Welcome back to The Drop In, DoubleBlind’s newsletter serving up news, culture, and independent journalism about psychedelics straight to your inbox.

Today’s lead story is an interview with comedian Shane Mauss, a longtime psychonaut and science-minded comic who weaves together comedy, neuroscience, and psychedelics in a subversive way that forces audiences to think deeply about the complexities of our existence under a cloak of humor. It’s brilliant. We talked to him about his new two-part comedy special, TRIPS; how he used to call Rick Doblin during his stand-up sets; getting bullied by conspiracy trolls; why LSD trips are actually boring; and so much more. You can find the interview just below.

If you keep scrolling, you’ll find other stories on Lyme disease and psilocybin, tripping on Sea Bream fish, and an interview with Incubus frontman Brandon Boyd about mystical experiences and the sacred.

Happy Spring🌸🌞,
Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

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The comedian’s new special, TRIPS, blurs stand-up and altered states, exploring what happens when psychedelics stop being answers and start exposing how the mind works.

Shane Mauss has spent years occupying a unique corner of comedy. He is, on the one hand, a seasoned stand-up comedian with major credits spanning Conan, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Comedy Central, and Prime Video. On the other hand, he’s a comic who wandered off the traditional club circuit long ago to delve into stranger, ostensibly trippier terrain to create shows about consciousness, animal mating behavior, mental health, mythology, and the science of how the mind works, including what psychedelics tell us about the brain. The throughline here is Mauss’s obsession with the mind and all the bizarre ways it can glitch, expand, protect itself… or spiral.

You can sense this obsession in TRIPS, his new two-part psychedelic comedy special. The first installment, “The First Dose,” is now out via 800 Pound Gorilla Media. The second, which is aptly called “The Second Dose,” arrives April 19, Bicycle Day, the unofficial holiday celebrating chemist Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD. But TRIPS is not just another comedy special riffing on acid flashbacks and DMT revelations. It’s actually a full visual experience featuring the works of 20 psychedelic artists, including veteran concert VJ Michael Strauss, and it’s filmed inside Meow Wolf Denver’s 360-degree projection room, surrounded by LED visuals. (So, yeah, perfect to watch on psychedelics.)

When we got on the phone a few moons ago, Mauss was debating whether to spend the afternoon rock climbing or playing pickleball. We talked about how he thinks LSD trips are hella boring, why conspiracy culture is insufferable, why everyone takes DMT entities so personally, the risks of overdoing psychedelics, and the weird position he occupies as comedy’s most grounded psychedelic over-sharer. All of which you can behold in our interview below!

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DoubleBlind: Okay, let’s start with TRIPS. What is this project, and what are you trying to do with it?

Shane Mauss: I usually do inspired, infused, and philosophically themed comedy shows and I try to essentially trick people into thinking about how the mind works. I had a Netflix special about mating behavior, and an album about breaking my feet and the evolution of pain and negative emotions. And then I did a psychedelic tour, which led to a documentary about psychedelics, and I kind of got known as “the psychedelic comedian guy,” like organically. I didn’t mean for it to happen. But I guess it makes sense because I have been doing psychedelics for, like, 30 years. I’m definitely a psychonaut, and have obsessed over psychedelics for way too long. I probably would have never had a science podcast without them impacting me in the way they did. I talk with scientists outside of the fields of psychedelics, but I don’t think I would have been that interested in the mind and neuroscience and psychology and stuff had it not been for them.

Anyhow, I have these two specials now. I added visuals and got the whole community involved — about like 20 of my favorite psychedelic artists involved — and had VJ Michael Strauss, who’s been doing visuals for psychedelic bands and festivals and things for over 20 years. I wanted to add visuals, but I didn’t want it to be a PowerPoint presentation. I wanted things to be able to be weird and squirmy and moving around and stuff. I wanted to be able to go off the rails and improvise and change up the order of things and do new material and stuff.

And so we did a 150-city tour with it, and that culminated in filming it at Meow Wolf in Denver, the first special ever recorded there, which was a pain in the ass to get to have happen, but I know some of the people there, so they were able to pull some strings for me. So yeah, the first one just dropped on March 3, and then there’s a second one coming out on Bicycle Day that people can look forward to.

DB: It sounds like you’re doing something that feels different from the standard comedy special.

SM: Yeah, I mean, there are so many fucking comedy specials these days, it’s hard to have anything stand out. So I am quite proud of this one. There’s definitely no comedy special that looks like mine. And so it was fun to get to do something a little bit different in a world that’s becoming very saturated.

DB: How have psychedelics impacted how you approach comedy, and how are they impacting this round of work for you?

SM: Well, that’s a good question. I’ve kind of thought about this quite a bit, which is that people are often confused, because I do feel like I have three separate things that are my main interests that all intersect sometimes — comedy, science, and psychedelics.

So comedy, there’s this idea of the alien anthropologist. A lot of us take for granted why we behave in a certain way or why we made a certain decision. And scientists look at things through this alien anthropologist point of view — if an alien came down to objectively analyze this behavior, what would they think about it? Comedians do the same thing. They look at the same sort of thing that everyone’s walked past a million times, and then have a fresh look at it.

And psychedelics are related, but a little bit different in that they’re the closest thing to experiencing a completely alien kind of consciousness. It’s the furthest that you can get to being outside of yourself, and they kind of force that alien anthropologist perspective. Psychedelics can also be very validating, sometimes to a fault for some people. I’ve gotten some validation from them over the years, especially early on when I had very major insecurity issues.

My science interests are really about how the mind works. I love learning about animal behavior. A lot of my early interest in wildlife and science came from David Attenborough documentaries and online classes, and I just kept going deeper from there. I like thinking about the mind by looking at life through other animals’ perspectives and through an evolutionary lens.

I’m also really into cognitive biases and logical fallacies, and the predictable ways the mind can go wrong. We all make mistakes and don’t have a perfect sense of things all the time, but it’s not just random. The mind is wrong in very specific, testable ways, for a lot of interesting reasons. For me, psychedelics are a really interesting way of exploring that. A lot of people have a psychedelic experience and think, “Oh, I finally saw the truth.” But when I do psychedelics, it feels more like I’m experiencing the raw machinery of those biases. It’s like the mind having to quickly relearn everything.

DB: That “novel connections” piece is interesting, because it can also lead people into some strange territory. It makes me think about how the brain creates narratives to make sense of things, and how that can slip into conspiracy thinking, which feels pretty common in psychedelic spaces these days…

SM: Oh my god, I thought I was done with psychedelics because all the conspiracy people harassed me during COVID. I’m a science communicator who had the misfortune of being on the “Joe Rogan Experience” when COVID happened, and so I got to see what it’s like when fucking unstable people suddenly have this major event happen, and proportionality bias stuff, and these simple paranoid explanations for everything. I’m obsessed with conspiracy thinking, and the psychedelic crowd is… I mean, I just got yelled at today. Completely out of nowhere, just outrageous, delusional. There are some fucking real unwell people out here.

DB: What were they mad at you about?!

SM: I don’t know, because I wasn’t using my platform to call out child trafficking more, and why I’m not mentioning the Epstein Files… and I’m just like, probably because people know! Everyone is already aware of this! Literally just try not to hear about the Epstein file for an hour. I dare you. I’m not sure I’m gonna move the needle on that one issue honestly. Everyone’s already on it.

DB: Okay, since we’re talking about heated topics like conspiracies. You’ve mentioned DMT entities before, which is another really fucking heated topic of debate in the psychedelic space. It’s really wild how angry people get about DMT entities.

SM: Yeah…I told this story about this DMT entity — this purple woman I’ve interacted with — that others see as well. And people are very fascinated by this. But, then I broke down what I think is happening from a neuroscience and evolutionary perspective, and how our minds might use similar levels of abstraction to put together conscious states. This is where Jungian ideas of archetypes come from.

But, like, I’m not overly committed to any of these ideas. They are just interesting ideas that I like thinking about. But people were so mad that I didn’t believe the entity was some real, living goddess from another realm.

When I first put it out, I thought people were gonna think I’m crazy or lying about just encountering the goddess. But they actually believed my trip more than I did and were made at me for explaining how I felt. No one cared that this was my experience. They were yelling at me for not believing my experience as much as they dis.

DB: Ah, yes, people want to tell you what your experience means!

SM: It’s so funny, because I couldn’t care less. If you’re into communing with DMT entities and DMT goddesses, go for it. I don’t blame anyone for having a face value perspective on these things. It can feel extremely real in the moment. But people get themselves really worked up about it.

DB: You mentioned bringing Rick Doblin into your stand-up and taking audience questions about him. What’s the funniest question you ever got about Rick?

SM: Well, first off, Rick’s a pretty funny person. I really like Rick. I used to do tours and visit 111 cities, and I’d call Rick Doblin as part of the show most nights and put him on speakerphone so people could ask him questions. [laughs]

But the first thing that comes rushing to my head in terms of a funny question and answer from Rick Doblin was when I was making my documentary “Psychonautics.” I was maybe going to be doing Ibogaine, and it was the one psychedelic that worried me a little bit. I had heard it can be like a 12-hour nightmare. And I was talking to Rick backstage, and I said, Rick, I’m thinking about doing Ibogaine. I don’t know. I’ve heard it can be like a 12-hour nightmare, and Rick goes, “Oh no. It can be much longer than that.”

DB: You’ve been really open about the fact that psychedelics aren’t always positive. What’s your relationship to them right now?

SM: I had an experience a few weeks ago where I snapped out of a fucking funk because of psychedelics. I was binge drinking and smoking cigarettes again and everything else, and just wanting to fucking kill myself. And now I’m just doing great. Resets like that, that’s a good reminder. And That was on LSD. I also had a higher dose of mushrooms a week and a half after that. Got a little more clarity on that one, too.

But when I was making my documentary, I was doing very high mushroom doses, like, three times a week. I don’t know why. I was just seeing what would happen. I wasn’t leaving enough time for integration. And then DMT and ayahuasca got involved, and all sorts of things that led to a very severe manic episode I didn’t come down from. Had pretty severe psychosis for like a month, and ended up in a psych ward.

So I’ve been a little more cautious since then.

DB: Has that changed how you approach psychedelics now?

SM: Yeah. I used to have no problem throwing some mushrooms in my brain when I was feeling a little funk coming on. But ever since that, I’ve had a little more cold feet.

I mean, if I’m depressed, I’m not too worried about it. But if I’m already doing good, like right now I’m doing good, it’s like, I kind of don’t want to fuck with psychedelics. I’m already in a really good place.

DB: I’m glad you’re out of the funk! What did coming out of that actually feel like?

SM: I had this fucking awful funk; a real long one. And then, like, three or four weeks ago, I took some LSD. It had been way too long, and it just snapped me right out of it. And now I’m just killing it. Taking care of myself and doing all the things.

It reminded me why I enjoy psychedelics, because I sometimes go back and forth with how much I give a fuck about them and everything happening in that world. It was a nice reminder of, like, oh yeah… this is why I play the game. This is why I love them.

One of the most influential figures in modern psychedelic science is trying to answer a question that has haunted philosophers and neuroscientists for decades: How does the brain produce consciousness? From experimenting with LSD as a teenager to pioneering neuroimaging studies in the lab, Robin Carhart-Harris has spent his career chasing that mystery, using psychedelics as a tool to probe the deepest layers of the mind.

In this week’s main feature, journalist Webb Wright traces Carhart-Harris’ unlikely path from psychoanalysis to cutting-edge brain imaging, and unpacks the theories that have reshaped how researchers think about consciousness, mental illness, and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. As the field edges closer to mainstream acceptance, Carhart-Harris is focused on a singular goal: building a map of the mind that is precise enough to guide both science and healing.

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