YouSaid · the spoken record

Rick Doblin

lines on the record: 189
first: 2021-07-21
most recent: 2021-07-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I discovered in some ways, I would say, is the key to the 60s, what I just told you, but in the follow up to the Good Friday experiment that I did in the 80s for my undergraduate thesis at New College in Sarasota, Florida, I eventually found 19 out of the 20 people. That was an enormous challenge because their names were all lost and it just took forever years and years and years to find them all. But I discovered that those people that had the psilocybin experience in the midst of 25 years later with Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan, and if there ever were there a social pressure to disavow the validity of the psychedelic experience, that was then. And instead they affirmed it, that they thought with all of these years of hindsight now looking back, they thought it was a valid mystical experience. Wow.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'm glad that you're doing it. And then he held up my hand, like, you know, like passing the torch. Wow. So it was, and that's one of my favorite photographs of me and Tim where he's sort of like, but it was after this, fuck the government. I'm so far past asking for permission for anything, but. I'm glad that you are. I did follow ups to the Good Friday experiment and I did follow up 25 year follow up to the Good Friday experiment, about a 34 year follow-up to the Concord prison experiment.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone who in 1990, we had now maps I started in 86. So in 1990 we had this conference to raise money out in California and Leary was there and Ramdas was there and Ralph Metzner was there and Andy Wae was there and Terence McKenna was there and Dennis McKenna was there and all these. But there was one point where Tim was speaking, and afterwards I was asking him some questions. And I said, Do you have any advice for us on how to work with the government and how to bring these psychedelics forward? That's what we're trying to do. I've got this nonprofit for it. We're trying to do this research. What is your advice on how to bring this forward and how to work with the government? And he said, fuck the government. He said, I am so far past asking for permission for anything”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turn people inward and take them away from political struggles. It actually motivated people. Once you actually have these psychedelic experiences, your attitude towards death changes also, this idea of death becoming an intrinsic part of life. It's a natural cycle. It's not so much. So I think people realize that while there's this billions of years of evolution, you know, infinity, whatever that means in terms of time, that we're here for a very limited time and they end up wanting to use their time well. They have a lessened fear of death. And they want to build this paradise on earth here now instead of later. So a lot of people really did get motivated to challenge the Vietnam War to work on the environmental movement, civil rights movement, women's rights movement, anti-militarism. And it was that challenge to the status quo that caused the backlash. So Leary is.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that Leary was someone who, a little bit got addicted to media attention. Ah. But I think that overall, he gets blamed a lot for the backlash against the 60s, the shutdown of psychedelic research. I think that he is unfairly blamed for a lot of that. I think when you look back at the 60s, the common narrative is that it was because psychedelics going wrong. People took psychedelics, they weren't prepared, they had emotional breakdowns, they went psychotic, they killed themselves, they did this or that, different problems of people taking psychedelics in context that they didn't feel fairly safe in or just they weren't prepared or they didn't know how much they were taking or all this. So the backlash was because psychedelics gone wrong. But I think the real reason while that did happen, I think the real reason is psychedelics going right. And people having this sense of connection and then the opposite of what the CIA was hoping, that it would kind of”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Psychedelics just getting more and more controversial, even in the early 60s, eventually got kicked out of Harvard, and then he became kind of a cultural icon for the counterculture and was hounded by the police and Nixon and spent a lot of time in jail. I mean, he's an incredible person. One thing that Ramdas said is that Richard Albert Ramdas said, I'm a rascal, but Leary's a scoundrel.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the psilocybin. So he was a great American psychologist, but then he got tired of the psychology game, you could say, or he would say that. He got more and more interested in cultural change and various musicians and artists and all sorts of people started coming to him for the psychedelic experience that they, in a way, for creativity, for other things. So he started hanging out with all sorts of famous people or creative people. And he stopped going to classes a lot. And Ramdas, Richard Alpert had... Given LSD to a student that Ramdas was. Courageous enough to admit that he had sexual interest in. They weren't supposed to give it undergraduates. That was about the only time that they ever did it.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Tim did that. He also did the naturalistic studies of giving loads of people psilocybin and sort of writing down what their experiences were, the range of experiences. Later on in his time at Harvard, they started doing LSD. And LSD is more cerebral, longer-lasting, not as reassuring in a way as psilocybin. Sometimes he used to say that if they never got into LSD, they'd still be at Harvard.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both of which, well, one was called The Good Friday Experiment, which was whether psychedelics in religiously inclined people taking psilocybin in a religious setting, whether it could produce a mystical experience that took place at Marsh Chapel at the Boston University. You could say entirely subjective, what people describe happens to them, he wanted to do another study, which would be a more objective measure, and that was called the Conquered Prison Experiment. And that was the thought if you can give people psilocybin mystical sense of connection type experiences while they're in prison when they get out, they'll be more pro-social and they'll have reduced recidivism.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And why did Nixon say that? It's because of this. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Timothy Leary was just an incredible advocate for think for yourself, question authority. Those are things he said all the time. Think for yourself, question authority. He was a rebel. He was kicked out of West Point. He was a psychologist who was at Harvard for three years from 60 to 63. Before he got to Harvard, he had an experience with mushrooms. In Mexico. And that he said he learned more in that experience than he'd had in his entire academic career before then about how the human mind works. And so he came to Harvard wanting to do research into psychedelics. And he did some very important studies.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did have Opportunity to get to know him personally and to spend some time with him. Timothy Leary. Well, let's start with Nixon saying he's the most dangerous man in America”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Alice would see these conflicts and would be the one that does the healing, would give this interpretation and that would open things up. So I think it's this idea of empowering people to heal themselves. And so if Ted Kaczynski had been in a therapeutic setting with psychedelics and if they had had something like MDMA available or MDA, which was popular during the 60s, which is a more like MDMSD combination, the outcomes might have been different.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that we help people to heal themselves, that we are not giving them the healing? It's a flip on the power dynamics that existed, you would say, in the 50s and 60s. My dad was a doctor and the doctors were gods and, you know, whatever they said was right. And we no longer, of course, believe that. But for a while, psychoanalysis with Freud, that they gave the interpretation to the patient. The patient couldn't help themselves, but they would do the free associations and the”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think this, for people that have had difficult psychedelic experiences, MDMA helps them integrate them. We've worked with people that had a difficult LSD experience 40 years before and are still able to get back to that under the influence of MDMA and work out some of the conflicts that they weren't able to resolve. All those decades before. So, I think that psychedelics could have been helpful in a different context for Ted Kaczynski. But the other big part of it is that people have to be willing to cooperate with the experience. We talked about resistance. So people can resist these things. You know, the saying is you can drink horse to water, but you can't make them drink. This is about how people have to be willing to go to these spaces. So, one of the essence of our therapeutic approach.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. And I think that this is where I think MDMA comes in, in a way that MDMA is, you know, he felt very isolated and very much out of society in some ways. MDMA stimulates oxytocin, which we haven't mentioned, which is the hormone of nursing mothers, of love and connection. It provides a lot of this sense of self-acceptance and safety and wanting to be in relationship. Gouldolan is a neuroscientist at Hopkins. She's given octopuses, MDMA, their solitary creatures, except mating season, which is not very often, but you give them MDMA and they become more interested in hanging out with other octopuses.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have so much incredible tools in these existing psychedelics that it's more about creating context for them to be used in safe medical or personal growth or recreational even with harm reduction, all these different ways. That's more important to me than finding some new molecule that's somewhat similar or somewhat different, but it can be patented. So it's the social context. So I do believe that Ted Kaczynski was part of NK Ultra, and I think it affected him in a negative way. And that's a cautionary tale, that it's not in the drug. It's in the context.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, all we need to do, and humanity is spiritualized, or end war, and all of this, it's not about the drug. That actually is why for me, we've also talked about engineering new psychedelics and all the people that are going to be trying for-profit companies to develop and patent new psychedelics. For me, the most important challenge is new cultural contexts. That can create legality, safety, support for the existing psychedelics that we already have.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know we can get this opposition to the modern world, to technology, and to the point of creating bombs to try to go after it so that the experience is not in the drug. It's this interaction between the drug, the person, the context. And so we can heal people with psychedelics, or people can be driven crazy with psychedelics. It depends again on the context. And so I think it's both these things can be true. And I think it was really good that you kind of highlighted this, that there is this polarities and that it's not in the drug. It's in the other factors and it's who they were beforehand and then how you use that experience. So all that's to say is if we put LSD in the water and everybody were going to get it, it doesn't mean that all of a sudden everybody's going to have a mystical experience and then that.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think it's true, and I do think it had an impact. So we talked before about are these drugs somehow or other Producing a certain kind of drug experience, or do they bring out what's within? So we have this experience, yeah. On the one hand, Kinkiesi, and he sort of took positive things out of this. On the other hand,”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very disreputable. We're learning more and more about what they did. And one of the unintended consequences was Ken Kesey and not only that, but then the grateful dead who began at the acid test that Kesey was helping to organize. And out of that emerged, you could say just this incredible psychedel culture. And you look at the bands that began in the 60s. And which ones have really survived to this day? And the grateful dead has survived longer than most any other band. I mean, some of them have died and all, but it was like the tightness, the sort of telepathy we talked about before, that they could just get so tuned in to each other and each other's energies and they could do improvisations and they could do this incredible work that I think the sustainability of the grateful dead as a grew. Was a testimony to the power of.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disaster for them. I think there was some thought that some of the people at the CIA had is that if you can turn people inside, you know, take drugs and they just focus on their internal experience. They're not going to be involved politically. It's a way to sort of take people offline. And what I don't think they countered on is that when you're offline and you have these unit of spiritual experiences and you realize how we're all connected, then why do you want to go out and kill these Vietnamese and put a... One dictator over another dictator dictators on both sides in North Vietnam and South Vietnam. Why are we doing that? So MK Ultra has”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either jumped out of a window or was pushed. He might have been killed. He was a CIA guy, and they gave him LSD. And then they're trying to see, can they break him down and get him to tell secrets? And I think he felt uncomfortable with what happened to him while he was under the influence of LSD and whether he was pushed or not. I don't know if we'll ever know. But MK Ultra was Violating people's human rights. It was done in secret. The irony of it is that Ken Keesey is one of the people, one of the main early people that got LSD in this context. And then he was one of the main people that helped inspire the hippies to use psychedelics to oppose the Vietnam War. So I think the CIA kind of, in many cases, things get out of their control, what they think they can do. And it turned into.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But MK Alter was really nefarious and it was part of our military and it was done in secret and they would dose people against their will. I mean, one of the most infamous things That they had a house of prostitution in San Francisco, and they would have one way mirrors and all this stuff, and then they would just dose people with LSD. They would have the prostitutes dose these guys with LSD and observe what they would do and how they would act. The CIA actually for a while was dosing each other secretly. And there's a famous case of this fellow Olsen that...”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think Gandhi said something even better, which is that the true way to win a war is to turn your enemy into your friend. Yeah.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, MK Ultra was a program by the CAA. What they were looking at was, can you take these drugs, these psychedelic drugs, and weaponize them in different ways for interrogation, for true serums, for exposing somebody before they give a big talk to something like LSD and then they can't talk or make a fool of themselves or can you spray LSD over the battlefield and have everybody tripping and drop their weapons and then you just walk up and nobody dies and you've won the battle so so”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, although I would question this idea of safety so we can understand physiological risks and we can minimize them. And I think there's very minimal physiological risks from the classic psychedelics, virtually none, or for even MDMA under safe conditions. Psychological risks are harder to address, but we can do that through the sense of safety and support. But I think there's a level of risk there that we shouldn't overlook. And so, you know, to make a drug into a medicine, what we have to do is prove to the satisfaction of the FDA and other regulatory agencies that things are safe and efficacious. But even though they use those words, proving safety and efficacious, it's in relationship to the disease that you're trying. To treat and you accept a certain amount of risk, so it's the risk benefit ratio rather than pure safety.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Now, that also, just to not shy away from anything controversial. Yeah. That gets us to this idea of psychedelics for Vision Quest, particularly for younger people. When you're sort of moving into this adulting kind of phase and you have to figure out what are you going to do with your life, there's so many options. A lot of people, of course, feel constrained that they have very few options. But I think this idea of psychedelics as a way to help you find your calling or find your vision or find your unique leverage point, I think we'll see that more and more as our culture evolves and gets healthier around the use of psychedelics.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, we have the whole phenomena of a lot of the people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere microdosing psychedelics in order to have a little touch more of this creative approach to things”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much of psychedelic experiences are poetic and metaphorical. I mean, you can take veterans who've never Read a book of poetry in their lives. You know, and under the influence of MDMA, just what they describe, the imagery and the way they describe their experience is metaphorical, poetic. It's incredible. And so I think that Ken Kisey was able to channel what LSD did to his mind in a way that Most people couldn't do, but he did because he was trying to write this novel and because he was so brilliant.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That he could explore them more in depth and more eloquently. And also one of the things he talked about was the fog machine was how people's minds were sort of clouded by the people that ran the institution and the fog machine would be coming in. So I think the imagery and the metaphors that he used a lot in the book could come to him during LSD experiences. And then now he wasn't doing, you know, very, when you're writing, you have to be. Literate, you have to be able to write, you know, so it would be more like beginning and ends of LSD trips instead of at the peak. But I think you would get a lot of these feeling tones or the images, the metaphors I think he would get these extent. Also LSD lasts so long. You can get these extended focus and you can really elaborate on images.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a process that's called semantic priming. And so what that means is that I say night, you say day, you know. There's kind of normal patterns of kind of you say one word, what kind of words come to you next. And so they've done some research, they, meaning scientists, have done some research where you give people a psychedelic and then you do this semantic priming. And what you find is they have a wider range of associations. They normally would when they're not under psychedelics. So, I think for Kinkese, he was able with psychedelics to get like a Deeper kind of emotional connection to some of these states of mind that people were in the dismental institution.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to do that. I think with MDMA, you can negotiate. That's, I think, a part of its safety in a sense. You can have this like, oh, I should be talking about this or I feeling this, but it's too much for me now. You can push it away. But with the classic psychedelics, this kind of membrane between the conscious and the unconscious, that once you take the drug and it weakens this membrane and things are coming up, it's very difficult to negotiate with it. The key to successful classic psychedelic trips is surrender.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. Although, and one of the reasons why we do the supplemental dose during the MDMA, or why there's advantages in a 10-hour LSD experience, is that you have a lot of opportunities to come up against this resistance. It may be too difficult to deal with, and then you kind of push it aside. And then a couple hours later, you come back to it or you come back to it.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This full experience of something is this funeral pyre of that emotion. And so that runs against a lot of what modern psychiatry is doing too, which is to suppress symptoms. And instead of supporting people to kind of explore these insecurities so that then they can contain them and then they can move on.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was unable to overcome this idea of letting go and really fully dissolving, letting the ego fully go. And I would have this sequence of trips over a couple months where I would reach this point where I was too scared to move forward and I would just be holding on. So there are repeated themes sometimes. What Stan Groff has said, which I find very beautiful, is that the full expression of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion. What that means is if you can fully let in something, then the essence of life has changed is that it moves on, that everything's in motion. And if you can fully experience it, even if it's a sense that you're going to be trapped in eternity in this hellish state, if you surrender to that, that's the way out.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so once I Had this kind of shattering experience that Hitler's part of me You know, no one else in the group had that. Probably a lot of them have maybe had that before, or they realize that they're not just the good, the white hat, good people, and that they're all good and, you know, we've got to fight against the bad people. And not only that, if you do it again, you'll go into a different place than you went to the first time Unless you have not resolved the issue. So I had a sequence of LSD trips that were very difficult, but it was like coming to the same sort of conundrum, the same challenge.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sentenced him to burn at the stake for espousing this idea that the earth was not really the center of the universe, he said to the Inquisition, is greater than my fear in being sentenced. That their worldview was so rigid, that they had to wipe out anybody that would question it. This idea of psychedelics displacing our ego is the center of the universe and to realize that we are just rotating around something much bigger than our individual life. Our ego is designed almost to protect this body while we're alive. And you can understand all the good reasons why that is. But it also disconnects us from this bigger reality. And so the psychedelics DMT by knocking this sort of ego orientation or the default mode network offline, you open up to the bigger sweeps of history.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that is just to say is that the context is the most important factor. So while I'll talk about the DMT experience, the context was this supportive sense of safety that I could be completely vulnerable and out of any kind of control women, I think, often are less safe in this way than men because of all the sexual assaults. What it can do by taking the ego orientation offline to some extent, it opens you up to much more. And to make a bigger point of that, we could say that it's very similar to the Copernican Revolution. People thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, and the Inquisition murdered people that questioned that. Father Bruno burned at the stake. Actually, one of the things he said, I think that's worth all these years later saying, is that when the Inquisition”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be this sense of safety as you become vulnerable in looking inside, you're not, I was just actually told about how there's a lot of work being done inside prisons to teach mindfulness. And so one of the Charlene, who's my assistant, is trying to do work on helping people in prison with trauma, potentially one day with MDMA or meditation or mindfulness. But one of the exercises was teaching people to, okay, here's how you deal with stress. Just close your eyes and deep breathe. And what Charlene was saying is people don't close their eyes in prison. You don't feel safe to do that.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I had not taken LSD. So there's this way in which we do that. So I would say that from the DMT experience, the sense of safety, that's what I was trying to get at with this group of us and this group of friends trying to do this common exploration, that if you have this sense of safety, you're incredibly vulnerable because you are giving up your awareness really of what's happening around you. I think there's What we're finding is that in our psychedelic research for PTSD and what we see with the vaccines that even African Americans are reluctant to volunteer for vaccines because they haven't had that sense of safety from the medical establishment. They don't volunteer for psychedelic therapy even as much. So the overlay”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Yes, yes, because it's also what you bring back. Right. I mean, I think that's particularly for therapy. It's not so much about what the experience is, but it's what you bring back. And what do you integrate? And then also, how do you learn how to do these things on your own without the drugs? There is this way, because we're saying it's sort of a core human experience, the drug is the mediator, but can we do this on our own? And once you've seen it and felt it, then you have a little bit better sense to recreate it on your own. Although, you know, I've had dreams where I've been doing LSD and tripping. It was just incredible. I was tripping in my dreams.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was with a group of people, the way we are doing it was, you know, each of us would smoke DMT, have 10, 15 minutes of experience while we closed our eyes and, you know, everybody else was just chatting. And then the person who did the DMT would come back and tell their story, what happened. And then we'd think about it for a bit and then pass the pipe to the next person. And so this was like a whole evening.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was just this shock like a stone sunk, you know, and I just was very moody for the whole next day. But it was that acknowledgement that each of us carries these potentials. And what we activate is what matters. But what our potential are is the whole full range of things.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had the sense that in my innermost sense of who I am uniquely individually, this inner voice that's talking to me that I didn't develop English, that it's like a gift to me from millions of people, so that even in my most innermost sense, it's not just me. It's the product of everything that came before me. I'm part of this bigger system. And then I just thought, wow, just how many billions of years does it take to reach this point, self-awareness and all this? And it was glorious, beautiful. And then I had this thought. And this is where this kind of intellectual honesty, I guess you could say. I just thought, well, if I'm part of everything and everything's part of me, then it's not just the good parts that Hitler is part of me too.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was 15 years or so after World War II. But yeah, and I'd say one of the most important psychedelic experiences of my life was a DMT experience. Also, Terrence was there, Ralph Metzner, Andy Weil, a few others. And we were sitting around Ed Esla and smoking DMT. And under the influence of DMT, which now this was the first time I've ever smoked DMT, I had this super rapid fraction of a second, like dissolving of everything that I, well, first off I saw a horizontal line, then I saw a vertical line, then it turned into a color, red, then it was red, then it turned into cubes, then it turned into like an MC-Esher kind of like, I don't know, you know, didn't make logical sense, and then I was gone. Then it was just this. Period of five, ten minutes of just feeling part of this enormous wave of billions of years of evolution, how”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a quote from Carl Jung from just a few years before he died. And I'll just paraphrase it, is that we need to understand psychology. We need to understand who man is, that the greatest danger to us is man. There are no other dangers, really, that impact our species. And then he goes on to say that we are the source of all coming evil.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I thought to myself, I've already decided to do this. You can lay this on me. I can say yes, and then you can die in peace. And then he died in front of my eyes in the dream. So, I think that that kind of cultural transmission that I got from when I was really young then manifested in this dream. And that was this story about how people can be incredibly vicious and can be very motivated by irrational factors. And so I just feel that this kind of multi-generational transmission of this story of the irrational being a murderous factor and something I needed to respond to was deeply ingrained. And I would say my guess is more culturally than this epigenetic mechanism.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll just add that the most important dream of my life ever was of a Holocaust survivor telling me that he was miraculously saved from death. And he knew that he was saved for a particular purpose, but he never knew what that purpose was. So in the dream, I'm seeing him on his deathbed. And then he shows me whatever happened to him during the Holocaust. We're back in the room on his deathbed. And he says, well, I know what my purpose was now. And I'm like, oh, great. What was it? He says, let's tell you to be a psychedelic therapist and to study psychedelics and bring back psychedelic research.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Now, the other portion of that, though, is culture. I mean, culture is where we store all these memories. And the stories that we get passed down.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will we develop one day certain kind of chemicals that we'll be able to bring certain kind of memories to the surface? That's not inconceivable.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source