 I never pictured a world where marijuana would be anywhere close to legal and it's mind-blowing to me that mushrooms are being decriminalized everywhere. Comedian Shane Moss tours the country discussing his psychedelic experiences. But I know that I'm hallucinating. I don't think that it's real. I'm not like, oh my God! The walls are bleeding! It's more like, oh my God! The walls are bleeding! Reason caught up with him at the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference held in Denver this June, where he participated in a roast of the psychedelic scene. DMT is always like, oh man, if I would just want to pull the thing out that it was telling me, if I just want to remember the thing. Oh, I could have saved the planet! Better smoke it again. I got a planet to save. The conference was sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, and a reported 13,000 people gathered in the Mile High City to discuss every aspect of drug policy, research, and culture. Moss, who also hosts a science podcast called Here We Are, shared his thoughts about the mainstreaming of psychedelic drugs, the surprising pace of legalization efforts, and the role that Joe Rogan and other public figures play in normalizing psychedelics. We're in a psychedelic renaissance, a lot of people call it. It's certainly a psychedelic moment. What does the psychedelic renaissance mean to you? I don't know what the psychedelic renaissance means to me. I tell you that as someone who was born in 1980 and experienced much of the Reagan era, just say no to drugs in early 90s, PSAs, and the frying egg, and this is your brain on drugs type stuff, I never pictured a world where marijuana would be anywhere close to legal, and it's mind blowing to me that mushrooms are being decriminalized everywhere. I started a science podcast, Here We Are, eight years ago, and at that time the number of organizations even attempting to jump through all of the regulatory hoops to just test psychedelics in any way at all was just maps, which was much smaller even just eight years ago, doing it in a couple other small organizations. And now there's all sorts of Johns Hopkins and Stanford and the Zillian universities are getting into it. What do you think changed? Like why now? Why are psychedelics suddenly everywhere? That is a very good question. I think... Why now? I have no idea. I don't know what changed. I don't know if this is just what progress looks like and it's inevitable. I don't know that that's the case. I have no idea. I didn't see this coming. I think that maybe just the war on drugs was such horrible policy in the first place that it was never going to last. So it's kind of like communism, right? Eventually it runs out of something? Yeah, perhaps. I don't know. I don't know enough about public policy to speculate on. One of the things... You're kind of a psychedelic comedian, right? Yeah. You talk a lot about that. You have a show which is built around your psychedelic experiences. What do you like about psychedelics? Psychedelics just changed my life. I did them just as kind of a goof when I was a teenager just to be a rebel or whatever and had smoked weed and laughed a bunch and thought it was great. But psychedelics were something more meaningful for me. I always had pretty serious depression issues from the age of 10 years old, I would say. And they were something that really helped with that. When we say they, what kinds of psychedelics are you talking about? Mushrooms were my all-time favorite, my go-to for a very, very long time. And then I think if it weren't for DMT, I probably wouldn't have a science podcast. I was always interested in how the mind worked. And then when I first smoked DMT, I became absolutely obsessed with trying to figure out what the heck was that. What was the... Can you describe the experience that you had that you're like, I got to figure out what's going on here? Well, I've always been... I was raised in a strict religious household. I didn't fit into that. I was always an atheist, especially in my younger years. I was a very angry, bitter atheist. I felt very bitter about my strict upbringing. What kind of religion was it? Catholic. Well, so you have the Holy Sacrament. I mean, you have LSD. Yeah, exactly. And I think that to have a DMT experience that seems like you're talking with entities or in some other world or is this an afterlife or how do you explain, is this some other dimension? That is the subjective feeling of a lot of experiences. It just made me go, well, how could I perceive something like that? Because usually by the end of it, I'd be like, I actually don't think I was in some other dimension. I think I was in my brain. So then the question is how would a brain make a perception that is so different than this conscious experience? And it just got me really digging into how the subconscious mind works and neuroscience and it was incredibly impactful for me. Over and over again, psychedelics have had, I started doing ketamine years ago and I've been falling on ketamine and scraping my face. It's been nothing but really interesting. Is falling and scraping your face on ketamine the new thinking you can fly on LSD? I guess. This looks much worse than it is. I'm a bit of a psychonaut of sorts. I don't suppose to do the most reasonable ways of doing psychedelics. And so if anyone watches my documentary, Psychonautics or anything, they'll see it. I think I have kind of a balance to take on psychedelics. And I have a lot of inherent disclaimers just in my own. You can look at this face and go like, well, maybe I should pause before doing ketamine outside of a nightclub so I don't fall over. You know, psychedelics have become big enough where you participated in a roast of the psychedelic community. What are the parts of the psychedelic community that you like the most? And then we'll get to what you find objectionable about. What's great about not just the drugs but the community that's building up around it? I've always liked the community. I did psychedelics just alone pretty much for a very long time until I started experimenting with doing a psychedelic show. I think 2015 was when I first started doing a few of those. And I'd never been to Burning Man. I'd never been to any psychedelic festivals. And so once I started meeting the people that would, the type of people that would come out to a psychedelic comedy show, one, it wasn't the cliche burnout, you know, dreadlocked, their only hygienist sound bath type. You know, these ideas of Cheech and Chong or whatever, like this ridiculous idea of what drugs are like. It was never like that. Sure, I'd sometimes have like one table of burnouts, you know, a bunch of cliches. But you would just meet the most interesting intelligent people. I'd been doing science shows for years and it could be tough sledding sometimes, getting people to like have the attention span to listen to jokes about biology or whatever. And when I first, I remember the very first time that I did a show about psychedelics, the engagement was overwhelming. And afterwards there was a line of people. I've been a successful comedian since 2004 and I've been on late night and everything else and you'll go and do shows and just absolutely blow the roof off this place. And afterwards a lot of times people will be like, hey, nice show and leave. You do a psychedelic comedy show and like there is a line of people that has a million questions and they're meeting each other in line and connecting and the psychedelic community is just so inquisitive and so open. And I would say like my criticism is sometimes maybe a little too open-minded. What do you mean by that? Maybe a little... I would like to see a little more critical thinking and some of the aspects of... Yeah, what are the parts of the psychedelic community or kind of known psychedelic users that you find objectionable or annoying? Sure. Well, I mean I can tell you as someone that, I did a 111 city psychedelic comedy tour and ended in 2017. It was just the greatest tour of my life. I loved meeting people every show. I loved starting going to festivals and everything else. And then COVID happened. And as someone who interviews biologists and epidemiologists and things like that, the number of just insane, not just conspiracies, but absolute like anger and harassment that just anyone doing any kind of science is like a like killer messenger. Granted, this is the internet and you're seeing the worst of worst cases, but it certainly opened my eyes to I think some of the problematic errors in thinking within the community, some of the magical thinking, a lot of the grifting in the space. I mean, I think that there's a lot of pretty dubious like supplements and things like that being pedaled and treatments and telling people you can like cure their cancer with coffee enemas and stuff like that that seem like an adjacent thing Yeah, you definitely need tea in your butt to cure cancer, not coffee. There are a lot of or an increasing number of very public people who talk about their psychedelic use. Joe Rogan is one. Is he a purveyor of misinformation or uncritical thinking? Absolutely. I mean, I've been on Joe Rogan's show. I find him to be a good interviewer or a nice guy and you know, he's just... Alex Jones is one of the best friends. It's just his shtick. He's been into, you know, oh, did the aliens make the pyramids? He had a show where he would like go and talk to bigfoot hunters. You know, I guess it's a little discouraging someone who likes science when I watch like the animal planet and finding bigfoot is the most popular show or I've tried to watch the History Channel to learn something and Ancient Aliens is the most popular show on there. And it is what it is, but I think that it's created a kind of, you know, any show, if you're going to like get on late night, each late night person or Comedy Central or Netflix is looking for something different. And to get on Joe Rogan's show, a way to get on Maher is to have like some big controversial idea or something like that. And yeah, I think that he ends up kind of being subjected to just a lot of griptors and just a lot of people that are telling him what he already wants to hear and dressing it up in some sciencey-sounding thing that is not really... Do you think the psychedelic community is more open to kind of bad thinking or conspiracist thinking or anti-science thinking, then like the population at large? The population at large, I don't know. I find the psychedelic community to be very intelligent, but I would say that, you know, because of the nature of it being such an underground thing, I think it has drawn people that are unconventional, that maybe don't like authority as much and which is great. I mean, I think we should all absolutely be questioning science and authorities and laws all of the time. I very much support that. I think that it sometimes, like as someone who can be too much of a contrarian themselves sometimes, it's just... Sometimes it's like a race to see who can have the most far out idea, because there's a lot of creative people in this space and then also you want to like get attention for your ideas and advertise your ideas and some of those like more far out ideas are sexier and more tantalizing than, you know, reality for some people. I think reality is very interesting. Some people think reality is like very boring and... What about, you know, so there's the, you know, there's the kind of psychedelic, you know, strangeness on the one side where people are buying any theory. Then there's also the like a whole subset of people who are like, I'm going to use these incredibly, you know, visionary, weird, whacked out drugs in order to become a better office worker. You know, you call them the optimizers. Yeah, what's your beef with the optimizers? I don't have a real... Listen, this is the optimizers, the life hackers out there. I mean, I just find them a little funny and comical sometimes. I think some of the motivational stuff is probably just because my personal resistance and problems with self-care are probably just projecting a little bit like I don't want to hear that or whatever. But I think it's... It seems like there's a lot of commonality where you are overly prescriptive within these influencers in like the self-help community. And it's very... If you give people like very, very odd and particular instructions, then one, that increases the placebo effect. Two, if it doesn't work for them, you're ending up, you're putting the ownership on the user and you go, well, you just must not have done the protocol correctly. There's not a problem with my protocol or my advice that I'm giving you as the user. You did step three when you should have been doing step two or something. Exactly. You didn't cure your cancer with the coffee animal. You must not have done enough of them or maybe you did too many of them or you didn't do it for long enough Exactly. You've done a bunch of different psychedelic theme shows, documentaries you have a science show. What's the role of cultural production for lack of a better term in kind of making psychedelics normalized? Yeah, I mean... So like I said, I started comedy in 2004. I was like a typical late night like short joke absurdist comedian and I would, I've always been interested in psychedelics so even back then I would sprinkle in a few psychedelic jokes here and there and I found that if I did a regular comedy club I could do five minutes of psychedelic jokes and it would be funny. Usually they were like goofy ones like I ate too many mushrooms and saw this weird thing, you know and if I talked about it much more than that you would start getting funny looks like what's up with this guy? Why is he talking about drugs so much? And more and more as this becomes just more part of the mainstream I mean I can tell you distinctly my 111 city psychedelic comedy tour ended in May of 2017 and I had all of these deals potentially in the works and ran into all sorts of barriers with like showtime and HBO not wanting to they didn't have a problem talking about drugs they had a problem talking about potential benefits and these talking about psychedelics as medicines that was very taboo to them they wouldn't touch it and I think June 2017 is when Michael Pollan's book came out and was the first time there was a psychedelic book on the front of almost every bookstore in the country they made it like say for NPR I mean like he mainstreamed the discussion and so it was already making progress for sure I had seen that over 10 or 15 years and there's like little things like that where there's a pop and suddenly my mom has a Michael Pollan's book and that's something I never have you ever tripped with your mom oh no that's I can't imagine that ever I would I certainly would I'd have a better shot with my dad maybe but I don't think that that makes me sad it's something that I think about sometimes when I can be a reckless user of psychedelics but I have a lot of beautiful meaningful experiences that I learn a lot from sometimes I think about people like I lost my grandma recently that she never got to have an experience like that in her entire life that my parents will probably never get to have an experience like that that I won't get to have an experience with them because of all of the past propaganda and war on drugs and just how much of an impact that had on culture I mean Nixon and a lot of the first criminalizing of drugs did start very conspiratorial and it was very like Machiavellian and everything else but once it took effect it didn't take any of that it didn't it was just a natural emergent like it didn't no longer required people to like be plotting against you know civil rights groups or whatever else it just enough people just bought into the propaganda that even people that were open minded about it it was never going to be on their radar to get rid of these laws and so just so recently with you know Michael Pollan's books and then opening the doors for others for all of my criticisms of people like Aaron Rodgers or someone that might be peddling a bunch of anti-science nonsense it's still to have some like huge NFL Hall of Famer you know praising psychedelics there's pros and cons I don't expect you know NFL football players to you know be the most scientifically informed and nor do I expect multimillionaires to be able to check their ego all the time so what do you think the benefits would be to society where psychedelics are just normalized that's a really interesting question because I'm not exactly one of those people that's like if you just put LSD in the drinking water and everyone did LSD like the world would be peace and love and I've seen the negative effects of psychedelics I've been to a psych ward twice myself I know that psychedelics aren't perfect and the very things that can help some people's mental health can hurt others and and I think that ultimately although I have mixed feelings about just like making everything legal the war on drugs is a horrible failure I mean I don't know what else there is to do but just to get rid of the absurd laws around them and you know it will make me nervous when people are doing psychedelics more and more willy nilly because there's unexpected things like you know I marijuana changed my life I no longer like this stuff but absolutely just I had such a beautiful few year run with marijuana I loved it I never saw marijuana being legalized I was thrilled even though it's no longer my cup of tea thrilled to see it go so legal and get so popular and have my grandma I think did CBD before like my god I never saw that coming and then you know sometimes you go oh did people forget that also marijuana can make you like paranoid and stuff as well and you know I wonder if you know would Joe Rogan be as into peddling conspiracies and anti-vax propaganda if he didn't smoke weed all day and that was like his whole big shtick I don't know you know what's it like or how do you feel about this conference seems to be part of the process where a psychedelic culture which is underground or a subculture or counterculture is like moving above ground and you know as somebody who's been in this space for a while are you like I liked LSD's early work you know before everybody knew about it I mean how what's it like to be part of a world you know a community a movement that is moving from underground to above ground I've been a big supporter of maps for years I've actually defended a lot of like criticism you know a lot of people are worried they've gone to corporate and so I worry about that as well I worry about any organization when they like get really big or whatever else I just love finding ways to legitimize the scientific process I actually if I were king or if I were just you know a politician with a little bit of influence say I think that one very reasonable step would just to not make psychedelics a schedule one maybe make them a schedule two which means schedule one means it has no accepted medical use and a high potential for addiction and the only thing that making something a schedule one does effectively is it doesn't deter use in any way because no one's like what schedule is this drug that I'm going to put in my mouth most people are just unfamiliar and then it also doesn't necessarily influence the laws so there's like no deterrent property for like hey don't do this or you'll go to jail well you'll get in more trouble for a schedule two cocaine than you will a schedule one marijuana that's legal in most places so the only thing that having it being a schedule one really does is it makes it so incredibly difficult for scientists to just run basic studies like you'd test anything else I mean we've made many black holes and particle accelerators they used to think that if you did that the universe would implode and it turns out it doesn't but you can test whether or not the universe will implode easier than you can test lsd on rats and I think that's that's going to create more harm if we can't investigate these things so I'm I'm not about being the cool kid hipster about psychedelics I'm thrilled to see more and more scientific organizations getting to be a part of it I have more pause about some of the influencer community out there and some of the wellness community that is I think a lot of it comes from a good place but I've seen some stuff that I'm like what do you mean you know my mom growing up was always falling for every you know like door-to-door salesman pyramid scheme type so I was just so used to being exposed to these multi-level pyramid scheme things you know having Tupperware parties and getting you know this and that vitamin is going to do this and you got to get magnets in your shoes and as my whole life I've seen you know why people like that stuff and you know take 40 different vitamins that don't do anything rather than getting the actual exercise and and so there's just there's a lot of things out there being sold to people that I'm like I don't know I mean I think that life is about finding the placebo that works for you ultimately so you know I would say just make your own snake oil it's going to be more effective if you go out there and you catch the snake yourself research how to oil it's going to increase the placebo effect and your subconscious is going to go well I wouldn't have chased around a snake and oiled it for nothing you know it's going to be more likely to work and so there's just I'd say that there is a there's a fair amount of snake oil out there that I think just overlaps with alternative thinking in more creative communities and I think it's like you know we all kind of want to pretend we have magic powers are going to be immortal or whatever I think that there's opportunities for people to take advantage of people's hope if you project you know I don't know 20 years 30 years 40 years into the future where you know things have been psychedelicized you know what's that what's that world look like huh a lot of good questions what does a world look like 40 years from now where potentially psychedelics are continue to track and become like really normalize I think that for people to have more options even just to like escape reality or responsibility or whatever even in like more reckless use of things than just shrinking their face off every day you know I think that I think that there is a correlation between younger people aren't drinking as much and I think part of that has to do with marijuana and some of these other substances becoming more normalized that there's like lots more alternatives for people so I think even the lowest bar of that of just like less drunk driving less alcoholism and I think that I think that there will be a lot of excitement for a while and hopefully 40 years from now this will just be commonplace we'll be bored with these there will be no use for a psychedelic comedy show because who cares it's like you know marijuana the based comedy is almost like kind of old and tacky by now and I think that's wonderful I think that's a sign of progress I hope that five years from now it'd be the hokeyest dumbest thing for me to still be doing a psychedelic show I think that might be a little soon for it but I'm hopeful that that will be the case I have other stuff I'd like to talk about what's your favorite psychedelic my favorite psychedelic oh my gosh mushrooms are my all-time favorite absolute my go-to for depression and for creativity if I'm putting together a new act or something like that I have such wonderful epiphanies on psychedelics I have such funny insights and meaningful takeaways ketamine is the only psychedelic that I do like very willy nilly because typically consequence free but it doesn't require the same like building up so I get to have like a very fun interesting experience without having to worry as much about the integration and like hyping myself up and nausea DMT is the most interesting thing I've ever done in my life I've had a hundred DMT breakthroughs and it never got more boring it only got weirder I stopped because it kept getting too interesting and I did 5MAO DMT recently and it was like that had to have been the most profound psychedelic experience that I've ever had MDMA if I'm in a relationship and maybe we're talking through relationship problems in a loving and meaningful way so context is very important if I only get one for the rest of my life it's mushrooms but I'm going to be so sad to say goodbye to those others Shane Moss, thanks for talking