Nolan R. Williams

We took a long time and people are wondering, like, why are we not doing this? I equate it to that.

And I think all these studies that have come out, the study that Dr. Nolan Williams did at Stanford and Ibogaine, right? People are, it's moving.

It needs to move faster because I think it can really help people.

But that's part of the process, right? You've got to go through the channels to, you know, the FDA and all the different things, right? But I think people are much more open to it because they see the bad side effects of opioid addiction and And like you said, right, there are some pharmaceuticals that may be helpful for certain things.

That perfectly bridges the gap between observational anecdote and rigorous science, because researchers are finally crossing that chasm.

Let's talk about the landmark modern work, specifically the Stanford Mystic Study, published recently in Nature Mental Health by Dr. Nolan Williams and his team.

This is where the subjective trip meets objective neurology.

The MYSTICS study is a crucial inflection point in psychedelic research.

But those results are remarkable.

I mean, 60, 70%, you know, significant reduction in symptoms, in some cases remission- But you know these, you know, I, I have friends in the s- so-called psychedelic community, but I also have friends in the standard science community.

And for these things to really come together, there's gonna have to be some standardization of safety, but also just practice.

What are you gonna talk about? If someone's like, "I'm feeling I'm at the precipice of, like, a huge amount of pain," do you encourage them to go into that pain and purge it? Or do you tell them, "Hey, listen, you know, maybe back away from that"? All this stuff is done by feel in the psychedelic community.

Heart and breathing, so they're linked obviously, you know, heart and breathing linked.

And people are heart rate monitored.

I know of many people, and they're many of your friends, like, and they've talked openly about this stuff, so DJ Shipley and the Capone, you know, Marcus Capone and others, and many, many others who feel that they've benefited tremendously from these therapies.

And, and there's a litany of other names there too that have benefited tremendously, I wanna be clear.

So it's, it's a really complicated key.

And I know, um, Dr. Nolan Williams, the late Dr. Nolan Williams, who did this, um, wonderful research at Stanford University looking at brain scans of, uh, people who were coming through our clinic at Ambio.

Yeah.

Um, he described it like in pharmacology, it's like we've been using these 14th century keys that kind of have like one or two teeth on them to turn the mechanisms of the lock, and that all of a sudden we're being presented with this very modern key that has so many different, uh, interactions with the mechanism and trying to now reverse engineer, like how does, how does that even work? Um, I think it's something that is gonna probably teach us a little bit more about how neurology works and how, you know, the, the fact-- It's not only the fact that it touches so many things, but that it seems to be doing so many things that are beneficial-

And I'm thinking to myself, "W- we're not talking about this stuff.

We need to talk about it." In fact, this last year, one of the luminaries in our field, it's a, still gets me, um, who was a real pioneer in, uh, transcranial magnetic stimulation therapies for depression and also psychedelic therapies, the studies of these, took his own life, my dear friend and colleague, Nolan Williams, who's helped the veterans community tremendously.

So I realized at some point people don't know how to take care of themselves.

They don't even know what self-care is.

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Nolan Williams, who's helped the veterans community tremendously.

So I realized at some point people don't know how to take care of themselves.

They don't even know what self-care is.

COVID started, like six months later, kind of put a real damper into that, and then I was teaching.

Then I was decided, okay, I was either gonna go full time and try to run the company, but if I had a really good postdoctoral opportunity, I would have to take that, and I, and I had-- I couldn't have imagined a better opportunity to come work with Nolan Williams, who was my mentor and friend of mine since that time.

So he hired me to come out to Stanford in twenty twenty-one, worked on some of the largest brain stimulation trials that we have ever seen in collaboration a lot with Weill Cornell Medicine in Manhattan with Conor Liston's team, and we had a, a large trial.

It was a little over six million dollar trial funded by the NIMH to do hundreds of subjects.