← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Neuroscientist On How To Achieve A Calm State & Rewire An Anxious Brain | Nolan Williams PT 2
01:18:30
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Dr. Nolan Williams
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Tom Bilyeu
The Matrix was a documentary. I assure you you are living inside of a simulation. Even if it's just a simulation created by your own brain to help you navigate the real world. The fact is that we all see a facsimile of the world that is created on the fly by our brains. When everything is fine, we're all free to learn, grow and chase our dreams. But when things go off the rails and we become anxious or depressed, it's like there's a glitch in the Matrix. All hell breaks loose. And that's what today's episode Part two with Nolan Williams is all about. Nolan is at the forefront of brain research, specifically your brain as it relates to anxiety and depression. And in today's episode we explore how things can go wrong for any of us. What to do when there's a glitch in our personal matrix and some of the cutting edge treatments like electromagnetic stimulation and psychedelics that Nolan has been exploring in his laboratory. Listen closely to this one guys. I feel such an intense obligation to help people that struggle with anxiety and depression since anxiety has been such a big part of my life and I know firsthand how debilitating it can be. And I also know how profound it can be when you find a way to get back on track. And today we are deep diving into this complex world of mental health, helping you guys bridge the gap between brain science and what you can actually do to make changes in your life. And if this one lands for you, and I hope it does, please be sure to rate and review the show so that we can reach even more people just like you. Now, without further ado, I'm Tom Bilyeu and I bring you part two of Nolan Williams. One question that that I have based on some of the things you're saying Is, is it the profundity of the experience from a psychedelic or is it the glial brain growth factor? I forget the exact letters. There we go. Yeah. Because if I can inject it right into the site, the, the glial derived neurotropic factor, if I can inject that right into the dopamine receptor, was that it then? In a mouse? Sure. But then that indicates that it may not be the profundity of the experience that's actually creating it, going back to SSRIs. And it's not that it's building up in your system, it's that there's potentially that it's just causing you to secrete more bdnf. And that's really what's going on. Where does the data point that we need to look? I get there's. We don't have the conclusive anything yet, but what does the data suggest is the next thing to look at.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah. So the, the ways that people are trying to deal with this is by modifying the molecule to take off the trip. The problem with that idea is that it's a different drug. You know, I mean, everybody wants to think it's the same drug, but it's effectively a different drug when you do that now, it could be a totally effective drug. And if they modify the molecule, if they modify the drug, and it still works just as well without the trip, then you can make the argument that the trip isn't necessary. If it doesn't work as well, then it's kind of unclear. Right. The other way to do it, which is a way that we're exploring, is can you put drug just in specific brain regions without putting it in other brain regions. Now injecting directly, you have to have surgery. And there's all this problems with that. But there's a guy, Ragh Aron, that I'm working with at Stanford, who's developed a tech where he can package drug into a nanoparticle cage. So you can inject the drug sitting in these kind of cages and then they just eventually urinate it out or whatever, and you never. The drug never does anything because it's been bound into this cage the whole time. But if you use ultrasound as a form of stimulation, because you can use a focused form of ultrasound, just like the diagnostic ultrasound, but you can focus it to a point. If you focus it to a point in a, say, area of blood flow in the brain vessels carrying the drug, it will warp this cage and let the drug out for a second, but
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Tom Bilyeu
only in the Specific region of the brain that you hit it with. Wow, right. That is clever.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah. And what's cool about that is it allows you to ask the question of necessary and specific and all that. So we're going to release ketamine into a cingulate, into a singular, into the anterior cingulate.
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Tom Bilyeu
So same idea, cage it up.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
Hit it when it hits this part of the brain and see what happens.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah. And we're looking at pain changes because pain's really nicely measured in the sense that you can have an acute anti pain effect, whereas the longer term depression effects or whatever, it's a little bit harder to kind of measure that. So if we're going to measure pain first, so that's the primary question, can we reduce pain? But relatedly, do they have any sort of, you know, dissociation from the ketamine, you know, and start to be able to use, you know, specific drug release to do mapping experiments? And you can do that with any psychedelic with ketamine. And so is this, is putting the drug in this brain region sufficient to produce all the therapeutic effects without causing the psychological effects or do you just get a piece of it suggesting that you. And then you put. You find, yeah, this one contributes 30%, 33%, this one contributes 33%, this one contributes 33% to the total. You put it in all three of those regions. If you do have the psychological effect that maybe you can't divorce them, if you don't have it, then you can. And so that's another way of dealing with it. But it's a really hard question and it's going to take 10 years to figure out that question. I think in the short term my thing is pragmatics and just having tools and all that. And so just trying to test it with a trip, knowing that it makes it a lot harder to scale that because you have to have a lot more therapeutic involvement and all of that to be able to deal with a lot of the content. What people say with ibogaine is that they have this life review. Actually about 80% of people experience a life review on ibogaine. And what that is is an autobiographical replaying of past emotionally relevant memories, some of which aren't even really known to be relevant. They just end up being critical moments.
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Tom Bilyeu
So things you wouldn't expect pop up.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah. Which makes this really interesting and gets back to your question about high tech. And so this is a drug that marches you through all the emotionally relevant parts of your life. You have an intuition, you're Seeing this as a third party, you have an intuition of what you thought and felt at that moment. You have an intuition of what the other person or people felt or thought at that moment. You have a re evaluation of that total situation and then a reconsolidation. Because every time you bring up a memory, you reconsolidate it as you know, and this drug for 30 hours marches you through all of these. Jesus. And at the end of it, people say they've completely sorted all of that content and they're now in a place where they kind of have approached it in a totally different way.
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Tom Bilyeu
So, um, with ibogaine specifically, are. Has anybody put words to what the. The vibe of the recontextualization is? So with like mdma, it makes you feel like you love.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, it's beautiful, actually.
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Tom Bilyeu
But from what I've heard, ibogaine, like they say it's. It's hard, it's work.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
It's hard, it's work. Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
What does that mean? Exactly? So no matter what sort of emotional thing you're. You're looking at, it's just I no longer feel emotionally charged about it. And so now from a neutral perspect perspective, I'm going to reconsolidate it with a neutral sense.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
It's a neutral stance, but it can be very emotionally. It can be very emotion inducing because you're not pro Tom in the.
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Tom Bilyeu
Whoa, that's weird.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Right?
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Tom Bilyeu
And so, so I, I am sort of standing outside myself and I'm perfectly willing to say you were an in that moment.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
But like, it's okay. But you need to recognize where to file that appropriately.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah. So your example earlier about the note to yourself when you were arguing with your wife on Saturdays, that. That almost is kind of the similar sort of idea, right? Is that in some ways you, you emulated that. You were able to kind of see that you're going to do this. Your wife's going to have this feeling, and if you just give her this note, then, you know, and so it's like that, right? It's like this idea that, that you're able to go into that and you may even. And I'm making this up, you may even go into that and be like, man, I shouldn't even have been mad about that. The only reason why she's saying any of that is because of this other thing that I did or whatever or some other scenario. But it's like you're able to see that you're also able to kind of intuit the other person's perspective. Who knows how any of this works in a way that they can. Then their kind of reasoning is contextualized for you. And then you have this moment for some people and why it can be hard. You have to face the hard reality that the way that, to your point, the perception of the map of reality that you're operating on wasn't the territory at all. And that the way that you were seeing that event go down was totally through a lens. That was the sort of, kind of perceptual disturbances that we see the world through and then operating off of that information that was inherently flawed. Right. And it seems to allow for folks to kind of re evaluate all of that and with that established greater control and choice because you kind of have a better calibration of the world. Like this idea of the map isn't the territory. The closer your map is to the territory, the more inherent control you have because you have a better sense of if I walk this way, there is going to be land or there's going to be water or whatever. And I think for a lot of us, part of what goes wrong is my map is off enough to where I thought I was driving my car on the road, the beach or whatever, you know, as a metaphor. Right. And, and I think that we do that all the time with our own perceptions of what's going on with reality and the people that we're interacting with. And so it seems like if you act, if you hear all the anecdotes, it seems like what it does is it really gives you a better calibration and that. But that calibration is inherently hard because you have to face the, the truth that you were wrong. Whereas I think with mdma, it's much more to your point. It's much more of like just a pure loving acceptance that your map isn't right, but it's okay. And in some ways both of those are highly useful and therapeutic. Right. You kind of have to hold both of those that like, my map is wrong and I have to face it at some point, but I also have to love myself and accept myself for having a miscalibrated map because it's probably due to something that happened in my childhood that shifted my ability to see it or something that happened in my. Whatever, like some trauma that I experienced in my early adulthood or whatever it is, you know? Right. Like that's, that's inherently like the empathic part. And I think you have to have both of those. But yeah, that's definitely what. That's definitely what the ibogaine seems to do is it seems to kind of write a bunch of views and take you down a journey. And it's pretty fascinating that it ends up being these elite fighters. Right. Which in retrospect makes total sense why they'd be really in droves going down there, because they're not worried about a 1 in 300. I mean, it's not really. Probably 1 in 300 for those guys because none of them have had a problem. A thousand of them have been down there, but, you know, in theory, 1 in 300, risk of. Of death, you know, they went into war zones that were a higher risk for them than that, you know, and they see this as an exit out of the kind of constant turmoil.
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Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I was going to say that that would be my gut instinct as to why Navy SEALs, and I think it was you that I've heard speak about this. But I definitely heard somebody speak about this. You know, you can imagine a Navy seal, they're in a combat zone, they do something, it goes wrong. They accidentally kill a child or friendly fire or whatever. And now that's a part of your mental map of who you are as a person, and that's just tearing your guts out every day, every night.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
That's right.
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Tom Bilyeu
And to be able to go do this thing that allows you to file it away properly. Because as you were describing this, the thing that it makes me think of is time heals all wounds. Now, what that phrase is getting at is that when you sleep, part of the memory consolidation process is to strip away the emotional charge of that memory and file it away neutrally. But if for some reason you're locked in a PTSD like cycle, that doesn't happen, and so you're. You're constantly reliving that emotion with the same level of emotional salience as when it first happened, which I cannot imagine the hell that that would be. If the worst things that have ever happened to me, or God forbid, I had done something that was horrendous and which, honestly, for me anyway, would be worse, and then I just living that at the same volume every time. Every time, every time. And so if I began, and obviously I'm pure speculation here, but if ibogaine works to sort of rapidly do what time is supposed to do, which is strip that emotion away. Like if. If life sleep does it slowly, you know, over weeks, months, years, depending on how intense this thing is, and ibogaine does it over 30 hours. Like, suddenly you get why people would be willing to go do that difficult Work. The part that I struggled to wrap my head around is why it's tied to addiction. Like those seem like two very different things. I think of, maybe erroneously, I think of addiction as being a biological thing where my body has gone. I, I, I have adjusted all of my internal levels to expect heroin, cocaine, whatever. And why all of a sudden if I don't get that, oh, we're good, no problem. But you know, a day before, if I didn't get it, I was vomiting, I was shaking and sweating.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Well, you have to think about what you bore mate was.
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Tom Bilyeu
He's been on the show.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah. So he works a lot of addicted individuals in Vancouver. His view, which is interesting, and I think he's probably right, is that there's an underlying trauma, driving, particularly if you think about opiates. Opiates in the very short term put people in a state of reduced pain. Not just physical pain, but emotional pain. And going back to the ketamine story where you need an opiate agonism to have an antidepressant effect from ketamine. So this idea that, you know, substances actually do have a very immediate effect that is in the right direction, the problem with these same substances, they actually go totally in the opposite direction and create a big problem with chronic use, you know, and so, you know, acute use of say, buprenorphine, what, which is, which is a, one of the opiates. It's, it's the active ingredient in Suboxone, the kind of one of the drugs that we use for, for taking people off of opiates. But it's itself an opiate. And so if you give buprenorphine, you can have an antidepressant effect. If you give oxycodone chronically, you can produce more treatment resistant depression. You can actually make people more treatment resistant.
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Tom Bilyeu
So it works for a minute, but then it becomes a problem.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
But then it becomes a problem. And so there's pretty consistent finding that people that have depression before major exposure to opiates or PTSD have a higher risk of converting to opiate use disorder. I had a study I tried to get National Institute of Drug Abuse to pay for four or five years ago with our neurostimulation approach where we were saying we're going to treat these depressed individuals right before they go and get a total knee, total hip replacement because it's incredibly painful. And in those people, if they're depressed, they have a 2.6 times the amount of opiates they're using by day three.
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Tom Bilyeu
Whoa.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Compared to non depressed People just being
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Tom Bilyeu
depressed makes you need more opiate to get the effect.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
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Tom Bilyeu
And so because physical and emotional pain are processed in the same part of the brain.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yep.
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Tom Bilyeu
That's so interesting, man. Jesus.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, yeah. And so I. And then, you know, our stimulation approach is targeted in the cingulate we were talking about earlier. Right. So you. And you can actually release endogenous opiates with stem. So it was this idea that we could, what we were talking about earlier, prophylax against one psychiatric condition by treating another. And so I said, let's treat the depression. They go and do surgery, and then we see if we can in the active group, knock down the amount of opiates they're using compared to the sham group for the goal of trying to treat the depression and reduce the risk, just like anesthesiologists do for other things. You don't go into surgery until your heart's good, until your vessels are good. They won't let you, you know. And so it's this idea of could you do a pre surgical risk reduction? And it gives you a model for actually preventing a future addiction. That was a seemingly too radical idea at that time for nida. I think it was having a little bit of a hard time kind of conceptualizing, you know, like, are you treating. You're not treating an addiction, you're treating depression, you're applying tonight, you know, and so it's where I think it gets a little bit complicated.
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Tom Bilyeu
You know, that's one of those things that really bums me out because if it works and like, I get. We don't think of them as being connected, but if they are connected, then you need to address it. And so especially when you think about how many people end up getting addicted to opioids because they were put on legitimate pain medication to begin with, and then it turns into an addiction and then they can't shake it. And so knee surgery becomes a prison stint for opioid addiction.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
That's right.
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Tom Bilyeu
Man, that's really interesting.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. So it's an interesting thing. I mean, I think we're getting to a place now where hopefully we can start thinking about that. I mean, the ideal world is we just don't. We don't give somebody an opiate or we concurrently treat them if they need to have an opiate with something that essentially fixes the underlying problem that would cause the risk profile. But yeah, I think getting back to your original question about ibogaine, the reason why it makes sense at A level is because the GDNF thing, but also the mouse self administration thing I was talking about earlier. But also that combo of that and that they're addressing some of the pain, right? Some of that inherent pain from some of the trauma that somebody like Gabor Mate would talk about that probably drove them to that place in the, you know, to begin with. Right. And because not everybody, you can give somebody fentanyl and they never want fentanyl again. You know, people hate it or whatever, Right. And so it's this idea that you, you may be people that keep seeking it, maybe tapping into actually a system that doesn't need fentanyl, but needs something else that fentanyl is acting on, right. Like neurostimulation, like maybe like, you know, some of these psychedelic drugs, maybe like ketamine, whatever it is. And it gives us clues about what the circuitry is and what the problem could be, the underlying initial problem could be. But it's also why I think we've got a poor, a lot more money into researching these things. We really have gotten very far in cancer biology and cancer treatments over the last 20, 30 years. We can treat previously untreatable cancers and we have drugs. We even have ways of modifying the immune system to attack cancer now. And recent Nobel Prize a couple years ago for somebody on that one. And we know a lot about the heart. But if you look at the federal dollars that have gone into brain conditions, particularly in psychiatric conditions, it's a lot less. But depression is the most disabling condition worldwide. A lot of these things are. And so if we.
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Tom Bilyeu
By what metric?
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Dr. Nolan Williams
By like standard disability scores. So you can.
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Tom Bilyeu
I can't get out of bed. I can't go to work.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah. I can't think through this thing. Yeah. I mean, and if you look to like our, you know, our conversation an hour ago around the cardiac thing and you know, if you, if you ask a cardiac patient just had a heart attack and they're having depression, what's the worst part of what's going on with you? It's depression. You take a Parkinson's patient with new Parkinson's and they've got all shaking and all this stuff and they're depressed and you ask them what's the worst part of your Parkinson's? It's the depression. Jesus. Right? Depression is comorbid with almost everything, maybe everything, and it makes everything that it touches worse. Right. If you have depression and you just had a surgery, your wound healing is going to be a day delayed compared to people that aren't depressed.
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Tom Bilyeu
That's been it. I mean, after what you told me about the heart, I should not be surprised, but I didn't know that. Yeah, that's bananas. So depression makes you need more opiates, it slows down your healing, and it increases your risk of heart attack. Does it increase your risk of cancer or other chronic diseases?
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Dr. Nolan Williams
The cancer story has been more inconclusive. You know, but there's a list. There's a recent meta analysis, and there was a list of risks. I mean, there is one paper published in the American. In the American Academy, the. The Green Journal Neurology and depression increases your risk. Your Depression in your 30s and 40s increases your risk of having Parkinson's later in life. Jesus Christ. And then Parkinson's increases your risk of depression. Just like the cardiac thing, right? So depression makes literally everything worse and produces a risk for you. And so the idea that we're not putting an insane amount of federal funding into understanding what depression is and answering many of these great questions that you've asked around what's causal and what drives what, and how is the gut and the brain related? And how is diet? All that stuff needs to be understood in a deep way, probably with machine learning and AI embedded in those questions. But you need a dense amount of money to be able to figure out, figure out how to do that, you know, and like all of our, you know, our accelerated stimulation approach that, you know, well, looks like we'll ultimately end up on the inpatient unit and treat psychiatric emergencies. We had. We have a lot of federal support and a lot of federal funding now and Very thankful for that. The original work was grassroots donor funding, you know, and so people that had
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Tom Bilyeu
personal, I'm guessing, obviously, but people that had personal experience that are like, you can make this as legal as you want. This is amazing.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, yeah. So a lot of the, you know, a lot of the really, really early, early stage mental illness, psychiatry kind of experimental therapeutics work, at least that we've done, has been philanthropy funded. And a good bit of my portfolio for the lab is from, you know, private donors with a whole lot of means that come in and they say, you know, my, my kid or my parent or my spouse or whatever is suffering and there's just not anything for this. That's how we got in the ibogaine work, you know, that's how we got into the accelerated stimulation work and our like, application and other indications, you know, how we're getting into some of like the direct brain recording work. It's all philanthropy funded. And you know, really where the federal agencies come in is in that, you know, in many, many cases, in that second step, once we have a signal to kind of come in and expand the effect. But you know, in their defense, they've got a limited budget, you know, so they really need to invest in things that are somewhat de. Risked. And if societally we were able to put, you know, as much money proportionally based off of your question of these disability scores, so the most disabling things, get the most federal money to kind of explore and to do really, really moonshot sorts of things where it's really early and fund it from the get go, then we would know a lot more about this. And so the hope is that this generation of teenagers and folks in their early 20s seem to really embrace therapy and the kind of having a mental illness, having a psychiatric diagnosis, having even sub syndromal symptoms and needing a therapist and that sort of thing. And as we like destigmatize this stuff and approach it from a different lens, and in the case of psychedelics, that in of itself gets destigmatized, I think that we're going to make a lot more headway and in my prediction is, and by 2040 probably or something, we'll be able to have a decent amount of control over these illnesses. People will be able to come in and we'll be able to kind of stratify them and we'll be able to make decently predictive therapeutic decisions on them and have a bigger part of the pie that's responding. Because if you look at the numbers for any given Oral antidepressant working, it's not very good. It's much less than a coin flip. And so being able. Yeah. For the standard oral antidepressants, it's not great. Right. So you end up iterating across a bunch of different drugs to get to a point where they're working some of these rapid acting drugs. Ketamine story, what we're doing with neuromodulation, a lot of the psychedelic work looks better than that. Right. And that's why people are willing to accept it because people, whether it be military or civilian government or whatever it is, everybody's recognized this is such a big problem. We can't have these preconceived notions of this is a good or a bad thing or whatever. It's like does it work or not? And if it does, let's add it to the list, you know. And, and I like that because that's the way I, I think about it.
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Tom Bilyeu
So this is incredible. What do you think about the fact that all of this, like when you were talking about ibogaine specifically, you know, the profundity of that it auto happens that you will start cycling through your memories that creates a, an environment that is useful, that allows people to deal with the, the most traumatic things ever that it. And this part I know is hypothesis, but the fact that it can help with addiction potentially just from going oh, that thing that you've been trying to cover up or run away from or whatever, just by putting that in the right context in your brain using whatever mechanisms the brain already has, but you didn't have access to before, just by putting that in its right file folder and removing the emotion from it, you no longer need heroin, cocaine, whatever that it comes from a root like that. Just what, what like that is from a co evolution perspective, I'm just like. I'm sorry, what like.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
Huh.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, yeah. I argue exactly what you said, but with the kind of profound neurotrophic kind of plasticity effects probably concurrent. Right. And that's why I think such a high tech sort of idea that it marches you through all these psychological things and it has the kind of biology change that are, that's happening concurrently. You know, my view, and I've said this publicly, is I think you could give, you know, the major drug companies $10 billion, 100 billion, whatever, whatever it is and say make a drug that works like ibogaine. But ibogaine in theory, ibogaine never existed. Yeah, yeah. And they, they didn't have anything to work off of. You Know, nobody could make nobody, it's not their fault. Like we don't have the neuroscience to understand what this is doing at all. Like why would it produce these very characteristic, you know, processes in like the vat, I mean about 80%, the vast majority of people. But it gets into that statement I said earlier, right, Is that we, we end up like evaluating technology based off of Moore's Law, you know, we use, we use computer think to evaluate everything else, you know. And I think that, I think that you can't kind of do that with the psychedelics. You can't use. Well, whatever is the most chronologically new has to be the most advanced. I think that you have to use a different kind of what has the most inherent complexity in a good way, like what's kind of in this case therapeutic complexity to evaluate it. But it's something like that. And it's hard to relay that kind of concept because obviously we're so programmed to get the iPhone 50 or whatever. You know, we're so programmed to get the next MacBook. I mean we just don't even think about it. Like we just know that the next iPhone is better than the last one, you know. And so chronological time ends up being like, you know. But I think for these technologies, right, it's more about what does it do and all the psychedelics at a level. But I think particularly I began, man, I mean, how does that even work? And it's interesting.
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Tom Bilyeu
It is very interesting. Is anybody looking at experimenting directly with glial derived neurotrophic factor.
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Dr. Nolan Williams
There was some work with trying to do some of that for Parkinson's back in the day where actually they were doing like burhols and surgeries and injecting it into the.
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Tom Bilyeu
Because you can't digest it in an oral form.
- [34:22]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Ibogaine is the only way to kind of have those effects, which obviously that was off limits 15 years ago, but have those effects without essentially a direct injection. And so the study was inconclusive. I think the problem probably from my perspective was dose, right? You give one injection of this, it's not going to necessarily be enough to take somebody who's so far down the pipe for having full blown Parkinson's that they're willing to do brain surgery to try to treat it, to then evaluating it. It would be interesting if you could use an ibogaine like substance even in Parkinson's, right, Where you had something maybe without all the cardiac risk or something, but you had something that could upregulate your glial derived neurotrophic factor and kind of ask the question of whether this could restore dopamine neuron function. That's where the similarity is between Parkinson's and addiction is that both have an effect on the dopamine system. In the case of Parkinson's, it's a direct hit and degeneration of the nigra, which feeds up to a lot of the motor parts of the dopamine system. And then the addiction acts on the ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, reward system. But these are both dopamine neuron populations. And so, yeah, a lot of, you know, an area that needs a lot more research and a lot more exploration to really understand it. But, but there's, you know, there's a good amount of basic science going on now.
- [36:10]
Tom Bilyeu
I'll be interested to see if I had to guess that there may also be some amount of, like the plant compound is so intricately evolved essentially, to have a bunch of different things happening at the same time so that you get the effect. Like, I know when you look at ayahuasca, which is multiple things put together and how on God's green earth someone figured out exactly how you have to prep this plan and that plan and put them together to get this effect. And that one sort of works with the other. You were talking earlier about, you know, there's. There's a place where serotonin, if you can break the cell membrane down enough that the serotonin can get in, then it can have an impact. And so, you know, how much of ibogaine or any of these other drugs, if you isolate the thing you think is doing the vast majority of the work, but maybe in reality it's only doing 80% of the work and that you actually do get additional benefits from the 20% of the other, you know, whatever is that come in that route or, you know, that sort of prime the system to receive it. Yeah, that's also interesting. But man, does it let you know that nature is complex.
- [37:19]
Dr. Nolan Williams
It is. I mean, I think I had a. It was a quote and I'm. I'm probably, I'm probably underestimating, but I think it's like 10,000 plant species in the Amazon. You know, it could be more than that, but I'm sure more. Yeah, if, you know, let's say it's 10,000, it maybe it probably is more than that. You know, the number of combinations and iterations and they're poisonous ones. I mean, it's just. It's hard to conceive of exactly what you said in the case of ayahuasca. And. And really you almost have to have a knowledge, right, that these two things, this one thing is blocking the GI breakdown of this other thing. In the case of the reversible monoamine oxidase inhibitor piece that then allows for the DMT to get into the brain. But yeah, the iboga tree, it's a root bark. They have to kind of, if you watch the booty, they're digging it up. There's not a clear predator. I mean it's a very curious kind of anthropological question, kind of neuro anthropological question around like what is going on with all that? And people have written about it and anthropologists have talked about it, but it's not clear. And I think that, I actually think there's probably some real value in investing some money. And that would probably be NSF or somebody like that, but investing some money into really trying to understand why humans were ever doing this to begin with. Right. I think Western culture, with the Mayans and with coming into Central and South America and just kind of imposing in that time Christianity and all that onto those groups and then kind of ignoring a lot of those traditions and kind of re embracing and asking if we landed on Mars or whatever it was and saw an alien species doing this, we'd spend a whole lot of money trying to figure out why they were doing it. So why don't we go in and say in a really deep way, like, why were the Native Americans doing this? Why were the Central and South Americans doing this? What is the reason why they were doing it? It was probably, there's probably. And it's unlikely that it's the same reason why we habitually drink alcohol. That'd be my view.
- [39:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting for me, they seem they're the same, obviously guessing the same evolutionary branch. One is elevated, one is a lot more fun. So when I think about, would I rather do ibogaine or mdma? I'd rather do mdma. And especially if, hey Tom, you have these traumatic experiences, there are two ways that I can put them away. You can confront it for 30 hours and like really contend with it. Put it away and then you're gonna be fine. Or you can have a great time, look at it from a place of love and just overwhelming joy and everything's okay. Also put it away and be fine long term and be like, word, I'll take the. The loved one, thank you very much. And so alcohol for me anyway, it makes me feel like I'm suppressing the urge to dance on a table. But it's brutal on my body, so I almost never do it.
- [40:51]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah.
- [40:52]
Tom Bilyeu
If there were no side effects, like if, if I only experienced the part when I was drunk, I would drink. Like it's fun. So I get how to me they're both riding on the back of. I'm gonna modulate your neurochemistry. You're gonna go on a chemical ride is how I think about it. Again, it might be circuitry, but you're gonna go on this ride of these things we call emotions are fun. Like you go to a movie, even if it's a sad movie or a scary movie. You like again, control to your point, you like the controlled experience of this. So while I would not want to truly relive the trauma, there is something about, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you a demon. But it's in a controlled fashion in that you can, you know, have people around you touching your hand. Everything's okay, you know. So I, I think it, it makes sense to me that the, the more intense ones are gonna propagate nested inside of a. I'll shorten it to shamanistic tradition to where it. This is, this is a ritual. This is not to be taken lightly. Whereas something like alcohol is going to propagate. It's like just a fun thing that you can do. You can take it a little bit and it makes you feel a little fun or you can really push it and then look, you're going to suffer for a day. But if there's no way, especially back in the day for you to track that, oh, this has long term consequences that it feels as close to cake and eating it too as you're going to get. In fact, the one that feels even closer to your cake and eating it too is marijuana. I don't know if you've looked at this, but like what I think people give, I'm really gonna make people mad now. I think people give marijuana free pass. I don't understand. If you're, if you're taking a drug, cool trade off, I'm totally for it. Like if it's worth it to you for the trade off just seems impossible. But when I do it, I don't feel bad the next day at all. I'm just like, oh cool. But it, like if I. So one I have noticed I don't do it often, but I do it more than I drink and I didn't used to. So for anybody that's listening to me for a long time, I have done it more frequently recently because I Have noticed that it has a tremendous impact on my enjoyment of sex. So that, that has been a fun discovery. But I've done both smoked and edible. Again, I don't do it frequently, but smoking, I can sort of feel the problem coming on. So I have a much easier time of not overdoing it. But with edibles, again, I'm. I'm a very cautious person. So I've never been like, I know some people had really bad experiences. I have not. But it did get to the point where I was trying to watch a movie and I'm like, I can't make like, even the sentences add up. So like, I just watched an hour and a half of this movie. I have no idea what happened. So for something like that, I just assume, like there is some knock on effect here. You can't just play with this stuff and not have some sort of complication down the road.
- [43:50]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Well, I think the base question that I. And you're kind of. I think you're alluding to it in a way. The base question that I have asked is this question of. Or even to back up a little bit, do people. Does everybody have an addiction? And what I mean broadly is behavioral addictions, substance addictions, control addictions, you know, And I'd argue that probably. Right. Like probably everybody has something, right? Whether it be like caffeine or control or you know, repetitive behaviors or whatever it is, you know, and if everybody's reward, and it's not really an addiction in that sense, what it is is your reward system is primed to repeat behaviors that are reinforcing. Right. And so for some people like me, I've historically been like a very serious extreme sports guy like kite surf and big waves. And if it's not a big enough wave, it's not exciting enough.
- [44:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa, how big wave are we talking?
- [45:01]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, like North Shore of Maui and stuff. Yeah.
- [45:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay.
- [45:05]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah. I was a big martial artist and fought in taekwondo fights all over the world in my 20s and stuff, you know, And I'd argue that that's really just. It's just really sensation seeking behavior at a level. Right. And we all do it, you know, in one way or another. Right. And so if that's the case, then do we. Do we end up sublimating certain rewarding behaviors that may end up being in the extreme, you know, kind of ends addict, what we call addictions. But do we sublimate certain behaviors for some core set of practices or behaviors or whatever that may balance us or put a centralize us or whatever? Right. And so people have argued that for a long time. Like people that do yoga argue yoga, people that are hardcore meditators argue that, you know, and there's like a frame that, you know, if these drugs like psilocybin and ibogaine and others, what the end result ends up being is a loss of addiction because they're not themselves addictive. Which is, I think, the fundamental first question. If they're not themselves addictive and there's a loss of an addiction, it kind of. It's curious, right? Whereas the substance you're talking about, certainly cannabis, there's cannabis use disorder, certainly there's a alcohol problem, obviously. And so are those sublimations of other habitual behaviors that end up being kind of culturally embedded. And back to the anthropological thing. Why do certain cultures, ceremonially, as a sacrament, take psychedelics and do those cultures. And we don't know enough about this, but do those cultures not have as much in the way of alcohol problems, of nicotine problems, of all that? Because maybe it's getting to that core kind of 5ht2a receptor, that kind of core circuitry modulation? And it's an open question. It's one that we don't really have an answer to, but one we probably should. Because if these are all just idiosyncratic behaviors that humans do with certain environments and certain plants, and then it's. Then it just happens to be idiosyncratic drugs that we're using randomly to drive behaviors down that we don't want to have, versus the other idea, which is that there's some core thing that some cultures did and that kept that culture in a certain domain, and then you don't have that. And then all of a sudden other cultures have a problem. You introduce drug A from culture A into drug B, and all of a sudden you're seeing all these kind of vast therapeutic effects. Maybe it's because culture A had it sorted, culture B didn't, you know, and it's a very hard thing to answer, but it's one that I think is really interesting, you know, that maybe a lot of it's just sublimation. Maybe drinking is just a sublimation of an instinct to do something else.
- [48:30]
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- [48:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Man, drugs are fascinating. I want to ask you a question. You made reference to it earlier. And do you think that we have a soul that is separate from our physiology? You referred to it as mind, something else. Mind, brain.
- [49:20]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Well, I think there's brain, there's mind, as we think about it, and there's probably self. This gets out of a scientific statement now. This is just my personal beliefs, right. And so I think that there's this in a lot of. A lot of meditation practitioners believe this. There's a thought stream that is mind. And many people, their mind and their self are fused and they see mind and self as the same thing. Let me ignore brain for a second. I can get back to that. But mind and self. And you kind of pointed to this earlier. You said once you realized that the anxiety was just happening, it was physiological, then you could kind of get yourself away from it. Right. And distance yourself from it. And I think what you're doing there is you're having that kind of theory of mind that your mind and yourself aren't the same thing and that you can see your mind do all of this stuff and you can be an observer of it from self and not act on it. You know, but for a fair amount of people, mind and self are totally fused. And I think that's really where a lot of the problems are. And then you got this other layer of brain, right? Brain being essentially the organ that mind is emergent from and probably self is emergent from too. Right. But it's. So mind emerges from brain. You can have an insult like a stroke, like we talked about, and have depression and have no reason why you'd be depressed. But, you know, mind, and, you know, mind is emergent from brain, just like blood flow is emergent from your heart. And so if your heart, if your blood isn't flowing, it's because your heart isn't pumping. So you got a structure, but then you've got this emergent property. And I think that. I think that part of mindfulness practices is to teach people how to, in this kind of mind, self dichotomy, to be able to distance yourself from your thought stream. Psychedelics definitely seem to do that. I actually think that brain stimulation can do it through the brain, because if you can shut down the brain regions that are emerging, the mind, then yourself is left alone in many ways.
- [51:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow. So you're saying the self would still survive so there, there is an observer even as you. The rest of you sort of goes offline.
- [52:08]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say you go offline. I'd say your mind goes offline. You're. You're like worrying mind or whatever it is, right? And so we had a couple people in our saint trials where they got well on Tuesday. So there was zero on Tuesday and we just kept treating them. On Thursday they came in and they said, hey, the weirdest thing happened to me last night. I was driving home from treatment or whatever and I saw the beach and I just decided to go sit on the beach. I never do that, but I just decided to go sit on the beach. And then for like an hour, I was just like totally present in the present moment. And I read about this in my mindfulness course or whatever and they're like. And I looked it up after and I was like, I think I had this mindful experience or whatever. And you hear one person say that as a scientist, you're like, okay, that's great for you. I don't really know what that means. When you have five or six people, you're not telling anyone that anybody else is telling you this, and they're all coming to you with this. And it's always like they go through euthymia, like they're totally nothing. They're zeroed out on Tuesday and we have.
- [53:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Did you say euthymia?
- [53:17]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, like normal mood. Got it.
- [53:19]
Tom Bilyeu
That's a fancy word.
- [53:20]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Oh, sorry.
- [53:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Euthymia. I've never heard that word.
- [53:23]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, sorry. They go through like basically zeroed out depressive symptoms. And when they transit through it, if you keep treating them, they get into these, these places and it's the minority of people, like, it's only people that are, you know, actually less typically less treatment resistant. It doesn't take them the whole week to get there. And then by Thursday or Friday they're telling you this. And you see this post, psychedelic. It's not during the psychedelic, but it's the day or two after, really clear, right? And it's like your thinking mind, this computer that you've got running, that's, I need to go grocery shopping, I need to do this. Like, I better not do this or this is going to happen or whatever. That's like kind of stuck in the past. Future thinking kind of goes away and what's left is you, right? It's you being able to be like mindful and present, you know, which is the way that many of the Buddhist meditators say that they get there, too. Right. Without any of this other stuff. Right. But it's this idea that you can just be present and be here and be able to appreciate the now. And really, the mind is just a tool to deal with the world. Right. But it's not you. It's your ability to make money or drive your car or do whatever you need to do to do the things that the self wants to do. And I think that, to me, as a personal goal, is a spiritual goal that people have or whatever, as well as potentially a scientific goal. Right. Is important to understand, because I've never had anybody that I've. I've observed in that space who's like, I don't like this. Like, I don't want to, like, get me out of this, like, being present thing. I want to go back to being worried again or whatever. Everybody feels like they, like, took a weight off and they're relieved of it, you know, now I don't have to deal with all that. I'm just able to, like, be here, you know, And I think that's an interesting goal. And trying to understand what that is from a physiologic perspective would be helpful because it may be a therapeutic goal, may ultimately be a therapeutic goal, not just a scale saying a person's only minimally symptomatic, which is the way that we think about it now, but actually that they can be present.
- [55:55]
Tom Bilyeu
So now does that imply to you that there is a part of you that can't be touched through brain damage or death?
- [56:06]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, it's. I mean, it's a great question. We don't have tools to. To. To understand it. Right. I mean, that's kind of the fundamental. The fundamental issue of all of that. Right. And it's. And these are. These are extremely hard experiments to do, you know, but it's this question of is there a way to separate it? Because you'd effectively have to separate it. I mean, I think that the kind of base understanding and viewpoint that most neuroscientists in 2023 would say is that the you that you believe is you is all brain emergent. Right? There's nothing about you that isn't brain emergent. Right. And if I was testifying in front of Congress or like, you know, and they asked me that question, I'd say, you know, it's brain emergent. You know, if you ask me, like Stan Grof, one of the, you know, the original kind of og, you know, psychedelic researchers, his answer, as I've heard him say it, is that the Brain's more like an antenna. Right. Which is very different. A very different view. Right. And we have no way of proving any of that or understanding any of that. Right. What everyone wants to believe is that you are completely an emergent property of this brain, and there's nothing else about you that's outside of the skull. Unless these things kind of float up into the heavens or something. It's hard to conceptualize of what happens, how you take that view, and then you kind of converge that view with a view of any sort of religion, which there are neuroscientists, pretty senior ones at Stanford, that are also religious. I haven't asked them this question, but it's this question of how do you merge those views together? That's the base. We don't know. And then to your other point, you can knock out brain regions and you can dramatically change behavior, you can change personality, you can change levels of consciousness. And so people who knew you would then say, you're not the same person I used to know. Right. And so that would argue towards the kind of brain centric. The soul is just an emergent property of the brain. The self is just another emergent property of the brain, outside of mind or whatever. That's hard. We don't have tools to sort it out, you know? And it's also hard because many of the mechanisms that are in place are kind of helping that system to kind of self regulate. What goes in contrast to that is there are a number of patients who, for instance, never had a musical ability in their life. They're a terrible singer. They don't know how to play any instrument or whatever, and they get frontotemporal dementia. So they get. They lost some prefrontal cortex, and they have these spontaneous emergent musical virtuosos. Right. Which is.
- [59:45]
Tom Bilyeu
How do you interpret that? Because I have a strong interpretation of that.
- [59:48]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Oh, you do. Okay.
- [59:48]
Tom Bilyeu
But you know more about this than I do.
- [59:50]
Dr. Nolan Williams
I mean, you know, it's. Yeah. I mean, there is. I will. I will just. I will follow that with another finding, which is kind of interesting, which if you take somebody that's learning how to sharpshoot and you knock out their prefrontal cortex, you can actually make them sharpshoot better. And sometimes that system. Anxiety, for sure, but that system may be actually fully functional, maybe having a detrimental effect to doing things that are much more physical and fluid and perceptual and not necessarily in the thinking domain. You know, and as a martial artist, to get back to what I was saying earlier, like, you you can't actually have a rational thought about being in a, you know, in a competitive fighting match. Right. You. You're reacting in much shorter periods of time.
- [60:41]
Tom Bilyeu
Right.
- [60:42]
Dr. Nolan Williams
You know, so some of that is think kick.
- [60:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Just kick.
- [60:45]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some of it ends up being like kind of memory memorize and repetitive and instinctual. And maybe sharpshooting is maybe, maybe in some ways music is, you know, but. Yeah, I'd love to hear your.
- [60:58]
Tom Bilyeu
So the way that transcranial magnetic stimulation made it onto my radar was around the idea that, I think it was a lab in Australia would have people come in and say, draw me a picture of a squirrel. I can't draw. Just do it. They draw a picture of the squirrel and then they would put TMS on them, hit them, draw squirrel again. And by knocking out a region of their brain, they could suddenly draw three or four times better. And they're like, what is happening? And so my wife is a world class artist. She's unbelievable. And so when I watch her do her thing, I realize that she is seeing information that my brain filters out. So it isn't necessarily that she. I mean, obviously she's trained as well, but she, her and her sister drew. Her sister's older than her. They drew something each for their grandma and gave it to their grandma and when they were young. So like a two year difference is gigantic at that age. And her grandmother took the two drawings and was like, well, it's no fair because Lisa's younger, assuming Lisa's drawing was the bad one. But in reality, Lisa's drawing was the good one. So she's just had an ability forever. And so I remember one time she's drawing and. And I'm like, why are you spending time in that part of the drawing? Because she was doing it from a photo. I'm like, there's nothing in the photo. That part of the photo is completely blank. And she looked at me and she's like, what? And I'm like, that part of the photo is completely blank. She's like, are you joking? I'm like, what do you mean? And I was being sincere. I'm like, that part of the photo has no detail in it. What are you doing? Because I watch her spend like an hour on a part of the photo that to me was solid white. And she was like, you really don't see detail? And. No, I don't. And so I was like, holy cow, you actually see detail. And then as I really sat and looked at it, I was like, I guess kind of so my brain was just like, ah, close enough. Those are roughly the same.
- [62:51]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Right.
- [62:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Move on. And so by. And your brain has to do that. Right. If you were, if I was looking at you going, there's this many photons bouncing off of that part of your head, like you're never going to get anywhere. And so your brain is constantly saying, don't pay attention to this. Now the interesting thing is that particular example is indicative of my entire personality. So part of the reason that, like, my wife will say to me all the time, I wish I had your brain, because I won't hold on to things so something could really upset me, and I'm not joking, five minutes later, I'll be like, oh, oh, yeah. Because I get completely absorbed in whatever I'm doing and I just let go. Now, the problem is having a memory like that can be very frustrating because I will research the life out of something and remember 10% of it. And I'm just like, how is this possible? Like, I've encountered that same idea like four times and I just can't hang on to it. And so good in some areas, bad in others. But when I think about it, my brain is like, not essential, not essential, not essential, not essential. And so it's just letting go of all that stuff. So with, with tms, the thing that I found so interesting was that oftentimes your ability goes up, not down, as you knock a region offline. Because I always thought it would be a stacking. Like you, you have to turn something on to get good at something versus turning something off. So I can see how. I mean, look, music is a little harder to explain, I won't lie. But like, if there are. Let's say that my brain is saying the tonal difference between two things is irrelevant.
- [64:23]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah.
- [64:23]
Tom Bilyeu
And now I get a lesion. It's like, no, no, no. Those little differences make a big deal. And so now by knocking that area out, I'm suddenly able to pay attention to those two things I could see or even like how the left and right hemisphere are telling each other to shut up most of the time. Which is why meditation is so interesting, because as you relax areas of your brain that normally are offline, suddenly they're. They're not telling each other to be quiet and so they can start talking to each other. So you'll get. You'll combine really weird ideas that I wouldn't have had when my brain is so busy saying, not essential, not essential, not essential. Yeah, yeah, that. That is super intriguing to me. Now, for me I thought you were going to be like, I'm a physicalist. And it took us a long time to get to the part where you said, if I was testifying, that I would say that it's brain derived. So is some part of you conflicted on whether that's all brain derived?
- [65:18]
Dr. Nolan Williams
I think that it's a difference between what you're trained and where the sparse but available evidence is and where one's intuition is right.
- [65:35]
Tom Bilyeu
You approach it with humility.
- [65:37]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, I think so. I mean, we just don't. It's like everything else. I mean, the Big Bang is in of one event, right? I mean, these are the problems with a lot of these questions is they're very hard to. They're very hard to answer at the end of the day. And I think that the tools that we have for answering them aren't that great. And so being able to have better tools to understand the nature of the brain, the nature of the mind, the nature of the self is the mind and the self. The meditators will say that these can be fused together in people and can be separated. Is that really actually a thing? Is that a phenomenological thing? Or you're just tricking yourself into thinking
- [66:19]
Tom Bilyeu
that you're just tricking yourself. It's as. Look, I have strong convictions, loosely held. If data came up that was like, no, there really is like, you are an antenna and this is all being broadcast from the Andromeda Galaxy or heaven or whatever. Okay, cool. I have no need to be right. But I also, My brain just models everything I see and is like, based on what I see and know. This is how I'm going to think about it for now and again, humility is the right way to approach things, but I also think people should be unafraid to say, this is what I think of it now. So right now my opinion is very much that it's all arising from your brain, but there are separate phenomena in your brain that you can learn to tease out or you can learn. Like, I really think again, data comes out that proves that I'm wrong. No problem. But I really think as AI comes online, what we're going to realize these are all patterns. And that I can put a monk that's been meditating for 40 years and be like, oh, looking at that pattern, I know right now he's practicing loving kindness, whatever. Oh, looking at that person, they're in a bout of anxiety over, oh, interesting. Something to do with a pet, you know what I mean? Like, I really think it's going to get that good.
- [67:28]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, but it may be that, right? These may just be modes. It could be, you know, it could be something else that there's some base signal, right?
- [67:38]
Tom Bilyeu
And then there's signal from inside or outside.
- [67:41]
Dr. Nolan Williams
You know, it's probably inside. You know, what we understand it is to be inside. You know, Francis Crick thought it, you know, it came from something called the claustrum as being a central kind of rhythm generator in the brain. But, you know, whatever, some system that's kind of the base self system and then anxiety is layered on top of it, you know. But that's different than switching between two modes, right? Switching between a mode of thinking about self and being anxious. So I'd argue more that way, right, that you've got some core, probably self representation, something driving the networks to start going in a direction because there has to be something moving the system. You know, the reason why I've done a lot of hypnosis research is because you externalize control, right? So you can have a suggestion come into your brain and then you act on that suggestion, right? So you can. Highly hypnotizable people, they will. People that get absorbed in things, they will get, you know, they. They will be very suggestible to all sorts of things that are out of their volition. You know, and I used to not. I used to think this is kind of bs like when I got to Stanford, you know, hypnosis is a big thing. I attended David Spiegel's course and I, you know, I had this. Had this experience. I'm not that suggest, you know, not that hypnotizable. I had this experience of doing a group hypnosis. There was a bunch of doctors in the room, right? And so I'm supposed to have my eyes closed, but I'm kind of like, you know, looking, watching this, and I see all these guys, they tell them to put the arm up and they're like fixed in the air. I went up to all of them after and I was like, you know, you, like, just did that to be compliant, right? Like, no, no, I had no volition over it, you know, such a trip.
- [69:36]
Tom Bilyeu
I want to be hypnotizable, but from what I can tell, I am mildly hypnotizable at best.
- [69:45]
Dr. Nolan Williams
If you, if you think about that, though, if you're externalizing to some other entity to drive behavior, then there's got to be something driving that behavior internally. That's either a representation of self or mind or some combination of that. But we don't even know where that originates. Right.
- [70:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Why would you say that? So my read of that would be that your brain evolved to know that data will be coming from the outside and to do things with that data.
- [70:18]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Oh, for sure. It's two different. There has to be a source point in the brain or a primary network in the brain that's driving. That's causal. To be able to have volition, you have to have that. You have to have some organ, some circuit, however you want to think about it, in the brain, that's driving it. You know, if not, then because.
- [70:48]
Tom Bilyeu
So I may be misunderstanding you. Do you say that because you assume that we have free will?
- [70:54]
Dr. Nolan Williams
I say that because, well, yeah, I'm assuming we have free will, yeah.
- [70:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting. I don't think we have free will, though. The illusion is so compelling. I don't spend any time thinking, like, oh, I don't have free will. I act as if I do. But when I really stop and think about what I know about the universe so far, I'm just like, nah, probably not. Like, this is probably all mappable. Meaning. If you knew everything, like there was a theory of everything, you understand physics completely. There is nothing that's unknown or unexpected that you could then map out how every billiard ball will react when hit by any other billiard ball and the amount of friction on the table, et cetera, et cetera, and that all of our neuronal firing and all of that stuff is. It's all trackable. We just don't have the data to be able to track it.
- [71:43]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think that's totally true. It's more about. At the end of the day, if what you're saying is true, then it's all just reward reinforcement that our entire experience is assuming what you're saying. It's all just reward reinforcement. We're just being driven completely by externalized stimuli being processed. This threat or pleasure or some derivation of that.
- [72:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Welcome to my worldview. That's literally what I think. That's why I say, like, you're having a biological experience. Understand how this all works. The great news is that as you enter, as you become aware of it, what I'll call awake in the Matrix. I wish that word wasn't getting a weird reputation. But as you become awake in the Matrix, you can suddenly intercept some of these things and go, ooh, I would like to react now in this way. I'm not just going to be beholden to my emotions. And you really can insert a level of awareness. Even if, whether you get that Level of awareness is something you can choose to do or not, which I doubt, but it certainly feels like you can. And so becoming aware becomes easy.
- [72:56]
Dr. Nolan Williams
That awareness isn't. I mean, I suppose you could argue that's reward driven as well. But the sort of thing that people who are serious meditators, maybe some of the psychedelic crew, that whole set of writers, it doesn't map onto the way that standard reinforcement happens in the brain. I think that's really the. I agree with you that there are probably a lot of people walking around the world that are kind of driven mind brain. Their mind brain self is kind of all fused together and they're being driven primarily by these reward aversion loops. Right. But the sort of like, meditative descriptions that people say, unless you can argue that that's all being driven by some other way of reinforcing reward, doesn't play on to the, to this more standard kind of reward story, you know, can
- [73:59]
Tom Bilyeu
you give me an example specifically of what they would say? Because, like, and while you think of that, to all the people out there, I get this every time I bring this up. They're like, tom, as soon as you do psychedelics, you're going to realize that your worldview is just absolutely ridiculous.
- [74:11]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Cool.
- [74:12]
Tom Bilyeu
Fair enough. I'm very open to that data point. And. And it is merely at this. Actually, there's two things that stop me. Legality. And I recently read a story about a guy that did psilocybin for the first time and it sent him off on like a four month or longer, like, manic episode. And he said it ended up ruining his life. And I was like, whoa, that was sort of the first calming thing. I was like, ready to go? And that was like, oh, maybe not.
- [74:45]
Dr. Nolan Williams
I don't advocate for anybody to take psychedelics for, you know, personal reasons in the, in that kind of a context, if that makes sense, as kind of as a physician, I think they're useful within a kind of diagnostic framework. What I can tell you is the people that do advocate for those things, you know, that's the sort of thing that you hear. The risk, as you've aptly pointed out, is there are certain people, particularly people that are on the kind of psychotic, hypomanic, bipolar spectrum in which psychedelics are really contraindicated. And all the trials intentionally strip out anybody that has a threat of that. Although there is an ongoing trial, interestingly, of people with an established psychotic disorder diagnosis being explored right now, which I'm
- [75:40]
Tom Bilyeu
really looking forward to with psychedelics. Whoa.
- [75:42]
Dr. Nolan Williams
And they've given schizophrenic patients full blown schizophrenic patients ketamine and they, and they don't have a worsening of their psychotic symptoms. So Carol Tamingo down at UT Southwestern did a lot of that work. But yeah, I mean, I think that what you hear from people if you go to psychedelic science or you talk to patients that receive this is there ends up being an experiential stripping of these things apart. And that could all just be, you know, a construction. Right. As you, as you aptly point out. And that's, that's why all of this is all theoretical. Like, there's no like what you're saying I think is theoretical. What the various things I'm saying are all theoretical. Your personal worldview is most aligned with, I'd say the majority of neuroscientists walking on earth today. Right. So your view is, what if we had a polling at Society for Neuroscience, what most of those folks would say if you did polling at Psychedelic Science 2023, it'd be a majority of those folks probably. And so it's just one of these things where it's hard to. I don't like to kind of. And the reason why I'm not giving you a firm answer on this and why I'm giving you a lot of open questions is because I don't like to have opinions, maybe to your point, I don't like to have opinions that aren't testable. And at the current state of things, while your views align with the majority of neuroscientists, some of that's probably an extrapolation from animal studies and stuff like that, which I would argue the whole human experience is beyond what animal cognition is. And then the psychedelic crew, or even maybe some of the hypnosis researchers having a different viewpoint on this is all experiential. And maybe at the end of the day, to your point, just kind of self fulfilling prophecy or self deluding or beliefs that are kind of getting entangled in worldviews around what the science is. But you know, to your point, we don't have the tools to measure it. So in 2023, an impossible question to answer, but an important, a very important one, you know, and once we get a handle on that, if it really is that the brain is truly just self propagating and you kill a part of the brain and you kill that part of the person forever, and that's just that part of that person is dead, or until we find ways to regenerate the brain Dead or whatever. Then, you know, then it aligns with the sort of way you're thinking about it. But yeah, I don't love. I don't love. I try to bite off chunks that are more proximal to the tech we have now. And then that allows for me to have a real bet and then have an answer that's yielded out of it. So this idea of moving hypnotizability up transiently, we had enough science to be able to go and say, yeah, we can do that. Or being able to figure out kind of slick ways of cutting speed of stimulation down to really short periods of time and asking questions about moving brain circuitry quickly or slowly or what's the nature in some ways, what's the nature of the brain circuitry? So we have a study now where we scan people every day and then we look at, you know, the change in the circuitry as it relates to the change in symptoms. So does the circuitry change precede the behavioral change or vice versa? It tells you something inherently about, you know, when you know, based off what you're saying, you'd assume the circuitry has the either change concurrently or before. And then you have a behavior change.
- [79:51]
Tom Bilyeu
I actually don't. I think that there is something where you could, you can do it in either direction. And that's part of what's utterly fascinating. It's like smiling and then feeling better or feeling better and then smiling. You can actually go either direction.
- [80:04]
Dr. Nolan Williams
Well, at this, it would be, it'd be weird if the stimulation changed the behavior without a brain change from what you were saying earlier. Right. Like you'd have to assume that the brain changed for a stimulation induced experiential change to happen.
- [80:23]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting.
- [80:23]
Dr. Nolan Williams
I think you have to bypass physics principles.
- [80:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh God. We didn't really open up a can of worms there. So I'll tap out with that question hanging in the air. Brother. This has been so fascinating. I've absolutely loved this. Where can people follow you?
- [80:42]
Dr. Nolan Williams
So Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab is the best place to follow our work. And yeah, happy to particularly have patients come in and be interested in some of the studies.
- [80:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Amazing boys and girls. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
- [81:00]
Dr. Nolan Williams
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