← Pablo Torre Finds Out
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Share & Tell (OnlyDans Edition) with Mina Kimes, Dan Le Batard, and Pablo
00:50:08
Loading summary
Transcript156 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre. And today we're gonna find out what this sound is.
- [00:07]
B
I found out today that I was willing to talk about something publicly that I would have at any time in my life not been willing to talk about publicly.
- [00:19]
A
Right after this ad.
- [00:21]
C
You're listening to DraftKings Network.
- [00:36]
A
I feel like we don't need to do the thing where we demand that Mina talk to us about motherhood. We can do that later. But I do want to acknowledge, literally, that she's back. Hello. You're a mom. Hi. Yay.
- [00:49]
C
Hello. I'm here.
- [00:51]
A
Yeah.
- [00:51]
C
Yes.
- [00:52]
A
Yep, yep, yep.
- [00:52]
B
I want to, though. I want to her about all the things she's learned about motherhood in. In three weeks, In. In five weeks.
- [01:00]
C
I love depriving Dan of personal life talk. You could see the hunger in his eyes. I know when I sent you guys that text, I was like, yeah, I'm cool skipping this week. I could feel the silence seething. He's like, you know, the grief eater is what we call him, but really, it's not just grief. He wants it all. He wants. He wants to suck the marrow of your emotional core every time.
- [01:25]
B
That's right.
- [01:26]
A
Yeah, Dan.
- [01:27]
B
But you know how she retorts, though? I'd rather talk about Belichick.
- [01:31]
A
That's right. The opposite. The opposite of vulnerable motherhood is talking about Bill Belichick.
- [01:37]
C
He is mother to me, to use the kids jargon.
- [01:42]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do like the idea, though, that Dan is like a truffle big. Always sniffing around for emotion. He's like, mm, there's some emotion in there.
- [01:49]
B
Our connection. Or just not a truffle pig. How about just a lonely pig truffling around for connection.
- [01:56]
A
Hi. Clown.
- [01:57]
B
With his friends and with the people.
- [01:58]
C
Okay.
- [01:58]
B
So that. So that we all may be present in the moment.
- [02:02]
C
I'll give you. I'll give you one. One little.
- [02:05]
A
Oh, he's salivating.
- [02:06]
C
A little morsel for you, dad. That is, I think, analogous to give.
- [02:10]
B
Me a motherhood morsel. Thank you. Give me a. Yeah, please, please give me just one morsel of motherhood.
- [02:16]
A
Genuinely, genuinely perverse. Please.
- [02:19]
B
I will truffle around. Sorry.
- [02:20]
C
I'll truffle around. People always ask me about my. My baby's now, I think six weeks. Six or seven weeks old. People are always like, what's his personality like? And I'm, like, crying like, what? I don't know. You want me to. People want me to, like, fan fiction my baby for them and, like, be like, yeah, he's really curious and, you know, intellectually open. Whatever. This is his entire personality. This is not really great for audio.
- [02:47]
A
Format for the YouTube and DraftKings network audience. Yep.
- [02:52]
C
Google rooting if you're at home. And this is what it looks like when you put him near you, another human. And he's hungry. And he's always hungry. He's just constantly. And that is what Dan looks like.
- [03:08]
B
That's me.
- [03:09]
A
That's me.
- [03:10]
B
That's right. That's the truffle pig of emotion. That is exactly right.
- [03:13]
A
I gotta say, also, that is also gonna be your son for all of his life. That is what all men do, basically, is root around for a nipple forever. So there is that.
- [03:25]
C
There's butt guys too.
- [03:30]
A
What's your son like? He's a butt guy.
- [03:35]
C
No interest in the butts right now. A lot of interesting.
- [03:41]
B
Because I wanted a motherhood motion.
- [04:03]
A
I feel even more perverse by setting up our first topic today, which is a topic that I'm obsessed with, that I've been rooting around for, which is this Washington Post story, a very long story, a really well reported story about OnlyFans. It's by Drew Harwell and the title is inside an OnlyFans empire. Sex influence in the New American Dream. And I, I just, I guess I need to recap what OnlyFans is for some people out there. It launched in 2016. It's been kind of a joke in the way that you now understand, I hope intuitively, to lots of us. It's. It's essentially a way to sell pornography to subscribers now who pay real money. There aren't, you know, just downloading illegally at this point. They've created an economy around it on the books in 2023. And there's a video that I hesitant. I'm hesitant a little to play, but let's, let's play it from the Washington Post.
- [04:58]
D
You set your own limits, your own rules. Unscripted, unplanned. We're just capturing life. I had no prior experience. Two and a half years later, 1.3 million active fans, 11.5 million likes, over 16 million in sales. We have the largest OnlyFans account on the platform. Traditional porn, you are either amateur, you have a company and you have an agent. When you are an OnlyFans creator, you are entirely in charge of it yourself. Let's just say we got together and.
- [05:31]
C
We had a little fun. Spur of the moment video, up in.
- [05:34]
D
The loft, in the gym. Being the horny girl that I am.
- [05:37]
C
Is a hot video.
- [05:38]
D
So you get two interns and Joe.
- [05:40]
B
And one lovely bracelet.
- [05:41]
A
So anyhow, you get the gist, I think but financially.
- [05:45]
B
Gist.
- [05:45]
A
The gist.
- [05:46]
B
Gist is the word that he used there. Gist.
- [05:49]
A
I am nervous to even pronounce that.
- [05:51]
C
You were trying so hard to describe this with like the appropriate. I don't look at this, I'm unfamiliar with this.
- [05:57]
B
Let's do this, let's let people. He got into such broadcaster voice guy and then makes the gist mistake because he was following. He's scared around the content. It's tawdry, it's dangerous. Mina made a face as soon as you started talking because you're like, like I'm obsessed with only fans commerce. But this is interest. All of this is interesting, the, the commercialization and sexualization of the social media age. But let's, let's deconstruct what happened to Pablo there.
- [06:27]
C
Pablo leaves only fans for the articles. Let's be clear.
- [06:30]
A
Yes, well, well, okay. Here to read from this article. I want to put some facts and figures to this. There are now 230 million people who subscribe on OnlyFans who have paid the creators. In total, this is per Goldman Sachs research, more than $5.5 billion, which is, if you were wondering, more than every online influencer in the United States earned from advertisers that year. So there is more money from direct to consumer porn, slash whatever content writings you may have than there is in actual advertising. And so this article is about a visit to a farm in Florida, naturally a 10 acre farm in which it's an incredibly sophisticated operation because at this point, of course it should be, because this is data and analytics as well as the tawdry stuff come home to roost quite explicitly.
- [07:23]
B
A giant business forming around the technology and the appetite for fame, for attention, for influence, for power and for a different relationship with sex and the sex work than your parents and your grandparents. This is. Young people make everything popular. And, and you can start in here with of course porn would get to the most efficient ways to capitalize on capitalism. And this is the brands taking over management of their own accounts in a way that course young people and influencers would want power over how it is that they're received sexually and otherwise.
- [08:11]
C
Well, this is the best case scenario for the creators, they call them. This article, which I, you know, I, I, I found, I found it really interesting because like Pablo said, it really is looking at a very, very successful creator who is with her boyfriend, I think it was husband's boyfriend. Yeah, partner, whatever. They have made their own business, they have employees. It seems like everybody is paid fairly, it's safe. There is not middleman taking the cut from them. And, you know, if you were to only understand this business and the cottage industries around it from the vantage of like a case study like this, it seems great. I will say I've read articles about only vans in the past that have shed light on the fact that many, many, many people who are on this platform don't make anywhere close to this money and in fact end up having to give significant cuts of what they earn to middlemen. Often actually men who are sort of like, I don't know if this is stigmatizing it, but they're kind of in that pimp role, frankly, where they are serving as an intermediary to give them big platforms or whatever. That can be abusive, it can be predatory, but this is what happens anytime a new industry sprouts up. You get the good and the bad.
- [09:28]
A
Yeah, look, if onlyfans came into your newsfeed cause of like the Andrew Tate stuff, stuff in which he was trying to like, allegedly, you know, hustle women into this role of like, creating revenue for him. Of course it, it feels definitionally dystopian in that way. But what Dan hinted at before is something that I found myself contemplating here, which is what does dignity in work look like now? Right. What does it mean to be degraded at work? And if you control your product and ostensibly at the top end, at the very least, not just be a purveyor of porn, but the one who is directly profiting from it, absent middlemen to the point where you're an employer. Well, I want to quote from one person in this business in this article, and she says this quote. Why would I spend my day doing dirty, degrading minimum wage labor when I can do something that brings more money in and that I have a lot more control over? Does an accountant always enjoy their work? No. All work has pleasure in pain and a lot of it is boring and annoying. Does that mean they're being exploited? Question mark, end quote. And that, that premise of, like, is this feminist autonomy, the idea that a, a porn creator can profit directly, or is this a familiar problem dressed up in a different way or undressed in a different way? We're early in it, but I think the premise of autonomy, Dan, of creators owning their work is something that you personally, on some level, must now appreciate more than you did. Say, I don't know, four years ago.
- [10:57]
B
Only dance. I can start an only dance to celebrate Independence, only dance. All of the things that you're talking about here are just. It is just the commercialization of porn adjacent both. But the thing that's interesting to me about where all of this has arrived, of course porn would figure out how to make a maximum business that would do all of the things that would exploit, but also the actors within it would then find player empowerment in porn. Yes, this is what has happened that. That's what's happened here. Right?
- [11:46]
C
It's player empowerment in the best case scenario. I just want to keep highlighting that because I do feel like this doesn't happen. This doesn't go the way it does in the article for a lot of people who join this platform. But it's also, you're not entirely in control because it's direct consumer. You are catering to the explicit, explicit, specific whims of the consumer in a way that also makes this unique. It would be like if instead of the Dan LeBatard show featuring Stots, you went full time to only dance and all of a sudden you would have to fulfill requests for takes. People would say, I want you to talk about the Miami Heat for 20 minutes, Dan. You do not have control over your output. You are just going to do that. You would send people personalized takes. Actually, as the more I talk about it, the more I think this is an interesting business model that perhaps you.
- [12:35]
B
Should pursue thinking about it. Trust me, we have said that we want to merge stug greed and his sensuality to giving those takes while doing them sexily while in a diaper.
- [12:48]
C
You know, it's cameo. But that I think is also something that's unique about this. One thing I found really fascinating in this article is it's not only people making custom sexual content. It's the relationship side of it. It's this business of chatters they call it. They employ people who talk to.
- [13:09]
A
This is the stugats that seems to.
- [13:11]
C
Be as important as the porn.
- [13:14]
A
Oh, this I wanted. I'm glad you brought that up. I was about to get there because what Stugats really is dreaming of is what these people, Bryce Adams, the number one creator on OnlyFans, to mean. His point about the extreme end of this, of the story and this economy. She employs like an army of people to be her in these explicit custom bespoke chats and. And so she's not even doing it herself. And this is the part. And I want to be careful because Mina, it's a great reminder. I'm not trying to glorify this. I am awe of the way in which this whole thing is both very sophisticated and suddenly very mundane. There's like a. There's like a phone bank operator dynamic here. It feels like work. It is now work. And it's formalized and it's optimized in a way that. Wait a minute. Oh, now. Now this feels very familiar as well as exotic on the surface.
- [14:08]
B
Loneliness as a business that can be exploited. And I'm not saying that all of this. I'm not dismissing all of this as loneliness. I' even trying to judge it. I'm just talking about whatever it is the pandemic has done to isolate all of us where we're feeling disconnected from people. So I'm not saying others are lonely. Here. The ability for capitalists or porn or business people to attack that loneliness with a Wall street efficiency to maximize the dollars on. I can solve your loneliness. I am the cure for that hole in your heart. I am only fans. I will be whatever it is you want me is. You're disconnected from the world. You're addicted to your devices. Here's this fantasy world that you can pay in order to somehow feel less lonely. It's not surprising to me that sex merchants and business titans would feed there.
- [15:04]
C
Something I found myself wondering as I was reading about what Dan's describing, which is the relationship side, which really is the core of why this is working for these types of businesses is, I assume, a not insignificant portion of the fan base. The buyers know that they're not talking to Bryce or whoever, or they understand that the video they're getting might not just be for them. I mean, a lot of these businesses are pretty public. This. This practice of hiring chatters sometimes in developing countries is not uncommon. It's not a secret. And the fact that I assume some people are just overlooking it anyways makes me think this is something you could see AI taking the place of a lot of these roles.
- [15:58]
B
Aren't we at the bridge there, though, Pablo, of technology, where this is the bridge, this is the commerce bridge before AI?
- [16:05]
A
Yeah, I feel like it gets darker from here. Maybe we all agree on that part. I feel like the automation of everything means that you're getting less and less of the. Of the authenticity. And that's the point. It's not just I am selling you an individual video. It's that you are now a fan in a parasocial way. You are a subscriber that pays me a monthly fee and you can make requests and I will satisfy them and you will willfully suspend your disbelief because we have this thing, you and me, creator and fan. And that's. It's a hell of a branding thing that is truly ripe for exploitation when it gets to the point of, like, now I got you and you're sad. And here I am servicing some needs that maybe are not being provided by a human. Eventually.
- [17:03]
C
This is where like every science fiction movie and book made for the last, like 100 years always ends up with a sex robot. Because that is ultimately, or, you know, where people's minds go when you think about, like, how much does authenticity versus artifice matter relative to this appetite people have, the loneliness, the desire for connection, and obviously sexual satisfaction. And this feels, to your point, Pablo, like a pretty crucial stepping stone to where this all might be headed.
- [17:39]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I'll show my feet if that's what you guys want. Pablo Torre finds out.
- [17:46]
B
Nobody. Nobody wants that. Like, I don't know where I'll show my feet. I know you're a public exhibitionist with everything. Yes, of course you'll show your feet. You're you. You'll show more than your feet. Like, we wouldn't have to. Oh, if we gave you applause. If we gave you just some applause.
- [18:03]
A
That's the sad part, is that he.
- [18:05]
C
Has shown his feet.
- [18:06]
A
Well, I believe there is footage of that which we should scrub from the Internet because I now need a paywall.
- [18:12]
B
No, no. Why?
- [18:14]
A
It's a matter why. It's a metaphor for my dignity.
- [18:21]
C
There's multiple times I feel like it highly questionable. You showed feet and nobody asked for it. Well, this is moving from a very titulated fan base to a very angry one. Bill Belichick might get fired. Does anyone care? Are people worried about this? Are people talking about it? Is it something that is top of mind that the greatest coach in the history of the National Football League might be kicked to the curb this season? I sent you guys an article by Will Leitch in New York magazine, basically positing this, but this is something that it actually whispers of. It started before the season. I remember during the summer, because obviously the Patriots have not been very successful in the post Tom Brady era. Last season in particular, I think, you know, it wasn't just that they were bad, that and they weren't as bad as they are now, that made people raise this question, but that the offense in particular was a disaster and that the disaster was so easily put at the non photographed feet of Bill Belichick because he was responsible for, and I feel comfortable saying this, one of the worst offensive coordinator decisions in the history of the league handing over the reins to Matt Patricia Slash Joe Judge at some point. Anyways, so we go fast forward to this year. Things were supposed to look better. I mean, nobody thought the Patriots would be excellent, but there was expectation that at least the defense would still be good, that the team would be competent. And they are at the bottom of the division, the bottom of the conference. The offensive product looks horrible. You have a first round draft pick in Mac Jones, quarterback who has regressed. You have a number of picks in recent years who have either been released or not playing well. The free agent signings are a disaster. Bill Belichick is of course both head coach and gm. So finally sports media is willing to touch the third rail and ask is it actually going to happen?
- [20:30]
A
Yeah, hold on, Dan. I'm trying to decode the gobsmackedness in Mina's voice because it is presented as a can you believe this? And I'm actually curious whether any of this feels reasonable to a reasonable person because what you've laid out is, is not surprising on the level of sports and impatience and what have you done for me lately and the fact that this guy doesn't and I think will point this out in his story. Like who's in his base at this point, like who's in the Bill Belichick hive. And it seems increasingly, increasingly scarce. And so you, I imagine, are, are not a person who would fire Bill Belichick. Based on the tone I'm just reading.
- [21:12]
B
I don't think that I'll find a more interesting or fascinating subject in the sport here that's not like sociolog. Instead of just about the meritocracy and the cutthroat nature of sports, then the idea that this guy wouldn't somehow be a level of expertise that would be above wherever firing is for what he has done for your franchise. Lest we forget, and I understand we will give all the credit to Brady, but the Patriots before all of this were not what they've been now for a generation. A generation like one of the most winning symbols anywhere. The amount that Brady and Belichick won I would think would make them immune to Brady having to end his career. Anyone else after the bra the crafts had said publicly he will end here how he wishes to Belichick, I would think he would get the exit to go whenever he wants. To me it is a flabbergasting symbol for how cutthroat that sport is because there are legends in other parts in sports where you would not fire them, period. They would go out on their own terms. But that we're talking about this to me is flabbergasting. I shouldn't be surprised at all. But I think some levels of expertise, this man is clearly excellent at what he does. They're terrible. Now if he's not above firing, no one is.
- [22:41]
C
Well, Dan, you said it right. The NFL is the not for long league. The Patriots have emblematized that more than many other teams in their willingness, Bill Belichick's willingness to move on from players quicker than some other, I would say other organizations. And yet what he is hypothetically asking, what those who would wish to keep him are saying is you can't just look at the last 1, 2, 3 ish years or so. You have to take a longer view. Because if you were to only look at the last few years and put up his resume as a blind resume nine times, nine out of 10 people would say fire him. Right? I think we can agree on that. So I think it's a question of scope, it's a question of okay, well, how long does he have to struggle in various aspects of his job and we can split hairs. And I think this could be a solution potentially in terms of like what you actually decide to do with him taking away some responsibilities and not others. But my point is like the defense of him is taking the long view in a way that people do not do in the NFL. It just doesn't happen.
- [23:53]
A
Right. And I wonder by the way, like how much you mentioned the splitting off of responsibilities. Like take away, you know, it feels like what you do to your grandpa, like you can't drive anymore, you know, like we can't let you go around town unsupervised. And, and, and if you're doing that, I do, I, you know, we live in this time, right? And we live in a gerontocracy. We live in a time where we don't do that to our politicians, where we let them go to the grocery store and shop for the country. But Bill Belichick can't get the, the grace despite his resume, despite his relative youth compared to like 80 year olds who we elect president. And I wonder the question of his decision making, Mina, like what is his biggest sin here? Like is it simply that he is bad at picking, I guess his figurative children, the figurative branches on his coaching tree? Like what are what we, what are we right to blame him for? Full throatedly. If you're a rational thinker on this.
- [24:59]
C
I don't want to zoom past the point you Just made, which is that we have higher standards for NFL coaches than elected officials running our country, which I think is a reasonable critique. But it is worth, to your point, actually parsing out, what are his failures? What has he done poorly? Because he has not done everything poorly. I think the defense has kind of fallen apart because of some very significant injuries, but they've been good. They've been great, actually, the last two years. He is, of course, a defensive mastermind, so it's not like they've been a failure in every way. In fact, that great defense is why they were competitive in a lot of games last year. But offensively, from personnel to coaching decisions to game management, it's been a nightmare. I mean, the starting with the personnel, it's not just the picking of the quarterback. They have been abysmal at not just drafting skill players, but signing them. A couple years ago, I mean, it was about three years ago they went into free agency. It was after Tom Brady left with a ton of money and made horrible decisions with their signings. Bill Belichick made very bad decisions. You can look at the history of draft picks over the last few years. They have not been good both sides of the ball. Actually, he's made some pretty significant errors. So as a gm, he has been bad. As a coach, he has been bad with the offense, good with the defense. Also bad with special teams, by the way, which is supposed to be his thing over the last couple years.
- [26:18]
A
Like, so why. How did he go, Dan? Like, remember when Bill Belichick was the guy, like, the way to, like, warm him up. Reporters figured this out was like, ask him about, you know, the most obscure special teams position. Ask him about the holder. Ask about the long snapper. He'll give you paragraphs. And now if he sucks at that, like, what. How. How are we supposed to make sense of them? The myth is contradictory now, right? He was a strategist who now sucks at strategy.
- [26:42]
B
Like, I. I saw Belichick earlier this year, okay? He's the only guy I saw stop Tyreek Hill because he has the ability, I think, to take away the thing that you do best, or he has when his defense has been injured. That's been one of his gifts. You guys are getting in micro, though, and I understand it because going back to Matt Patricia, we can go through a litany of reasons on the micro where you can criticize. Hey, this guy's not infallible. This guy's fireable. Just. It's a results business. And I ask you if the macro on this might not be as simple as this team for 20 years was the symbol for winning, and Belichick got a lot of credit for that, and Brady got a lot of credit for that. But somebody in the middle of that, Bob Kraft was the boss. Boss of both of them, and he had to decide between them and the Krafts, put their name on. Brady will end how he wants to. And Belichick's flirting with Garoppolo, and Belichick wants something other than Brady at the end. If the ending that the Krafts wanted was Brady will play here until he's 47, and Belichick, you will support him. And Belichick torpedoed that. This can just be a rich, powerful owner saying, hey, man, you told me to choose you, I chose you. And this has been for five years while Brady was winning. And Brady in the meantime is trying to get into LeBron game of ownership, maybe wants to own with the crafts, wants to get into the game where he's an NFL owner and that franchise chose Belichick. And so that in the interpersonal dynamics of that, like, we could talk about all the details of this, but maybe a rich dude is just like, hey, Bill, I did your thing. And look, we're two and we're two and eight. Like, we stink. And. And listen to Mina here giving all the reasons that you've stunk at these things.
- [28:29]
C
I think that's how he feels reading the tea leaves coming at it, like the quotes, the reports. Nobody's come right out and said any of this or that. You know, Bill Belichick is 100 on the Hot seat or whatever. But when you read between the lines, you know, the reporting out of there, it does sound like, to Dan's point, like Robert Kraft feels all of those things. He chose him. He chose poorly based on the last season and Mina.
- [28:55]
B
And he thinks he gets some of the credit for what they've been for 20 years. Not just Belichick and Brady. Like, owners are not egoless here. Like, they. Kraft has signed up for all things Belichick, and it. And it. It's never been worse than it is today.
- [29:11]
A
So what we're saying is that Bill Belichick, in a way, is a victim of his own standard now that he can't be the thing that was winning all of the time. He is. He has fallen far too short. And the second thing that we're saying is that Bob Kraft is like, hey, I was promised a happy ending.
- [29:28]
C
Oh, God, how long have you been thinking about?
- [29:31]
B
The whole segment. The whole segment. And he dismounted not unlike Kraft. Probably a minute to 75 seconds too soon. The segment was not over. We needed another minute of content there.
- [29:45]
A
I was concerned about how premature that was.
- [29:49]
B
Oh, come on. Come on. No, come.
- [29:51]
A
Yeah, yeah. See.
- [29:55]
C
I did like how we all got through that segment without saying. Or at least me without saying, bill Belichick will be fired, thus avoiding aggregation. That was sneaky. 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?
- [30:24]
B
I do.
- [30:24]
C
You know, I do.
- [30:25]
B
I think. I think I have a. Like 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 based on whether or not I've gotten.
- [30:35]
A
Yeah, hold on. Here you go. Here you go. Here. Dan, I'm worried that my daughter loves my wife more than me. And now go. Now we have some energy.
- [30:42]
C
Should we just. Do we have to give him little pieces of that as the show goes on? That would be a great thing to just kind of keep his motor running every now and then when we sense that it's going low, just come in hot.
- [30:56]
A
Yeah, yeah. With our fears and vulnerabilities. Yes.
- [30:58]
B
Pablo, has Violet asked you why Daddy seems preoccupied with work things instead of things that she needs at home?
- [31:05]
A
Yeah, I mean, she says, where is Daddy? And the answer is, I'm in this room square.
- [31:12]
B
Yeah.
- [31:12]
A
Just living in this.
- [31:13]
B
Right there in the studio. What he means by that is the palacious New York studios that Metal Arc has built for his and our media empire that we're thrilled to have Mina 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. Got my attention. 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 patient's improvements. His anxiety, world weariness, and self doub seemed to have evaporated within 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. He isn't getting to joy when he's getting the things that he want. What is it about his patterns? As I've, you know, 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. 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. 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. Some healing somewhere.
- [34:31]
A
Can I. I mean, before we. We share our personal perspectives, I actually want to follow up with Dan. Can you explain what you felt physically like? This is. 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. What. How would you characterize. Explain what it is that you were sort of imagining or seeing or feeling an hour elsewhere?
- [35:01]
B
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, 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 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.
- [36:13]
A
Before.
- [36:14]
B
Before I even knew my brother was sick, Before I even knew my brother was sick. It was the space on. If there's. 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 never have been. I've always been too repressed. I've always been too cynical about. About that. Like that God is not there. That's just a trip. That's not.
- [36:37]
A
But right, right, right, right, right, right. Man.
- [36:41]
C
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 because you talked about how when you were doing it, you. You had these feelings of, like, toeing the line and what that felt like afterwards. Did it change the way you felt about it?
- [37:05]
B
I think that stuff is hard to stick, right? It's hard to leave, whatever it is. Are 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.
- [37:59]
A
Yes.
- [37:59]
B
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. Like it just some dry things, it lubricated them.
- [38:22]
C
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 on the part of the medicine, the community is kind of 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. Do you? Because I. 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 wanna know, what I wanna 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?
- [39:20]
B
Yeah. What are the side effects?
- [39:21]
C
That's what I wanna know.
- [39:22]
B
Right?
- [39:23]
C
Yeah.
- [39:23]
B
What Pablo is saying to me there, you have to understand that what this feels like. Right?
- [39:27]
A
Right.
- [39:29]
B
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. But I'm trying to hold on to the lessons of it because, as I told you, like, if. If it's not spiritually meaningful, it's somewhere in the realm, like some. Whatever it is that we're talking about here is. Is something close to making me feel better about living than I. Than I did before doing it.
- [40:38]
A
Well, this experience, the dissociative state, the psychedelic trip. What this article is suggesting is that research 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.
- [41:11]
C
It.
- [41:11]
A
And so it's interesting, right, we're learning about how the brain works, like this neuroplasticity concept that Mina mentioned. I wanted to find 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, right? So in depression, for example, I'm quoting here, the prefrontal. The prefrontal cortex, the brain's reasoner in chief, loses some of its executive control over the limbic system, the emotional center, right? So your ability to reason and. And your ability to feel are. 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. 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 of the heart? 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?
- [42:43]
C
Yeah. And what you're describing, Pablo, is like a clarification of the medical benefits, the psych, 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. 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 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, that 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 downside. And then. And you know, there's. 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 me to believe this is pretty revolutionary. Like, there is.
- [43:42]
A
Yes.
- [43:43]
C
The potential here is tremendous for people who are battling such a horrible disease.
- [43:47]
B
If I. 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's talking about there, that I have a break between what I can think and what I can feel. What? Like that I. That I say my emotions as opposed to experiencing my emotions. That, that. That somewhere in there I need some scientific help on altering my brain chemistry. Like, 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. With what ails me. Right. Like, I don't think people would think of any of that as medicinal, but I could, I could just tell you that the exploration of it was medicinal. That was. That's what we were aiming for.
- [44:45]
A
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 want to say that exclusively. I think there is profoundly, again, eye opening, third eye opening, you know, like it's, 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.
- [45:48]
B
I'm sure the Internet will be totally gentle with. I'm sure that, 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.
- [46:04]
A
No, no, no, no. What I'm left thinking about is how, how mature I am for hearing Dan talk about how a dry thing needing to. To be lubricated is how he actually thinks of all of this until the very end of the show.
- [46:19]
C
Worried.
- [46:20]
B
Here we go.
- [46:20]
C
That you would cut in?
- [46:22]
A
No, no, because I am. I too, I do have, have an evolving brain. And I waited till the end. At the end here, Pablo Torre finds out another episode of Sharon Tell with Dan and Mina. We go around the table and we talk about what we found out today. Both of you have cut to the core of me in ways that are now obvious and honestly irrefutable. So touche. But Dan, what did you find out today?
- [47:01]
B
I found out today that I was willing to talk about something publicly that I would have at any time in my life not been willing to talk about publicly. So I learned something about myself today which should just punctuate the self involvement and the narcissism that exists at my core just perfectly. I didn't learn anything from you two. You know, I learned from. I learned something from myself.
- [47:29]
A
That's the, that's the PTFO way. Mina, what did you, what did you find out today?
- [47:35]
C
Dan, you did learn what a hungry baby looks like rooting around for.
- [47:40]
B
I did breast smoke. As we did you did such a good impersonation of a truffle pig. Looking for. Yeah, Looking for food.
- [47:49]
A
Yep. Yep.
- [47:50]
C
I learned that we're all too afraid to say that Bill Belichick should be fired. Myself included.
- [47:56]
B
Yeah, nobody. Nobody's got the courage. Nobody's got the courage.
- [48:01]
A
What I learned today is that our editing team makes Mina's fear totally irrelevant.
- [48:07]
C
Because of this, Bill Belichick should be fired.
- [48:12]
B
Oh, no, don't do that.
- [48:14]
A
Let's get that aggregated. Send that to, like, NFL Central. Adam Schofter.
- [48:19]
B
This is what happens when you give him his own control staff, you give him his own edits, you give him his own power in studio. This is what happens, Mina. Context gets lost, probably.
- [48:32]
C
You should make your own NFL aggregator account like Adam Scherman. Pay for the blue check and see how quickly you can grow it just by posting videos like this.
- [48:42]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm gonna pay wallet. Yeah, yeah.
- [48:45]
B
It's a funny parody account.
- [48:47]
A
Just. Just smart. But it's exclusively my smart friends. It's. It's just the people that you think would never say this, now suddenly saying all of this.
- [48:58]
C
Honestly, I'd rather have you aggregate or post a misleading video of that as opposed to, like, a video of me rooting for my own nipple.
- [49:06]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We also have that. Also got that one. Love you guys.
- [49:13]
B
Thank you, guys.
- [49:24]
A
And with that, we have reached the end of yet another week of Pablo Torre finds out another week of relentless finding stuff out. Eat it, David Sampson. Well, after this week, we now know that you wouldn't taste it, but eat it nonetheless. We are produced by Michael Antonucci, Ryan Cortez, Sam Dawig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Loman, Rachel Miller, Howard, Ethan Schreier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tominiello and Juliet Warren. Studio engineering by RG Systems post production by NGW Post theme song, of course, by John Bravo. And yeah, we'll be back on Tuesday, and I am deeply excited to talk to you then.