The Experience Is Not in the Pill. Rick Doblin Spent Decades Proving the Context Is.

Lex Fridman opens with Rick Doblin, founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a figure who has been inside both the cultural history of psychedelics and the science now trying to make them medicines. Doblin starts with the word itself. Humphry Osmond coined *psychedelic* in dialogue with Aldous Huxley: mind-manifesting. MAPS reads that broadly enough to include dreams, Holotropic Breathwork, even some meditation. The primary work, though, is still on the drugs, whether people call them medicines, spiritual tools, or sacraments.

He splits the field into two rough families. Classic psychedelics — LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, ibogaine, DMT — dissolve the ego into unitive states. MDMA is the other pole. Some people refuse to call it a psychedelic at all and prefer *entactogen*: it does not smash the self the way LSD does, but it brings material up and changes how information is processed. Marijuana, in his view, sits closer to the classics than to MDMA. Dreams are the analogy he wants ordinary listeners to keep, because everyone already knows a night can surface feelings in symbolic form, and everyone already knows a nightmare is possible.

Huxley's image of the brain as a reducing valve is how Doblin explains "bringing things to the surface." An air conditioner is running in the room as they talk; they tune it out because it is not what the conversation needs. Survival, belonging, and esteem, in Maslow's stack, do the same filtering. Traumas, death, tribal emotion, and childhood abandonment get pushed down so the day can proceed. Classic psychedelics loosen that ego control. MDMA, by contrast, strengthens a sense of self and self-acceptance so the same buried material can come in without shattering the person who has to feel it.

The load-bearing claim is that none of this is conjured from nowhere. Sasha Shulgin, who rediscovered MDMA, described his first mescaline session as a *human* experience the molecule helped him access, not a mescaline experience he was having. Children already live closer to that unfiltered state, which is why Doblin thinks kids handle ketamine's "emergence" better than adults as anesthesia wears off. Even 5-MeO-DMT, the Sonoran Desert toad toxin many people call the most powerful psychedelic, knocks higher cognition offline so a deeper layer can speak. Fridman raises Terence McKenna's machine elves. Doblin knew McKenna, credits him as an entertainer who focused attention on the power of these drugs, and does not buy the elves. Culture primes the visions. Jaguars show up on ayahuasca. Whatever entity appears, Doblin tends to read it as a part of who we are, which leaves the real question: how big are we?

Asked for the differences among ayahuasca, DMT, LSD, marijuana, mescaline, psilocybin, and MDMA, Doblin first waves off a distinction he thinks is romantic and misplaced: nature versus the laboratory. Plants can be poisons. Lab compounds can be spiritual. LSD does not grow on a hillside, though lysergic acid amide in morning-glory seeds is a close cousin. Cities near the studio had begun decriminalizing "plant medicines" under the slogan of decriminalizing nature. He does not grant plants a moral preference.

Terence McKenna forced the point in 1984 at Esalen, before the crackdown on MDMA, when underground therapists and above-ground researchers were trying to protect the compound. McKenna wanted to forget it: laboratory-made, no thousand-year indigenous record, unknown risks. Doblin called that unscientific. Dick Price, who co-founded Esalen, put up a thousand dollars after Doblin did, and the first MDMA safety study got funded because McKenna had been so frustrating. The man who thought plants were safer became, in Doblin's telling, the catalyst for studying a synthetic.

The differences that actually matter are duration, vision, ego-dissolution, and whether a religion already exists around the substance. 5-HT2A receptors drive a lot of the classic visual and unitive effects. Mescaline, a phenethylamine like MDMA, is chemically the closest classic to it and tends to carry some of MDMA's warmth. Smoked DMT or 5-MeO-DMT can last ten or fifteen minutes; ayahuasca, with DMT made orally active, lasts hours; LSD can run eight to twelve hours; psilocybin four to six. MAPS gives an MDMA dose and then half that amount two hours later to hold people on the therapeutic plateau. The Eleusinian mysteries, from 1600 BC to 396 AD, look to him like an LSD-like potion, kykeon, built on ergot. Claims of ancient indigenous 5-MeO-DMT toad use, he says, are modern invention.

For-profit psychedelic companies, Doblin says, are in a land grab: mescaline now has Journey Colab, ibogaine has interest from an ATAI-linked effort, and the pipeline will fill with never-before-seen molecules because composition-of-matter patents are the business model. Fridman wants the chemistry of what those new drugs might unlock. Doblin is a clinician and a policy person, not a chemist, and he swerves first to a talk he heard from Buckminster Fuller near the end of Fuller's life. Miniaturization, Fuller thought, was heading toward telepathy. If there is a collective unconscious, Doblin is willing to say we might learn to explore it more deliberately.

Stanislav Grof, his mentor and the field's leading LSD researcher, heard stories of MDMA underneath 5-MeO-DMT: ego dissolution with a floor of self-acceptance, so you can watch the self dissolve without the terror of going crazy or dying. Grof called that the future of psychiatry. Doblin likes combinations — LSD with MDMA, psilocybin with MDMA — sequenced over time, closer to personalized oncology than to a single magic bullet. He does not think you fine-tune the molecule to the person so much as you create safety and let an "inner healer" choose what needs to come up, the way the body already repairs itself.

What the classics do, as he has learned it, is weaken the default mode network, the scanning-and-filtering system that feels like a self. Information floods in. Thinking goes symbolic. A mystical sense of connection can follow, along with a sense of how small one life is. Albert Hofmann and Shulgin chased structure-activity relationships and still had to take the new molecule to know. Shulgin dosed himself, then his wife Ann, then a group of twelve he considered a minimum for consensus, then handed promising compounds to Leo Zeff, the "secret chief" of underground therapy. Doblin's first MDMA session in 1982, after plenty of LSD, mescaline, and mushrooms, shocked him by how different and still how profound it was. MDMA reduces activity in the amygdala, raises it in prefrontal cortex, and increases connectivity between amygdala and hippocampus, which is why fear drops, logic returns, and trauma can move into long-term memory instead of staying always about to happen.

Working with Rachel Yehuda at the Bronx VA, MAPS planned to look at epigenetic markers of trauma before and after MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. Yehuda had identified mechanisms by which Holocaust survivors passed anxiety set points to their children through sperm or egg, not by rewriting DNA on an evolutionary timescale. Whether actual *memories* transmit that way is an open question. Doblin's own deepest transmission, he guesses, was cultural. The most important dream of his life put a Holocaust survivor on his deathbed, showing him what had happened, then telling him the purpose of that survival was to send Doblin to become a psychedelic therapist and bring the research back.

Fridman pushes on the capacity for evil that World War II and Stalinism revealed, still sitting in everyone. Doblin paraphrases Jung from a few years after the war: the greatest danger to us is man; we are the source of all coming evil. The psychedelic experience that locked that in was his first smoked DMT, at Esalen, with Terence McKenna, Ralph Metzner, Andrew Weil, and others passing a pipe. A horizontal line, a vertical line, red, cubes, an Escher space that would not parse — then he was gone. For five or ten minutes he felt himself as a wave of billions of years of evolution. Even the inner voice speaking English was a gift from millions of people. Then intellectual honesty arrived: if everything is part of him, Hitler is too. A stone sank. He was moody the entire next day.

The group sat around chatting while each person went inside for ten or fifteen minutes and came back with a story. Context was the real drug: a circle of friends, a sense of safety, permission to be completely vulnerable. That overlay, Doblin says, is why African Americans have been reluctant to volunteer for vaccines and for psychedelic therapy, and why people in prison will not close their eyes for a mindfulness exercise. Women often feel less safe because of sexual assault. Take the ego offline without that safety and you do not get a Copernican shift, you get a violation. Giordano Bruno, sentenced to burn for saying the Earth was not the center, told the Inquisition their fear in sentencing him was greater than his fear in being sentenced. Psychedelics, at their best, displace the ego the way Copernicus displaced the Earth.

Nobody else in that DMT circle had the Hitler shatter that night, which is Doblin's point about repetition: the same person, on a later session, goes somewhere else unless an issue is unresolved. He once had a run of difficult LSD trips over a couple of months, always the same conundrum, too scared to let the ego fully go. Grof's line, which he finds beautiful, is that the full expression of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion. If you can let even a hellish eternity fully in, motion starts again and that is the way out. Modern psychiatry, he says, mostly does the opposite: it suppresses symptoms instead of supporting people to explore the insecurity until they can contain it and move on.

Resistance is why MAPS uses a supplemental MDMA dose and why a ten-hour LSD session has an advantage. You meet the same wall more than once. MDMA lets you negotiate: this is too much, push it away, come back. Classic psychedelics weaken the membrane between conscious and unconscious until negotiation is mostly gone. The key, Doblin says, is surrender. Fridman notes that Doblin first began to doubt the health myths when he learned Ken Kesey wrote parts of *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest* under LSD. Semantic-priming studies show a wider range of associations on psychedelics. Doblin thinks Kesey got deeper emotional access to the ward, and that the fog-machine metaphors arrived as feeling-tones at the beginning and end of long sessions, not at the peak when you cannot write.

Veterans who have never read poetry, he says, describe MDMA sessions in images. Silicon Valley microdosing is the folk version of a creativity claim he would like to see studied with real rigor, over years, not as a productivity hack. After trauma treatment, the next cultural use he expects is the vision quest: young people trying to find a calling. He will not sell that as pure safety. Physiological risk from the classics is minimal, and MDMA's physical risks can be controlled in a clinic, but psychological risk is real. Making a drug into a medicine means proving to FDA that the *ratio* of benefit to risk is acceptable for a disease, not that the substance is harmless.

Kesey was also in MKUltra, the CIA program that asked whether psychedelics could be weaponized: interrogation, truth serums, dosing a speaker before a talk, spraying a battlefield so soldiers drop their weapons and nobody dies. They called it non-lethal incapacitance. Gandhi's better version, Doblin notes, was to turn your enemy into your friend. The program was secret, dosed people against their will, ran a San Francisco house of prostitution with one-way mirrors, and had CIA officers dosing one another. Frank Olson, a CIA officer given LSD, went out a window; Doblin does not pretend to know whether he jumped or was pushed.

The irony is the part he wants. Kesey got LSD in that machinery and then helped inspire hippies to use psychedelics against the Vietnam War. Some people at the CIA had hoped inner experience would take citizens offline politically. They did not count on unitive states making people ask why they should kill Vietnamese over a choice of dictators. Out of Kesey's Acid Tests came the Grateful Dead. Doblin thinks the band's longevity and the telepathy of its improvisation are testimony to those LSD sessions, and that none of it might have happened without MKUltra.

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was allegedly in MKUltra studies at Harvard. Doblin thinks that is true and that it affected him badly. Same era of LSD, opposite extraction: Kesey took something generative, Kaczynski took opposition to the modern world all the way to bombs. If you put LSD in the water, you do not get a spiritualized species. That is why, even as companies race to patent new molecules, Doblin thinks the real work is new cultural contexts — medical, growth, even recreational with harm reduction — for the tools we already have. MDMA might have helped Kaczynski in a different setting. It stimulates oxytocin, the hormone of nursing and connection; Gül Dölen at Johns Hopkins gave it to octopuses, solitary except in rare mating seasons, and they became more interested in other octopuses. MAPS has even taken people back to a forty-year-old difficult LSD session and worked the conflict. The horse still has to drink. Therapy, in their model, flips the 1950s doctor-as-god script: people heal themselves.

Doblin knew Timothy Leary. The place to start, Fridman suggests, is Nixon calling him the most dangerous man in America, which Doblin traces to "turn on, tune in, drop out" and to Leary's other refrain: think for yourself, question authority. Leary was a rebel kicked out of West Point, then a Harvard psychologist from 1960 to 1963. A mushroom session in Mexico, he said, taught him more about the mind than his entire academic career. At Harvard he ran the Good Friday experiment — psilocybin given to religiously inclined people in a religious setting — and the Concord Prison experiment, hoping mystical connection would cut recidivism. He also ran naturalistic psilocybin sessions and later moved into LSD, which he used to say might have been the reason they did not get to stay at Harvard.

He drifted from classes toward musicians and artists, became a counterculture icon, and was hounded into jail. Ram Dass told Doblin he himself was a rascal but Leary was a scoundrel: good fun versus someone you cannot quite trust. Doblin thinks Leary got a little addicted to media attention and is unfairly blamed for the shutdown of research. The common narrative is psychedelics gone wrong — unprepared people, breakdowns, suicides. Some of that happened. The real engine of the backlash, Doblin argues, was psychedelics going *right*. People felt connected, feared death less, wanted paradise now rather than later, and walked into the antiwar, environmental, civil rights, and women's movements. That challenge to the status quo is what got punished.

In 1990, at a MAPS fundraising conference, Doblin asked Leary for advice on working with the government. "Fuck the government," Leary said. He was past asking permission for anything, but he was glad Doblin was doing it, and he held up Doblin's hand as if passing a torch. Doblin then did the homework Leary had not. For an undergraduate thesis at New College in Sarasota he found 19 of 20 Good Friday volunteers whose names had been lost. Twenty-five years later, in the Reagan years, they still called the session a valid mystical experience. He also found what the original write-up hid: one divinity student, stirred by Howard Thurman's sermon at Marsh Chapel — Thurman had spent time with Gandhi and was a hidden hand behind nonviolence in the civil rights movement — ran down Commonwealth Avenue to tell people there was a man on the cross. Leary and Huston Smith caught him. They gave him Thorazine, a major antipsychotic Doblin says they would never use now to abort a difficult session. Eight of ten psilocybin subjects had a mystical experience, not ten of ten. Concord, Doblin concluded, had fudged data entirely. Leary underplayed risks and overpromised benefits because, Doblin thinks, the outside world was exaggerating risks and starving the work.

Doblin founded MAPS in 1986, a year after the DEA emergency-scheduled MDMA in 1985. The compound had been Adam in therapy rooms and was becoming ecstasy in bars; a crackdown was inevitable. Using a nonprofit tied to Buckminster Fuller's Earth Metabolic Design Lab, they had sued to keep therapeutic use alive and were winning in court and in public until the emergency scheduling landed. The drug war's story could not tolerate a good Schedule I drug. Americans, Doblin decided, *are* open to medicines that ease suffering. Science would be the religion. Culture and religion stay metaphorical until they turn literal; medicine could bring the drugs back above ground.

The mission was mass mental health, not a few awakened leaders. He quotes Einstein: the splitting of the atom changed everything except our mode of thinking, and a new mode is required if mankind is to survive. Doblin's candidate for that mode is the mystical sense that we are connected, which is why people fantasize about dosing world leaders. A ketamine session the day after the Hitler DMT showed him the limit. He was above and behind Hitler at a Nuremberg-style rally, watching the salute ratchet energy from the one to the many and back, and he realized there was no way into that head. You have to be willing. Change the mass of humanity, or do not bother. Big pharma was not doing the work. Government was not funding it. Donations were the only path, and that stayed true until the last couple of years, after MAPS had cleared regulatory obstacles and public opinion had moved.

He did not know, and is glad he did not, that no drug had ever been made a medicine by a nonprofit. That first happened in 1999 with the abortion pill RU-486, shepherded by the Population Council with Warren Buffett as a major donor. MAPS was never designed as academic research. It was drug development plus policy reform, so access would not stop at people with a diagnosis. In December 2014 they created the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation, wholly owned by the nonprofit, after Doblin learned that a 1984 Reagan law gives data exclusivity to off-patent drugs: five years, plus six months for pediatric work they will be required to do, roughly six years before a generic can even apply. MDMA was invented by Merck in 1912. Over 35 years MAPS had raised about $110 million. Boston Consulting Group helped sketch commercialization; depending on therapist supply, price, and insurance, U.S. profits during exclusivity might reach three-quarters of a billion dollars, to be plowed back into the mission. About 130 people work across the two entities. A third sit in the nonprofit, doing festival harm reduction, public education, and policy in places like Denver and Oregon where enforcement is already loosening.

Fridman asks the selfish question: if he wants MAPS-grade psychedelics to explore his own mind, when and how? Never, through the benefit corporation. It is a pharmaceutical company. It can work only on clinical indications, prescribed by doctors. Personal growth is the policy-reform track. Doblin's preferred end state is licensed legalization: some education, then the right to buy and use. Medicalization still comes first, because insurance coverage and public stories change attitudes the way medical marijuana did in Massachusetts before adult use.

His calendar, offered as hope rather than a guarantee, is blunt. End of 2023, he expected FDA approval of MDMA for PTSD. Because FDA does not regulate the practice of medicine, off-label prescribing for other diagnoses could follow, with malpractice and insurance caveats. A tiny expanded-access program for 50 treatment-resistant PTSD patients was about to open, with patients paying because there is no control group. Right to Try cuts FDA out and lets patients negotiate with companies; Canada was already moving on compassionate psilocybin for life-threatening illness. Psilocybin as a medicine he put a year or two behind MDMA. Then a decade of psychedelic clinics — thousands of them, cross-trained therapists who do not want to be only ketamine therapists — and around 2035, licensed legalization. He would like first sessions supervised in those clinics, paid by tax money, before a license to go alone.

Fridman finds the FDA pace maddening. Doblin, a parent, says the twenty years you think will last forever are gone when the kids leave, and America is still dealing with the Civil War. A twenty-year plan is not long. It has been fifty years since the psychedelic sixties and thirty-six since MDMA was criminalized. He thinks about the people who died by suicide in that gap, and about the DEA ignoring an administrative law judge's recommendation that MDMA stay in Schedule III. Culture still evolves slowly. We are not that different from people in the Bible. If we are going to avoid destroying the planet and each other, he has devoted his life to the idea that psychedelics have a role, and he still tells himself the whole effort has not been fast enough.

The paper had just come out, May 10, in *Nature Medicine*. To make a medicine you run animal safety, then Phase 1 in humans, then Phase 2 to design Phase 3: who is the patient, what dose, what measure, how do you blind a drug people can feel. MAPS spent from 1986 to 1992 getting even Phase 1 permitted, started PTSD work in 1999, and reached an end-of-Phase-2 meeting with FDA on November 29, 2016. In those years they learned that Zoloft and Paxil, the approved SSRIs, work better in women and fail in combat-related PTSD, while MDMA-assisted therapy worked in men and women, in combat trauma, and regardless of cause. Rave disasters — overheating, or hyponatremia from too much water — did not appear in the therapy room. CAPS, the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale, moved. And unlike LSD and psilocybin, where depth of mystical experience tracks outcome, MDMA produced decent mystical scores with *no* correlation to healing.

Doblin's Kennedy School dissertation had claimed to solve the double blind with low-dose versus full-dose MDMA. They tested zero through 150 milligrams. Seventy-five milligrams, to their surprise, was already effective. Doses of 25 to 50 milligrams did create confusion, which is what blinding needs, but they were anti-therapeutic: stimulating without reducing fear. People still improved with therapy, just less than on inactive placebo plus therapy. At the end-of-Phase-2 meeting they told FDA they could offer blinding that would make it *easier* to beat the control, and proposed instead therapy plus inactive placebo versus therapy plus full-dose MDMA. Tom Laughren, once head of psychiatry products at FDA, reminded them the double blind already fails in practice on SSRIs because of side effects. What matters then is random assignment and independent raters. MAPS built a pool of about twenty raters, calibrated monthly on videotape, assigned by Zoom so a rater almost never tracked the same patient through the study. After eight months of protocol negotiation they started Phase 3 in 2018: two studies of 100 people, chronic severe PTSD, including prior suicide attempts, because those are the people who need it.

An interim analysis in March 2020, with 60 at the primary endpoint and all 100 enrolled, told them they needed to add zero subjects. COVID ended the first study at 90 people, 46 on MDMA and 44 on placebo. Statistical significance is 0.05; FDA's "robust" bar of 0.001 can justify approval on a single Phase 3. They got 0.0001, one in ten thousand. Placebo-subtracted effect size — the MDMA on top of therapy — was 0.91, large against SSRIs at 0.3 to 0.4. Within the MDMA-plus-therapy group, from baseline to outcome, the effect size was 2.1. There was no site effect across 15 locations, two in Israel, two in Canada, eleven in the United States, with about 80 therapists. The dissociative subtype, supposedly too split-off to work through trauma, did *better* than average: MDMA enhanced memory while dropping fear, then helped store the event in the past. The only suicide attempts in the study were in the placebo group. Side effects were transitory, sweating and jaw clench and a slight temperature rise. Phase 2 neurocognitive testing had shown no decline. At two months, 32 percent of therapy-only patients no longer had PTSD after an average of 14 years of illness; with MDMA it was 67 percent. Phase 2 follow-ups at twelve months and at three and a half years showed people still getting better. That durability, Doblin says, is for insurers. The FDA question is whether it works and whether it is safe. On the first study, both answers were better than they had hoped.

Doblin does not think the result is unique to MDMA. The pairing was strategic: MDMA is well suited to PTSD. Psilocybin-assisted therapy looks strong for people with life-threatening illness and for addiction, as in the Johns Hopkins smoking work with cognitive behavioral therapy. Depression may be harder because some of it is biological, but he still expects approval; FDA had already called psilocybin a breakthrough therapy. Ibogaine, he says, is phenomenal for getting people through opioid withdrawal and then facing what drives the addiction. Ben Sessa in England used MDMA for alcohol use disorder and found he was mostly treating trauma. Quiet the pain with a bottle or a bag, and you still have to meet what you were running from.

Fridman wanted to be a psychiatrist when he was younger, then grew cynical watching the field become a prescription business. Doblin will not correct him. Psychiatrists meet people for fifteen minutes, adjust medications, make the most money that way, and have lost the art of talking. Young residents, he says, are thrilled by psychedelics precisely because they want to treat individuals again, not a stack of chemicals. Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious and, in a last book, wrote that we may yet learn to influence the energies of the brain with chemicals that help therapy. Doblin laughs: ahead of his time.

If much of society, including politicians, used these tools well, what would 2050 look like? Licensed legalization in 2035 is only the infrastructure. The goal he names is net-zero trauma. Two MAPS sites in Israel can help a few people; a war in Gaza traumatizes millions on both sides. Humanity, he says, is like lemmings heading over a cliff of climate, nuclear proliferation, religious hatred, and a retreat into authoritarianism. Psychedelics used wisely — not just legalized and dumped — might clean enough filters that people see similarity before enemy. Grof's phrase is *transparent to the transcendent*. Religions, in that hoped-for world, would look like languages: thousands of them, none the only right one, Jesus the son of God and so is everybody, the Jews chosen and so is everybody. He thinks we can get there and that we need to, if the species is going to survive the century.

The rise of for-profit psychedelic companies is, first, a sign that prohibition and stigma have cracked. The fear is what they will optimize. They will try to minimize therapy so insurers pay and then sell as much drug as possible. Johnson & Johnson's esketamine for depression is his exhibit: approved as a pharmacological treatment without psychotherapy, results that fade, a design that maximizes redosing. Generic ketamine costs a few dollars; the patented isomer sells for hundreds. Some clinics thank J&J for the proof, buy the cheap vial, and add therapy. Some are mills. MAPS cannot convert a profit-maximizer into a benefit corporation. It can only lead by example, the way alternative-energy companies eventually forced oil majors to talk a different talk, and hope doctors who actually sit with suffering people choose the version that heals.

Most for-profits, he says, treat drug-policy reform as a threat to the business model. He thinks they have it backwards. Destigmatize the work, teach peer support, and more people with serious issues will still want trained professionals covered by insurance. Cheap, legal MDMA at ten or twenty dollars is also a check on price-gouging. Then Fridman asks for advice to people in high school and college. Doblin reaches for Howard Thurman, the minister of the Good Friday experiment: there is nothing in particular you should do, but find what makes you come alive, because that is what the world needs. Beware the trap of vast resources. Super-wealthy passengers in first class on the Titanic still drown. Get enough money to leave the edge of survival, then combine what you need with what the world needs. A twenty-year plan is allowed. He has been on psychedelics as a life project for 49 years, since he was 18, and did not think it would work. Family covered his survival. He learned that if happiness depended on accomplishment he might never be happy, so he attached it to effort. He also learned not to split the world into us and them. A full-time police officer who is also a psychotherapist went through MAPS training, got his chief's permission, and a couple of weeks before the taping they dosed a cop with MDMA. Persistence plus patience: once FDA and DEA realized MAPS was not going away, progress started.

Fridman closes on the big why questions: love, the terror of dying, meaning. Doblin's finding is that we do not need the answers. We can feel happy. We can love. We are social. One life is enough. He does not even think death is tragic. If you take the collective unconscious seriously, impact lasts; more simply, death is what makes life precious. He is a procrastinator. Infinite time, he suspects, would make nothing precious and nothing get done. Every Jewish new year his parents sent a card. One quote has stayed: we have to make up for the brevity of life with the intensity of life. The end of the conversation, Fridman says, is what makes it precious. Doblin does not call the hours a waste.