedelic medicine as the thing that both changed my life and the thing that I just saw the sort of the future's already here, it's not evenly distributed. But I thought it was too early. Unfortunately, I was at lunch with my personal doctor at the time in New York City where I was living.

Who is also from college and he, I was telling him about all and some ideas and he blew my mind when he told me he was prescribing ketamine therapy. And I thought I had my finger to the pulse of psychedelic medicine, donating to psychedelic research. It was one of my biggest personal passions and hobbies and intellectual curiosities.

And I still didn't know that ketamine therapy was available for Americans today. He prescribed it to me, showed up on my doorstep. I was just as. powerful as a lot of other psychedelic medicines I've tried that have been transformational for me. But I saw, and I saw as clear as day there was a huge issue here for why people like me and other people didn't even know about it, much less could access it.

One is at the time it was like a thousand dollars a session to go into a Ketamine clinic, despite the fact that Ketamine itself is extremely cheap. Two, The stigma around ketamine is very high. You talk about ketamine to most people and they'll say, Oh, the horse tranquilizer. Ketamine is what I learned.

That's

Srini Rao: literally the exact phrase that I was taught when I was in

Dylan Beynon: college. It was what I thought it was. And I was donating to psychedelic science and research, right? That's how deep the stigma was. And and the reality is the ketamine is on the world health organizations list of 100 most essential medicines in the world.

It's like the safest anesthetic. That exists. And so it's used in every hospital and ER room every single day, especially on children. Because they tolerated and it doesn't like depress breathing and your heart rate. And and a lot of chemo clinics don't have access to them. So 160 million Americans already live outside of treatment coverage areas and behavioral health.

And so Ketamine where there's just a handful of clinics around the country, largely metropolitan areas. If you're in rural America, you have no access to Ketamine clinics. So I saw clear as day that there's an opportunity to help dramatically increase access to these medicines by lowering the cost, get available to all most, if not all Americans through telemedicine, and do a lot of the work to accelerate educating patients and providers about how clinically effective ketamine is, both in terms of the efficacy, but also the safety.

Like Ketamine will give a side effect to somebody 10% as frequently as SSRIs. And the side effects are much milder than SSRIs. So you're talking about a drug that's 10 times safer than SSRIs and you have adverse events that people experience is also much lower. But obviously people don't know that and that's not the first thing people think about when they think about ketamine therapy.

So how do

Srini Rao: you deal with this stigma issue? What needs to be done to de stigmatize this? And then what about big pharma? Cause I think I alluded to the fact before we hit record that I remember very distinctly reading in Michael Pollan's book and you alluded to it when you're talking about the investor as well.

That they're going to fight this because like, why would basically say, okay, we can either prescribe an SSRI for somebody that they have to take for the rest of their life or we're done in three sessions, which I mean, that poses a huge threat to companies that make billions

Dylan Beynon: of dollars. So first question, what's it going to take to really bend the curve on eliminating the sort of ignorant stigmas around ketamine and other psychedelic medicines?

I think there are three things. So the first is what you and I are doing right here, which is having people and encouraging people to have the courage that's. It's a big step to go out and publicly talk about doing psychedelics but to have the courage to raise their hand and to speak up and say that I've used these medicines and they've been really meaningful and impactful for me we've seen tremendous progress toward around people sharing their mental health care stories to reduce the stigma around talking about and working on mental health.

We still have a long way to go in that area and especially a long way to go around psychedelic medicines. I don't think I start Mindblume if it wasn't for Tim Ferriss speaking openly and publicly about it. He was someone I really respected and was following and seeing him have the cojones to speak very publicly about his experiences with his mental health challenges and his experience using psychedelics was a major The driver for me feeling comfortable saying, okay, I will put my reputation and everything on the line to speak publicly about this.

The second is not just people with some platforms discussing their experiences, but everyday patients sharing their experiences and a big focus of us. Of our team at Mindbloom is essentially building what we call an evangelist vision. We found that the number one issue or the number one blocker for people trying ketamine therapy is fear.

And the number one thing that helps people overcome fear is hearing from other people they know and trust that they've tried it and that they got outcomes. Best would be hearing from your trusted. Parents sibling, best friend around the dinner table next is hearing from someone you trust you follow like Tim Ferriss.

And then the third for me, and the third would be hearing another patient story that you don't know or someone exactly like you dealing with the exact same issues with the exact same tears and anxieties, how to come right through and got the exact results that you're hoping for.

So an aspirational goal would be an aspirational philosophical goal would be if every American had heard that there was someone dealing with the exact same issues as them who has similar life circumstances and then got outcomes from ketamine therapy that's what we're trying to achieve there.

And then the third is through our research, we've also uncovered that while there's a proliferation of direct to consumer platforms and providers like Mindbloom, like you mentioned, saw us on Instagram 75% of behavioral health patients will only consider a treatment they learn about from their Thanks, Howard.

Provider, like not from an Instagram ad. So we really want to bend the curve. Those providers are incredibly trusted as they should be advisors to their patients. And so at MindBloom, we've actually rolled out because we keep getting asked by medical providers platform and program to enable psychiatric providers and primary care physicians to add on ketamine therapy to their practice without supporting them so rather than our providers prescribing.

They're prescribing, and we're providing all of the fulfillments, our blue box that we send people with all the things they need to do, psychedelic therapy, around ketamine therapy the mobile app, the coaches et cetera. What about in

Srini Rao: terms of government what challenges do we have there that we still have to overcome in terms of regulation and, of course, dealing with

Dylan Beynon: big pharma?

Yeah we recently had several hundred clients write in letters to the government. And we spent months going out and talking to rounds up to a hundred different people in the Senate, Congress, and the administration to make sure that the government understands that.

Mental health is the largest public health crisis. There are treatments today that can make a dent in it, including ketamine therapy. And it's incredibly important that patients and providers get to continue getting access to these treatments and be able to provide them through telemedicine. Today the government really backed and supports the use of ketamine therapy and the use of ketamine therapy with telemedicine.

The D. A. recently put out a proposed rule as the public health emergency ended dialing in that this would be something that they would be preserving as the public health emergency ends. I think it surprises people when they go and talk to members of. The administration, Congress, Senate, how bipartisan both psychedelic medicine and specifically medical health care crisis is it's very widely supported.

And I think a big reason for that is I haven't met a single person since I started Mind Bloom who doesn't have a first degree separation. from a serious mental health care issue, either personally or a close family member or very close friend who hasn't completely been brought, if not lost, to a mental health care issue.

And so we know that Yeah, we're losing the fight. We know that what we have on the table to treat people today is not getting the job done. We have treatments that work for mild pain or headache, right? You take ibuprofen it works consistently and eliminates it.

We're not guessing or worried about it, but that is not the case right now for the mental health crisis. It's getting worse, not better. So there is a massive wave of support from the government, which is really encouraging to see. I part of me wonders, is this going to be the end of companies like Johnson and Johnson that some of these huge pharma companies that make drugs literally are designed to treat these as I, I told you I did the math when I got hired by a pharmaceutical company.

Srini Rao: I was like, wow, based on my one medication I take, I was like, these guys are printing money. Johnson and Johnson today is the largest. Distributor of psychedelic medicine in the United States of America. They have a drug called Spravato which is S ketamine. Essentially, ketamine comes out 50% S ketamine, 50% R ketamine.

Dylan Beynon: And so they patented the filtration process to get S ketamine. And it's a blockbuster drug for them that launched in 2019 and is about to hit a billion dollars a year in sales. The clinical outcomes are not as good as racemic ketamine. The price is 13 times higher than racemic ketamine or so regular ketamine.

But they have amassed a pharmaceutical sales team and they're getting patients some incredible outcomes with it. But it's been tougher for providers to adopt because it requires them to fundamentally change how they practice because there's a two hour observation period.

They have to hire specific staff and set up their office to enable it. So it hasn't done as well as they had hoped the billion dollar drugs, that's not doing bad. I want to

Srini Rao: finish this up by talking about two things you alluded to starting a couple of other companies prior to this.

Given the background that you had where you grew up and where you've ended up, time and all the things that you've done, how has your own personal definition of success changed? And how does the way you think about money and how has that evolved?

Dylan Beynon: I want to Tony Robbins has unleashed the power within, event with some friends one time which is just watching him is worth the price of admission alone.

But he had a definition of success that resonates for me, which is success is living life on your own terms and not giving a fuck what anyone else thinks. Excuse the language. That's not in the podcast. I'm directly quoting him. And I think that's be my definition of success. I think success is like really understanding.

What it is that one wants to get out of this infinitesimally short life and organizes their priorities around that. I think Ray Dalio has a quote that's you can get anything you want, but you can't get everything you want. And I think that holds true. And so for me, my personal definition for myself, not for others is that there are two things that I want and there's used to be in conflict for me where I have a lot of conflict between try to pick one or the other, but have over time realized I can have a balance and and a boast.

One is that I want to make as large of a contribution or try to make and put my energy into making a meaningful contribution back. To the tribe I think our ancestors lived in 75 to 150 person clans or tribes. And everybody was generally contributing in some way, whether you're taking care of children or cooking or hunting or crafting a pot.

It's a contribution back, which is essentially what our economy is. And having the opportunity and privilege to get to apply my talents to try to make a meaningful contribution back to people is really meaningful to me. And then the second thing, which is feels at odds is we only have one life and I'm trying to like squeeze every drop of like fun out of it that I can.

Yeah, I. If I don't enjoy my work, then that's a problem, or if I don't enjoy my relationships, that's a problem. And so I'm constantly working on how to increase like the valence of my qualia in terms of how much enjoyment I'm getting. Amazing. I

Srini Rao: have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative.

What do you think it is that makes somebody or

Dylan Beynon: something unmistakable? I often think about building a remarkable product and really the bar for somebody remarkable is like clear. It's it's so good that people remark on it. So to me what makes someone unmistakable I'll just use the same definition, right?

It's like something that is. So unique and like clear and inspiring that people can't help but remark on it. Amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, Mindbloom, and everything else?

Srini Rao: Yeah.

Dylan Beynon: You can find Mindbloom at mindbloom. com. And part of my own mental health and wellbeing. Routine or practice is I don't have sort of social media. So the best place to follow me would be on LinkedIn which is about as old school as it

Srini Rao: gets. Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

Dylan Beynon: This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite, 36, 000. The number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system, NetSuite by Oracle, 25. NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs. One. Because your unique business deserves a customized solution.

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