The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - PTFO - Share & Tell (OnlyDans Edition) with Mina Kimes, Dan Le Batard, and Pablo

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

How close did Dan get to death's door on ketamine? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Giraffe King's 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 Sharon Tell today with Dan Levitard and Mina Kimes. He was back. He was back. And it's worth listening to in full. But here's the problem for you, friend. We're only gonna give you a taste in this feed. You gotta go to Pablo Torre finds out the podcast feed further rest. Yes, we have our own feed. And yes,'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 Polatory Fides 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 he's like a health bar of sorts? I do.

I do. I think I have a gas meter, an old 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, bad as based on whether or not I've gotten. Yeah, hold on. Here we go. Here we go. Friend Dan, Dan, I'm worried that my daughter loves my wife more than me.

And now go. Now we have some energy. So we just, do we have to give him little, little pieces? Yes, yes. As the show goes on, that would be a great thing to just get a keep his motor running. Every now and then, it will be sense that it's going low. Just come in hot.

Yeah, with our fears and vulnerabilities, yes. Pablo has violent asked you why daddy seems preoccupied with work things instead of things that she needs to do. Yeah, I mean, she says where is daddy? And the answer is, I'm in this f***ing square. Just living in this, right there in the studio. What it means by that is the polacious New York studios that Metal Arc has built for his and our media empire

that we're thrilled to have Meena 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 psychedelics 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. Quote, 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 patients' improvements, his anxiety, world-reariness, and self-doubt seem to have evaporated with hours of taking psilocybin, an effect that 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 want. What is it about his patterns? As 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. 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, right? Like 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. Can I, I mean, I before we share our personal perspectives, I actually wanna follow up with Dan, can you explain what you felt physically? Like this is a story about how scientists now are divorcing the psychedelic experience from the effects. I just wanna clarify what the effects, not the effects, butic experience from the effects. I just want to clarify what the effects, not the effects, but the experience, the trip. How would you

character, I explain what it is that you were sort of imagining or seeing or feeling? An hour elsewhere, fearful, but an undercurrent of fearless because you're exploring current of fear list because you're exploring a space unknown to you with discovery and you know, somewhere within this, I was on the brink of death, right? Like somewhere 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, you know, 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, and 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 to, I've always been too cynical about that. Like that God is not there. That's just a trip. That's not, but... Right, right, right, right, right, right. Man. Am I wrong in just interpreting what you said that the experience just sort of made you more comfortable then with the idea of ultimately

approaching that or I mean Did you come out because you talked about how when you were doing it you you had these feelings of like towing 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, right? 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, like I have, 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 too scared to do this To scared to do I you was come to scared. I'm too risk averse to do those things but my brother was always pushing me toward them and and This experiences is foreign as anything I've ever done 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. Like it just, it just, it, it's some dry things, it lubricated them.

That's the question I have about all of this. I think it's a 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 kind of something you just said, which is what 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. Because to me, it makes sense that when you're, 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 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 I want to know. Yeah, what Pablo is saying to me there, you have to understand that what this feels like, right? It is being at the center of what is my greatest fear psychologically, right? 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, right? Like I've got to do meticulous stuff, not just chemically. I've got to do meticulous stuff daily and rigorously 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. Like 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, like if it's not spiritually meaningful, it's somewhere in the realm, like some, 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, right?

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, right? We're learning about how the brain works. Like, this neuroplasticity concept that me and a mentor now wanted to find that, because the Arkle 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, right? So, in depression, for example, I'm quoting here, the prefrontal cortex, the brain's reasoner 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? Right, I think people hearing Dan talk about, you know, what I think people who go to clubs would have called a K-hole, right? The idea of like, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna 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. Like, I didn't realize that this was a thing until really like 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. Like if you were given K, you knew you were given it, which made it hard, you know, so from a medical studies perspective, you know, it's like, okay, well,

did this person really, did the brain really change? What's'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 mean, I am the kind of person who, whenever I read articles like this, I'm always like, okay, well, like, show me the articles about all the reasons it's bad and dangerous, and this is the downsized. And then, you know, there are downsides. It's expensive, not everybody can afford it.

And there is obviously the risk of abuse. But everything I've read about this over the last year leads lead to, I believe, this is pretty revolutionary. Like there is the potential here is tremendous for people who are battling such a horrible disease. If I may, on context on this, right, the science of it, because 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. It wasn't what she is sending me with some expertise into science to see if something will help me with what ails me, right?

Like 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. Friedman, the author points out, an estimated 23% of Americans suffer from mental illness in some form, right?

So there is such a need for new solutions, like we've been trying the old things for so long and now what if there's a way to calibrate it such that, you know, 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 wanna say that exclusively, I think there is profoundly, again,

eye-opening, third eye-opening, you know, like it's all, 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 isolatable 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. Oh yeah, yeah. 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 moralities. No, no, no. What I'm left thinking about is how much sure 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 bring it up until the very end of the show. It's so worried that you would cut in.

No, not because I am. I too have an evolving brain, and I wait until the end.