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

“Sort of like set points for anxiety, fear, certain things like that. But the question is, can you actually transmit memories from one generation to the next? Now, this is not DNA. Changes which happen over a very long period of time in the evolutionary scale. But within one lifetime, within some experiences, you're epigenetics, what turns on the genes or turns off certain genes, that can be impacted. And that's what we know now can be transmitted from generation to generation. Either by the father or the mother through the sperm or the egg. So it's pretty remarkable. So what Rachel's going to try to do is MDMA research for PTSD and look at these epigenetic markers before and after and see if they change as a consequence of therapy.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Studies that are with the epigenetics of trauma. So she's worked with Holocaust survivors and their children. And she has identified epigenetic mechanisms by which trauma is passed from generation to the generations.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not so much this eco-dissolution or emotional. What MDMA does is reduces activity in the amygdala, the fear processing part of the brain. So it's not just chemistry, but it routes energy throughout the brain in a different way. It increases activity in the prefrontal cortex. So you think more logically, that I think has an enormous impact on the effect of MDMA. The other thing it does is it increases connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus. So it helps facilitate processing of things into long-term memory. And with PTSD, trauma is like never in the past. It's always about to happen. So will we one time develop drugs that would even be specific to certain kind of memories? We're working with a woman, Rachel Yehuda, who is at the Bronx VA, and she's done some stuff.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, you can have approximate ideas, but to know exactly. So, you know, when I first tried MDMA, which was 1982, and this was after I had done lots of LSD and masculine. And mushrooms. I was shocked at how different it was than these other substances and yet how profound it was. So are there a whole new kind of categories of classes of drugs that we're not aware of that would be”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's still a lot of mysteries as far as structure activity relationships. And it's not going to be the case that people go into the lab and they tinker with molecules and they know exactly what they're going to get. And a lot of it has to do with the not so much chemistry as morphology. You could say the shape of the molecule and how does that interact with receptor sites. And so we're getting better at modeling all of that.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then what they would do is if they both thought it was valuable, they had a group of 12 people that they were with for many, many years. And they would distribute these new drug to these 12 people. And they would get the different perspectives. And he felt that 12 was like a minimum number, you know, because we're so unique how each of us see things. But then you kind of get a little bit of a consensus on how a lot of people are going to see it. And then if that 12 people were positive about it, then they would turn it over to Leo Zeph, who we called the secret chief, the leader of the underground psychedelic therapy movement. And then he would start exploring it in therapy.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big the universe is and how small each one of us is. So there's a lot of work that Sasha Shilgin and Albert Hoffman, who invented LSD and first synthesized psilocybin on what they call structure activity relationships, what is the structural of the molecule? And then how do you predict what that new molecule that never existed before is going to do once you actually take it? get close, but you never really know until you actually take the drug. And the way that Sasha ran his experiments is that he would take the drugs himself first in low doses. And he would sort of, you know, step up the doses to have more experiences. If he thought it was valuable, he'd share it with his wife Anne.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On different neurotransmitters, different other parts of energies in the brain. The default mode network is what's considered to be like our sense of self. And it's part of the brain that sort of is what I described before, scanning the world and filtering information for what's really important to us and both focusing us on things and also helping us to ignore a lot of things. And the classic psychedelics all weaken the energy in this default mode system. And therefore you get this flood of information that you're not normally paying attention to. And then you start seeing in more creative waves or more connected, you actually move beyond the verbal kind of thinking into sort of symbolic thinking a lot of times. And that's where you sometimes get these mystical sense of connection, how it's all one, and you get this sense also of...”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The new approaches to oncology, where you do genetic analysis of different kind of tumors, and then you have certain kind of chemotherapy agents, and you do like personalized chemotherapy. I think we will have more personalized psychedelic therapy, but it'll be more like a sequence of different drugs that people go through over an extended period of time. And then you kind of customize what's next. And sometimes you'll combine different drugs together, like this 5MEO DMT and MDMA, or a lot of times people do LSD, MDMA combinations or psilocybin MDMA combinations. Chemistry and it's not my strength. I'm more into clinical applications and policy, but I can say that from what I've learned from reading from others and research done by others, that different psychedelics have an impact.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although I don't know about fine tuning things to the person in the sense that we believe there's this inner healer, this kind of inner healing intelligence. We talked about it the body repairs itself. So I think we more need to create safety for people. And then what emerges will be customized to what they need to be looking at from this inner healing intelligence. At the same time, we will move to, you know, we hear so much about.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was like a shocking thing for somebody scientific like that to say that. So, will we unlock those parts where I talked about the collective unconscious? Will we be able to more consciously explore those areas? So I think that that's a possibility. There was Stan Groff, who's the world's leading LSD researcher and has been my mentor, his wife Brigitta. They were talking about stories that they had heard about MDMA that people take. And then on top of that, they do 5MEO DMT. And so you get this egodissolution, but underneath it you have this sense of ego sort of safety, of self-acceptance kind of grounds it. Stan was like, that's the future of psychiatry That you can watch without the terror of the ego disillusion, the sense that you're losing your mind or you're going crazy or you're dying or”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you reminded me. I'll get to exactly what you said, but you reminded me of a talk I heard by Buck Mr. Fuller shortly before he died. And what he talked about is how technology was making things ever smaller, you know, that we were able to pack more and more information into smaller and smaller spaces and that we're developing technologies of communications with people we now know the internet and things like that. But what he said is that he thought the eventual evolution of this sort of research would move from this miniaturization to telepathy.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rise of the for profit companies is making it so that there's just going to be an enormous amount of investigations into all these different psychedelics. But what we're going to see is the development of new psychedelics that we don't know anything about that have not existed yet because a lot of these for-profit companies are going to want to invent and patent and have composition and matter patents on new molecules. So I think we'll see a lot of that happening too.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ergot on grain and LSD comes from Aragot. So I think that there are a lot of ways to look at these different substances. Another distinction is which one of them are being researched right now. Scientific context and which are not. And because of the rise of all these for-profit companies and everybody's looking for what they can patent, what they can claim, the land grab, more and more there are companies looking at every different kind of psychedelics. The ones that are most important that are not being researched, mescaline, but now there's a company to do mescaline, a journey co-lab, I began, which is crucial. Company, a branch of this company, AI, that's going to be looking at Ibegan. So I'd say the”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People to be in this therapeutic state. So that's another distinction is, you know, how long these drugs last. Another distinction is which of them come from a religious context, have a religion built around them. We have this sense that some people are saying that 5MEO DMT and the Snoran Toad that they have this long history of indigenous use, but they don't. That's all modern. It's made up and it's kind of a new approach. However, there was thousands of years of use of psilocybin mushrooms in religious contexts. From 1600 BC to 396 AD, the world's longest mystery ceremonies, the Eleusinian mysteries, sort of the heart of Greek culture, the heart of Western culture, that was a psychedelic potion called Kikian that seems like it's very much like an LSD-like substance.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, LSD has eight, ten, 12 hours sometimes. Psilocybin is more like five or six hours or four to six hours. MDMA is similar. One reason why in our research we give an initial dose of MDMA and then two hours later we give half the initial amount to extend the plateau because we want it to last longer.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chemically. So masculine of these psychedelics tends to have the warmth that MDMA has. It's not as ego-dissolving quite as some of the others. I mean, it's the main active ingredient in Peyote. It is very psychedelic, very visual. Another distinction with these different drugs is how long they last. And a lot of that has to do with the route of administration. So, for example, if you smoke DMT, it takes 10, 15 minutes and you're within seconds, you're off in another world. Similarly, 5MEO DMT very rapid. When you take DMT in the form of ayahuasca, where it's mixed with another substance that makes it so that it's orally active, then it's a couple hours.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense of classic psychedelics versus things like MDMA. So, to what extent do they dissolve the ego? And you could say, to what extent do they cause visions, the 5HD, 2A serotonin receptor subtype, which is responsible for a lot of that where these drugs are activating? Now masculine of all the psychedelics, chemically it's the most similar to MDMA. It's a phenethylamine, which is MDMA. So in the 50s, there was the 53, I think it was, the Army Chemical Warfare Service wanted to look at drugs for interrogations, mind control, non-lethal incapacitance. They did a study in eight substances. These were now toxicity studies in animals. And on the one side was methamphetamine, on the other was mescaline, and MDMA was in the middle.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the safety of MDMA. And so then Dick Price, who started Aslan, I said, I'll put $1,000. Dick Price, he'd put $1,000. So Terrence was actually the catalyst for the first study with him, DMA. Just because he was so frustrating about how plants are okay. And if it's from the lab, it's bad”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this was some of the underground therapists and the above ground researchers were trying to talk about how to protect MDMA from this eventual crackdown. And Terrence was like, forget about it. You know, it's from the lab. It's dangerous. We have thousands of years of history, all these other things. And, you know, what do we know about MDMA and blah, blah, blah, blah? And I was like, Terence, you're so... Unscientific Full of shit. Another way to say it is, and I just said, you know, we need a study.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if they don't show up in nature, like LSD. Now, there is something LSD is lysurgic acid diethylamide. There is lysurgic acid amide, which comes from morning glory seeds. So it's very similar. But at the same time I'd say, I don't buy into that distinction that there's some fundamental preference. One of the things that Terence McKenna, since we talked about him, he talked about how if it's from nature, it's good. And if it's not, you know, we should be suspect. Of course, he had a lot of great LSD experiences. Actually, Terrence in 1984, we were at Eslin with a bunch of other people. This was before the crackdown on MDMA.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of the big ones that people make a big deal of that I think is completely misplaced. Some are from nature, some are from the lab. So there's this kind of like romantic thought that if it's from nature, it's good. If it's from the lab, it's somehow tainted by humanity. And, you know, therefore, some people are all for plant psychedelics. We see the policy changes that have been happening in a couple cities, Cambridge, Somerville, right? not far from where we're at now where they decriminalize plant medicines. So they call it decriminalizing nature. So I think that there is. From my perspective. Certain things from nature are poison, certain things from the lab are spiritual.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we have that with the radio. I mean, you know, you got a frequency, you turn all this information. You could actually say right now in the space between us, we have the whole world's knowledge that's up on the internet. Right here But we don't see it.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experiences that people have had before. And we always hear about everybody who talks about past life, they're always kings and queens.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think that there's this. Other concept I guess I would like to talk about briefly, this Jungian collective unconscious, this idea that somehow or other everything that has ever happened is still accessible, maybe not with as much Or as much resolution, but that there's wave resonances so that I do believe that we can have experiences as part of this human collective unconscious that we're not from our own life. And that we can the holographic realities, that there is a way to gather information that can be accurate about other times and places through depth investigations of our own consciousness. But I think what I tend to believe is that it's because there's emotional resonances between where we're at now in this life. Other kind of”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With ayahuasca, it's about jaguars and Amazonian animals. And so I think these machine elves are this construct of Terrans that other people do see. There's actually some people that are very interested in doing a study and that they're well funded and moving toward it to keep people on an IV infusion of DMT. For them specifically to see do they contact machine elves or aliens, and what kind of information do they bring back from these other? Other places or other entities. One question is, you know, who are we? Are we connected to everything in the universe? We certainly know in many cases. You talk about waves or particles. the quantum approach. So I don't interpret. Experiences that we have of some entity that's somehow or other deep in our consciousness that's not us. It's a part of who we are. So I tend to interpret it in that way.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I knew Terrence. I spent a lot of time talking with Terence, and I do not ascribe to a lot of things that he was saying. He was tremendous entertainer, and I think he did a lot of really good things and focused us on, you know, the power of psychedelics. But I think I've never seen these, quote, machine elves. I think culture is more determinative of what people experience under psychedelics, your preconceptions, then we give it credit for. And so I think there's a lot of priming that you could say that people receive by stories from their culture.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, all of that is to say to your question that I think these psychedelics reveal things that are within us. Some things that are how we process information back when we were children, other things that we've never thought of before that are sort of baked into our consciousness. You know, there's one. Drug 5 MEO DMT. It's this toxin from a Sonoran toad that many people consider it to be the most powerful of all the psychedelics. And it kind of knocks the ego structures completely out of it. And we experience something different, but it's something I think that's always within us. It's at a deeper layer. So we knock out some of the higher cognitive functions and then we experience things in a different way. So my sense is that these are human experiences that the psychedelics bring us to.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when it's used in anesthesia, there's what's called the emergent phenomena. So, this is you get enough ketamine for, you can be operated on, you're not in pain, you're not really there, your ego's knocked out, but you can still breathe. But as the operations get over and then people metabolize the ketamine, there's a process that they call the emergent phenomena. It's like as you're emerging from this tranquilized state. And that's where you pass through the psychedelic phase. And they don't prepare people for that. What we see is that a lot of adults have difficult times with that, but children don't seem to have those problems. Children are a little bit more already in this kind of state. And so ketamine is used quite frequently in children now for anesthesia.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Large extent by conscious control. I mean, eventually we are learning more about the mind body and we learn about the placebo effect, what we think is the case. But I think that there's experiences that are below our level of conscious awareness, particularly once we're adults that are more these unit of mystical experiences, sense of connection. You know, I think kids are like this a lot. We kind of come from the void, you could say, and you're born and you have a different way of processing information. One interesting point about that has to do with ketamine, which is been approved es ketamine for depression, but it's used for anesthesia. And roughly one tenth the anesthetic dose is a psychedelic dose.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pill opens you up and you have an experience of yourself. Sometimes these are experiences that we've never consciously had. But we can say right now that we know that our body below the level of our conscious awareness has all these self-healing mechanisms. And we don't modulate them.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's a very crucial thing. So, yes, Sasha Shulgin, who sort of the godfather of MDMA, he sort of rediscovered it and brought it. Back into use, he talked about his first experience with Meskelin, his first psychedelic experience was with Meskeline. And he had a tremendous experience. But what he said about it was having a human experience that the masculine was helping him access rather than he was having a masculine experience. So that it's not like you pop a pill and you always have the same kind of experiences everybody else. The experience is not contained in the pill.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By dissolving this ego control or by with MDMA kind of strengthening our sense of self and our sense of self acceptance, we can bring in other information that have previously been too complicated or too painful.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tend to not focus on a lot of things that are coming, but we also push away things that are difficult emotionally, difficult cognitively. You know, we all know that we're on this very short trajectory from birth to death, but we're not constantly thinking about dying. Although that can actually be helpful to focus us on what's really important, traumas are often suppressed, the Conflicts we see in America and around the world a kind of rise of irrationality. Where people push away their logic in order for their emotional tribal needs to be met. A lot of people are suffering from early childhood traumas of a different kind or abandonment issues or anything. So we tend to focus on just what we need to survive and what we need for work and esteem. And so psychedelics.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, all this Huxley talked about the brain as a reducing valve, that we have an enormous amount of information. So right now there's an air conditioning sound in the background. But that's not crucial to what you and I are doing talking to each other. So we kind of tune that out. There's all sorts of sights and sounds. There's incoming information in all the different sense modalities. And we have to figure out what's important to us. And so the... Mind in a way focuses a lot on what are our core needs. And we filter all the incoming information that we get towards focusing on what our core needs. And we can even get to Abraham Maslow and the hierarchy of needs about survival needs, belonging needs, esteem needs, go on. So I think what What I mean by bringing things to the surface is that”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anchoring the concept of psychedelic in dreams is really helpful for people to know that it's kind of a natural state and that there are other ways that you can catalyze it than by going to sleep and that for thousands of years substances have been used in that way.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can quibble about whether it's certainly not a classic psychedelic, but I think MDMA is also a psychedelic marijuana, I would say, is a psychedelic. Marijuana is closer to the classic psychedelics than it is to MDMA. One point I'd like to make is dreams because then everybody can relate to that. Dreams are psychedelic. Dreams bring emotions, feelings, ideas, concepts in symbolic form a lot of times, or just in raw motions to the surface. So when people hear the word psychedelic, often they are frightened by it, it's about loss of control. And it is to an extent loss of conscious control, particularly with the classic psychedelics. And we know with dreams that we can have frightening dreams, nightmares, but I think that”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But our primary focus is on the drugs, is on the medicines or the, you might call some people might call them spiritual tools or sacraments. There's sort of two general categories of those. One are what are called the classic psychedelics, and those are the ego-dissolving sort of merged into unitive states. Those are like LSD, psilocybin, masculine, ayahuasca, ibigaine, DMT, things like that. And then there's MDMA, which some people even argue is not a psychedelic. They'll say it's an empathogen or an intactogen. It's about touching within or empathy. It doesn't do the same kind of ego dissolution That the classic psychedelics do, but it brings material to the surface and it changes the way we process information. And so I think”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. When I started MAPS, the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies, it was very important for me that psychedelic be in the name. And the way in which the original meaning of psychedelic its mind manifesting. It was created by Humphrey Osmond in a dialogue with Aldus Huxley. And so psychedelic means mind manifesting. And so we interpret that very broadly to mean dreams or psychedelic. Anything that kind of brings things to the surface, holotropic breathwork, you know, hyperventilation is psychedelic. So most people think psychedelic is only about certain kind of chemical substances, either natural or synthetic, but we've got a much broader view of that. Meditation can be psychedelic in some ways.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source