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To DraftKings Network. This is not an ad. I should say that to you again at the very top so you don't fast forward. Hello, it's Pablo. We are giving you a taste of share and tell today with Dan Levitard and Mena Kymes, who is back? Who is back? It's worth listening to in full. But here's the problem for you, friend. We're only going to give you a taste in this feed. You got to go to Pablo Torrey Finds Out, the podcast feed, for the rest. Yes, we have our own feed. And yes, it's true, you're not going to get the full episodes of everything we do on Dan's feed. In fact, you've never gotten it, all of it in full on Dan's feed. We have so many good things that we are waiting for you to discover over on Pablo Torrey Finds Out. So go over there, subscribe, listen, miss nothing. Enjoy some really, I would say, profound and disgusting revelations.

Do you think Dan's energy drains when he's not sufficiently fed emotional morsels from other people, like a health bar of sorts?

I do. I think I have a gas meter, an old school gas meter because my technology is not going to be up to date. It's just going to swing from full to empty bed based on whether or not I've.

Gotten- Yeah, hold on. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Dan, I'm worried that my daughter loves my wife more than me. And now go. Now we have some energy.

Do we have to give him little pieces of that? As the show goes on? That would be a great thing to just keep his motor running. Every now and then, we'll be sensed that it's going low, just coming hot.

Yeah, with our fears and vulnerabilities.

Yes. Pablo, has Violet asked you why Daddy seems preoccupied with work things instead of things that she needs at home?

Yeah. I mean, she says, Where is Daddy? And the answer is, I'm in this square.

Yes.

Just living in.

This-there he is right there in the studio. What he means by that is the palacious New York studios that Metallarky and that are built for his and our media empire that we're thrilled to have Mena even spending any time around. The article I wanted to put in front of you guys is from The Atlantic. The headline is What if psychedelics, hallucinations, if the hallucinations of are just a side effect. And I want to just read a little bit of this to you because the first couple of paragraphs got my attention here. So it begins with, One of my chronically depressed patients recently found a psychoactive drug that works for him after decades of searching, he took some psilocybin from a friend and experienced what he deemed a miraculous improvement in his mood. It was like taking off a dark pair of sunglasses, he told me in a therapy session. Everything suddenly seemed brighter. The trip, he said, gave him new insight into his troubled relationships with his grown children and even made him feel connected to strangers. I don't doubt my patient's improvements, his anxiety, world weariness, and self-doubt seem to have evaporated within hours of taking psilocybin.

In fact, it has continued for at least three months. But I'm not convinced that his brief oceanic experience was the source of the magic. So the point of all of this is to tell you guys that I was surprised to go on a ride with my therapist after years and years of therapy and years of helping me navigate between repressed or depressed or where is it that he isn't getting to joy? Isn't getting to joy when he's getting the things that he wants? What is it about his patterns? I'm handing my therapist basically, here's all the information for years on who I am with my most intimate things. And a therapist I trust, who is somebody who I would say knows me and my family and all my inner dynamics very well, suggested to me ketamine as a therapeutic change to my brain chemistry. It is well outside my comfort zone. I'm not a drug user. This is, recreationally, this is like a horse tranquilizer that will make you go on a psychedelic trip. And all I can tell you is professionally administered what this felt like to me, an exercise to try and alter my brain chemistry to aid openings that I might not be capable of because I don't know where my repressions are, my blind spots, where my patterns have, family histories have buried me.

What this felt like was something close to being to where God resides. This is the maximum of wherever these highs can take you. And in it somewhere, I didn't fear death. Now, this is before the death of my brother. This is before I'm having any thoughts of mortality. But from within this place is where science was trying to reach me on some stuff that I've never been open enough to experience, open enough to see, open enough of mind and spirit to even understand that this is something that can help my brain chemistry because there's stuff in my brain chemistry that needs some altering or some healing somewhere.

Before we share our personal perspectives, I actually want to follow up with Dan. Can you explain what you felt physically? It's a story about how scientists now are divorcing the psychedelic experience from the effects. I just want to clarify what the effects, not the effects, but the experience, the trip. How would you characterize explain what it is that you were imagining or seeing or feeling?

An hour elsewhere, fearful, but an undercurrent of fearless because you're exploring a space unknown to you with discovery. And you know, somewhere within this, I was on the brink of death. Wherever the edge is on, I don't think physically I was actually at death, but mentally, I was in the place where I felt like I was at death's door. And what does it mean at that portal? Without going too far into some of the stuff that happened with my brother, okay? Now I watched him die for a year. I'm watching him for a year transition into whatever's next as a cynic, as not an atheist, but agnostic, no access to any of these things, don't know what I don't know. I'm sitting next to death every day. What does that mean? What does that mean that I'm watching my brother, the most electric spirit I've ever known, an uncommon love in my life, fall apart, deteriorate in ways that haunt me still because I can't get the visuals out of my mind of his body falling apart? What does it mean to be on the bridge between here and there? That's where this space was to me before I experienced all that stuff with my brother.

Before I even knew my brother was sick, before I even knew my brother was sick, it was the space on if there's a there between here and there, if there's a line, if there's anything that you don't know, are you brave enough to believe in it and visit it? I've never have been. I've always been too repressed. I've always been too cynical about that. God is not there. That's just a trip. That's not.

Right. Man.

Am I wrong in just interpreting what you said that the experience just made you more comfortable then with the idea of ultimately approaching that? Because you talked about how when you were doing it, you had these feelings of toeing the line and what that felt like. Afterwards, did it change the way you felt.

About it? I think that stuff is hard to stick. It's hard to leave whatever it is or the most profound spiritual experiences of your life. If you're somebody who intellectualizes everything and thinks too much and if your brain is a poison and you think you control things. I don't know what all of that was, except an exploration that my brother, his entire life spent asking me to be brave enough to partake in, which is just go outside your comfort zone and go do things that you don't understand and feel big things and live giant things. The idea, if you told me at any point in my life that I'd be telling you guys, never mind that I'd done it, that I would be admitting in front of people that I took a horse tranquilizer in order to alter my brain chemistry, I would have told you I don't know that person. That's not the person I am. I'm too scared to do those things. I'm too scared to do ayahuasca. I'm too scared. I'm too risk-averse to do those things. But my brother was always pushing me toward them. And this experience is as foreign as anything I've ever done.

And I'm here to speak to the benefits of it only because it loosened me up a little. It's some dry things. It lubricated them.

That's the question I have about all of this. I think it's the central question of a lot of these stories about the industry forming around it, about the recommendations and the part of the medical community is kinder than something you just said, which is what's stuck, right? I'm not somebody who's tried this for psychological purposes. But whenever I read about it or hear about it, it's that when you read about, okay, this can alter the neuroplasticity of your brain. That's what I want to know. To me, it makes sense that whether it's K or something else, you have these out-of-body experiences. In the moment, you feel your brain loosening and functioning differently, and maybe you're relieved of psychic pain. What I want to know, what I want to understand, what some studies have suggested to be true is, okay, what happens in a month? Are you relieved of that pain in the long term? Do you feel more open minded going forward? Are you not afraid of death after doing this?

Yeah. What are the side effects?

What.

Sticks? That's what I want to know. What Pablo is saying to me there, you have to understand that what this feels like, it is being at the center of what is my greatest fear, psychologically. I wasn't consciously thinking about death and mortality, but my greatest fear would be dying and all the love that I have around me is now gone because my life has been extinguished. To be somewhere in the feeling of that and trying to have a drug aid you into, you can be fearless here around this your greatest fear. I don't know if that keeps. I've got to do meticulous stuff, not just chemically. I've got to do meticulous stuff daily and to apply myself to the awareness that keeps pushing me back to that space. But for that moment, it felt real. And I've tried to carry the lessons in it. It might have been a high and I walk out wobbly. I need a wheelchair to get out of the room. But I'm trying to hold on to the lessons of it because as I told you, if it's not spiritually meaningful, it's somewhere in the realm. Whatever it is that we're talking about here is something close to making me feel better about living than I did before.

Doing it. Well, this experience, the dissociative state, the psychedelic trip, what this article is suggesting is that researchers are now finding that, for instance, ketamine is a focus of this piece. And ketamine has been shown to boost mood. And the studies that are fascinating recently, what they're showing are that you can administer ketamine to people who are asleep during surgery, who are not conscious, who don't get the almost out-of-body divine memory of it, but they wake up with the benefits of it. And so it's interesting. We're learning about how the brain works. This neuroplasticity concept that Mian had mentioned, I wanted to define that because the article does a good job of doing that, too. It says that neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to more easily reorganize its structure and function. So in depression, for example, I'm quoting here, the prefrontal cortex, the brain's reason or in chief, loses some of its executive control over the limbic system, the emotional center. So your ability to reason and your ability to feel are not healthily interacting. This stuff reorganizes it to make you feel better in a way that is profound and verifiable by science now to the point where what if we could take away the thing that's scary?

I think people hearing Dan talk about what I think people who go to clubs would have called a k-hole, the idea of like, I'm going to trip out for a while. They're saying, What if we could give that to patients without that part and you just get the upside of it, the brain upside of it? I didn't realize that this was a thing until really recently and this article clarifying it. And that seems so promising in terms of both destigmatizing, psychedelics in terms of what they are, and also just helping people who are otherwise, in those trips, having their anxieties aggravated, who are fearing psychotic breaks because, spoiler alert, encountering what feels like something close to God can be terrifying. And now what if you could get just the benefits that may be residual to some extent afterwards?

Yeah. And what you're describing, Pablo, is like a clarification of the medical benefits, the psychological benefits separate from the trip because that was hard, as I understand it, in the past to separate the two. If you were given K, you knew you were given it, which made it hard. From a medical studies perspective, it's like, Okay, well, did the brain really change what's happened here? Or did they just know that they were tripping? Now what you're saying what's different is you're actually able to just observe the effects of the drug on the brain. That is tremendously exciting to me. I'm the person who whenever I read articles like this, I'm always like, Okay, well, show me the articles about all the reasons it's bad and dangerous and this is the downside. And there are downsides. It's expensive. Not everybody can afford it. And there's obviously the risk of abuse. But everything I've read about this over the last year, leads lead to lead, this is pretty revolutionary. The potential here is tremendous for people who are battling such a.

Horrible disease. If I may, on context on this, the science of it, to the degree that it is science because I'm trusting a therapist with my intimate vulnerabilities, and that therapist has determined, in some ways, the thing that Pablo is talking about there, that I have a break between what I can think and what I can feel, that I say my emotions as opposed to experiencing my emotions, that somewhere in there, I need some scientific help on altering my brain chemistry. That was a science experiment. She is sending me with some expertise into science to see if something will help me with what ails me. I don't think people would think of any of that as medicinal, but I could just tell you that the exploration of it was medicinal. That's what we were aiming for.

But I think that's the point now is that we are seeing what felt like party drugs as medicinal as affecting. And again, the article, Richard A. Friedmann, the author points out an estimated 23 % of Americans suffer from mental illness in some form. So there is such a need for new solutions. We've been trying the old things for so long, and now what if there's a way to calibrate it such that maybe the trip, and this is one of the takeaways from the article, maybe the trip, as a concept, becomes the thing you do for fun. But the thing you do for, and by the way, I don't want to say that exclusively. I think there is profoundly, again, eye opening, third eye opening. The brain is a complicated place. I don't want to say that a trip has no medicinal effects. My point is the medicine can be actually isolated. In the last five years, they're showing it's isolateable in a way that's just new. I also, at the end here, just want to applaud, not just Dan for his vulnerability, but myself.

I'm sure the Internet will be totally gentle with that. I'm sure that the next time that something happens with me, somebody won't be pointing out, Yes, this is the loon who does psychedelics and then judges others on their morality.

Please. No, no, no, no. What I'm left thinking about is how mature I am for hearing Dan talk about how a dry thing needing to be lubricated is how he actually thinks of all of this.

And not bringing it.

Up until the very end of the show. The second.

He said that, I was so worried- Here we go. -that you would.

Cut in. Here we go. No, because I am... I, too. You're an adult. I, too, have an evolving brain, and I wait until the end.

I'm an adult.