Conversation with Shane Mauss | Episode 24

Original Broadcast Date | 10.16.2020

In this episode of the Mind of Snaps Podcast LIVE Conversations series, I have a lively & educational interview with Shane Mauss! We discuss comedy, Twitch, mind exploration, mindfulness, psychedelics, & more! It was a really interesting, great conversation - hope you all enjoy!

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SPECIAL GUEST INFO --- Shane Mauss

Website | https://www.shanemauss.com/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/shanecomedy
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/shane_mauss/
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/shanecomedyfan

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Jessy (Mind Of Snaps / SheSnaps)

www.MindofSnaps.com

CONTENT --- Twitch | Youtube | TikTok
SOCIAL MEDIA --- Twitter | Instagram

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Unknown: 0:12

Welcome to the Mind Of naps podcast with your host, Sna s (AKA SheSnaps). She' a popular twitch broadcas er, photographer, entrepreneur and mental health advocate. n this and future cast expe t to fall on with snaps as she learns more about her mind, the world and her fellow hu ans. It could get messy in here, but stick around. You might ju t learn something as you enter Yay. I love friends. Okay, you can you can go ahead and wave at everyone and say Hi, friends. Yeah, I'm so excited about that. I like as soon as you're told me, you can do as many Yeah. You're switching right when you include lots of digits. That's how it works. Yes, you can't hear him You shut up. Oh my god. Okay, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold friends. This is my own login. I gotta switch the scenes. We even test this earlier. It's not your fault. No, my Remember I told you audio is like the thing that is the worst SON OF A That's unbelievable. Check There we go. I didn't even see your voice registering on the login things. So that was my bad audio. And the audio is hair guy pulling his hair out? Yes. Yeah, that that particular email is called not like this. So you know, you know, you know the names the emote names? Yeah. So it's really weird because like okay, we're gonna just jump right into this You are welcome at any point to like read any of the chat messages that people drop in like comments on them because normally the Live podcast recordings, it's just us talking but I want you to like get the feel for this. Sure. So on to read. Yes, you are allowed to read. Every emote has its own name and like there's a suffix for the streamer or a prefix for the streamer. So like all of my emotes if you look in the chat window, where you see all the text going, you should see a little smiley face to the right. Like if you wanted to type in my chat. Yeah, so if you click on that little smiley face, frequently use that's going to show all of the different emotes and any channel that you're in should be listed like right underneath that so it'll say she snaps and then it'll list all these different little emotes. I see. I'm not in a I'm not logged into a thing right now. Yeah, that's fine. I think it should still show for you. Right. Yeah. Shows shows your frequently used these are solid. Frequent things. Yeah, for someone who's never been on Twitch Yeah. So like, this is my very first time on Twitch I'm learning about. I'm learning so much right now. So emotes are kind of like a big part of the culture on Twitch, which is really funny and weird because like any affiliated or partnered broadcaster gets the opportunity to create their own channel specific emotes. So all of my emotes. It'll, you'd have to type in the word snaps followed by the emote name like there's snaps k there's snaps toke there's snaps OMG so they have like, sort of a meaning that is spelled out in the actual like as you write it, and then you actually see the mode itself. So like, if you are subbed to a broadcaster, you can use their emotes anywhere on Twitch. And if you're not, then you can only use those global emotes from twitch or any other streamer that you're subbed to. Interest interesting. How long have you been on twitch? How long have you been doing? This is like a little over five years now. Wow. Yeah. How long is twitch existed? I didn't even I thought because I took like a two and a half year break from social media are no longer than that. I went from the moment Trump took office, I quit all of social media. And until quarantine and then I started again, and I didn't know of twitch until after recently and and and so this is all new, but I didn't know that. So you've been on it for five years. Yeah, yeah. And how So how long How long did it take you to build? Like, what's, uh, how many people are in here right now? Um, right now so normally for me, it's um, usually somewhere around like 100 concurrent viewers, somewhere in that range sometimes like 150, sometimes less. But because I don't stream Friday evenings consistently, we might have 50 people show up, we might have more. Usually it takes around like the first hour or so of anyone's stream for everyone to kind of trickle in. So you'll see the view count slowly grow over time as they're like, wait. snaps is on what the fuck she's not usually on now. I see. Interesting. Yeah. So you see all the people in chat that are kind of like explaining where twitch came about it was Justin TV initially. And then now it's Twitch. And Amazon owns it. And it's, it's a very interesting platform. How's Justin doing these days? It's sad. I don't know. I don't know. I hope so. Check him out. And Justin, maybe Justin and Tom from my space can like have a conversation and like, throw up some thumbs up and stuff. Oh, my goodness. This is I'm trying to keep up with all this. There's There's fun things. Someone said something about how we came up with this with our brains. radium skull and they were very excited about the eye. It's a solid point. Yeah. Alright, so there's so there's chats going on along the side? And then what? So it's mostly a video gaming streaming thing? Not anymore. Yeah. All right. Well, like I guess when when Justin TV started, he was just kind of like videoing, like filming himself doing everything. And then it became very gaming focused. And then as twitch kind of, like, Hey, have you guys been watching this guy? Just from what I understand what it was exactly. It's crazy, though. To watch him trimming his beard. And yes, and then and your comment along and sometimes we have laughs and that's what? And from that. From humble beginnings. came this new Empire. What about are there there? There must be it seems like there's a lot of comics on here now. Right? Yeah. What's the difference between like this and just doing like, YouTube Live or something? I guess really the difference is platform specific. Like it's kind of a personal preference at this point. Like live streaming is the future. Some people are digging live streaming on Facebook, which like No, thank you. Some people still really like being on Twitch. And somebody said no, thank you to face. Why is Facebook Live Streaming? Just because your grandparents and stuff? I don't Yeah, I have interest in Facebook. I got off, like people from people from high school and stuff like that. Is that what it is? Oh, man, I love that. I like that. Facebook is so weird like that I have. So I have a science podcast called Here we are. For listeners. We're there we go. Talk with scientists. And, and since like, since COVID has happened all of a sudden, everyone's just like, I'm going to read an article about science. And now I know science. And so there's all of these. Now there's always like, and all these scientists are like, having to bicker with their like, high school. People they went to high school with about like, it's a hoax. I got I got I've been studying immunology for 20 years. Oh my God, that's that's what's like the most scary about I think like Facebook especially, is like, you have this knowledge of these people who you might have grown up with and they may have known you when you were like a total fucking idiot, you know? So it's like, do I really want to engage in this and have them be thinking of me as the person I once was? Like, I think I'll just leave. Have you How old are you share your age? Yeah, I'm 34 Okay, okay. Well, I was going to I just went to Did you go to any of your like high school reunions or anything? No, I was in a bad relationship. I wasn't allowed to go. The reaction I really want you to have It's so stupid. No, wait a second. I Stuff either had some really bad relationship and like he wasn't letting or I'm not convinced it's a bad relationship. If someone's like, I'm not gonna let you go to your high school reunion. You don't even like this is just like an all around controlling person. Yeah, like he went through my journal. Like, oh yeah, really bad stuff. I couldn't have passwords on any of my stuff. I got accused of cheating like every other day, it was a mess. That's Did you ever cheat? No. And that was, that was the most upsetting. There were things very early on in the relationship where I could see it like, Oh, that was so inappropriate. Like that was just dumb. But no, I never actually like cheated on him. But he refused to believe it. That's the worst when you eat when you get in trouble for cheating and he had don't get any of those sweet cheating orgasms. Yeah, I got none spare dick and lots and lots of shit for all the potential. You know, it is I've been in that situation where you also weren't getting I had a I had a I had a girl. You know what the the most attractive woman I ever dated in my life was also the most jealous, like crazy concerned about cheating person ever. And she was she was a fucking lunatic. Actually. I was about to say her name because she she actually probably wouldn't even care that I was saying this. I used to have a podcast called the double date podcast. It was her and I and another couple each week, and we used to fight like crazy. But I Yeah, I know, do I want to talk about high school reunions? Are time right? Just pick one. All right. Well, I went to my I went to my 20 year high school reunion. And that was one of the most bizarre like mine, mine Fox of my life. But now COVID everyone's everyone's getting together with everyone's going through their phone and going. I better reconnect with everyone that I've ever connected with. Have you done that thing yet? No. Do you have what was your high school experience like? I barely went like I had a good time in high school, which is why I don't know anything now. Because I'm so incredibly ignorant and friends, I'm muting and silencing all of the alerts on here. So anyone who subs or, or anything, like I apologize for not calling it out, but I want to make sure I can keep this recording clean. Um, like I was still friends with some of them. But we just all like very much grew apart. And part of it was because of that relationship I was in for so long. Like they got used to not being able to be my friend without my ex being very aggressive towards them. Like the type of shit where the first time he would meet someone, I would introduce them to like an old friend. And if it was a guy, his goal was to do that shake their hand as hard as they can. He was one of those guys like I've got to establish like it was so dumb. Yeah, that is the worst just immediate let's do push up you right now, buddy. I, I have I was just about to so I just yesterday, I emailed my, like, I had this one pack of high school friends have like, I had a bunch of different friend groups. But my closest one that was in my grade was like, there's like 10 of us. And I just emailed them all yesterday, like hello friends and former friends together. And I am curious. Because it is such a it's it's such an interesting time for reflection and shit. But anyhow, all of this is to say, we shouldn't be on Facebook Live. So you're canceling that for me? Yeah, I'm trying. I'm trying to figure out what to dedicate my life to so so just to just to give the viewers listeners some context. I've been a stand up comedian for 16 years, I've been full time on the road for 14 years, meaning like at least two usually three, sometimes four weekends a month, flying doing a club and then and then I started doing indie shows five years ago, where I was doing like one offs. So for example, in 2019, I did about 100 different stops. And I have never been that much of a fan of, of social media, my agents and managers like way back in the day, they were like, you got to get on the Facebook and the Twitter. It'll change your life and like they've bullied me into it. All I did was write a bunch of jokes that alienated everybody. I'm not, I'm not terribly likable on social media. I I don't think it's benefited that much. And so like, a few years ago, I was just like, I'm done with it. I'll just like, pay to sell, you know, pay for some, like Facebook ads, or Instagram ads or whatever, for when I'm coming through, you know, Tulsa, or something, a thing pops up and says Shane moss is bringing a show stand up science or whatever, through your area. And then I don't have to deal with it. But but then COVID happen. Boom, no more live touring. And I had never even used Instagram until COVID. I had an account, but never used it. And I started on that. And I was like, Oh, I actually kind of enjoy this your Instagram happen from what I was seeing. Yeah, I mean, I don't put tons into it. But it's growing. And I've been enjoying it. I added video to my podcast. So I started a YouTube I didn't even have a YouTube channel until quarantine that has been unsuccessful. so far. I haven't figured out algorithms and this and that. And YouTube. Yeah. And and then I started, I had a Patreon just kind of sitting there just for listeners to donate and didn't do anything. And I started doing things with it since quarantine. And then, about two months ago, I added Discord. And I've been doing that some and I've I've enjoyed it, I don't attend to it every day. And some in some days. I I'm on there quite a bit. But I've enjoyed it. And so when I had a dialogue with you on Twitter about Twitch, you made it You made a compelling argument one at one of my best friends who isn't on any other social media platforms. always talks about Twitch. And, and he and he's a huge comedy fan and stuff too. And he's always telling me to get on here. And so you just reached me at just like, it was just the right time for me to be like, okay, what's this twitch thing about? So So that's, that's just so everyone little context into what my deal is and why I'm sure I sound like an incredible buffoon. Noob right now, I'm definitely not a buffoon, a little noobish but you know, we all got to start somewhere. Right? And this is like such an interesting place because like you were you were pointing out like the emo with the dude with his hands in his hair. And one of the funny things about like, my favorite emotes so far, so great. And one of the funny things about like twitch culture is that every emo that we know, tends like people will refer to the emotes verbally. So someone might like tweet out not like this and spell it in the way where it would normally register as an emote. So like anyone who goes on Twitch is going to see that in like mentally be picturing the hands and hair thing. And another example is like Kappa, can we get some Kappas and chat please? Um, anytime that you want to signify like sarcasm or essentially nullify whatever you've said, you put that Kappa face that you're seeing there. So that's Kappa so people will verbally say something are cows that's for sarcasm. Why? Why is that for sarcasm? I don't even know how that became the thing. I'm not sure but that person he's actually someone who I think works at Twitch, which is funny. It's just a very sarcastic twitching Floyd. Yeah. Which team was like this guy? He had a good face. Yeah. So like people will say something out loud. That's ridiculous. And then they'll be like Kappa and if they say it, then that's just like saying, Oh, I'm just being sarcastic. So like I'm through a ROM das in there. Yeah, that's one of my emotes. Oh, interesting. I'm almost I almost got ROM das. There's also my first beard. It's ROM das in a bit It's spreading. It's starting to ROM das I'm get I'm going for Darwin Darwin but ROM I could shoot for ROM das. hmm yeah so that's one of the emails that you can get if you subscribe to my channel is the ROM das that's a nice first beard. I mean, it's not like a takes practice. He's really been focused guys. not shave. And sometimes I put conditioner in it and not I don't do nearly enough things. I love that idea. I love the idea of like, getting your first beard and people being like, nope, you're like, yeah, you're right. I missed it. Start again. Better get it on here. And as you see the first little bits of stubble be like you listen up you son. You You better go fucking ROM das right now or so help me. Beard evasion. Yes. Yeah, so like there's the Kappa one right, which is like the way of kind of signifying sarcasm. There's pug champ, which can we get some pugs various types of pugs. So people will actually say paws augers or pug champs or porg as a way of signifying that face which like, I have my own Pog, emo and then there's the global pug champ event which you're seeing from Thumper there. Which is kind of like the holy shit face. Oh, oh, okay. I love that. Yeah. Nice. What's another one? debated? Can we get some debate IDs? So okay, that's maybe my favorite one so far. The old face one the old face one is my snaps OMG mode. The debated is the one underneath with the guy looking up. Yeah, no, I don't like the ones that are just the twitch employees strange and confusing. And then you win me over with a Bob Ross Okay. All right twitch crew. Yes, like your own emotes could be your own face kind of doing some of these like standard emotes, or you could just pick random shit. So, so you can so if you're a Justin, you can just like dust around the house and people tune in and be like, Whoa, how is I can't believe Justin is dust in the fan like that. Up there. And then and and people get real jazzed up about it enough to start an empire. Yeah, but but if you're not adjusting, who's the world's most interesting? God, even when he's doing mundane tasks, people just can't get enough of it. If you're not adjusting then then the next move was video games. Right? And then do I? Is it that cuz I almost screamed my documentary on here. Oh, really? Is that a thing that people do? Is your documentary available on crime? Oh, I wonder if it's available through I mean, I just have like the file of it. Oh, like I own it. Yeah, that's, that's a good point. Given that it's your your IP, you should be safe to stream it as long as you don't have any nightmares that would like block that. Yeah, I do have to clear it. But it's that's not a hard thing to do. Um, but and then I have cuz, don't people have like viewing parties and stuff on here? Is that a thing? Okay. And yours, yours is actually linked through they have this thing called Amazon watch party. So you can actually it's cool that you're I'm very surprised that yours is listed here. That's fucking awesome. So we're gonna watch that together at some point friends, um, but like, I can play it through Amazon Prime and watch it with people. But like, okay, so you don't have to just do gaming on Twitch. Because since everything has kind of expanded, like my content, a lot of what I do is I literally just sit in the just chatting directory, which is what we're in right now. And I just smoke weed and talk shit with people like we just talk all day and sometimes we look up funny things on the internet. And then if I want to I'll game or do my podcasts and things like that, but like you can come on here and create art you can come on here and mix music you can play your videos, or you can just sit and wait for someone to ask you a question then talk to them. So you have a so you have a the sitting and waiting for a question sounds like a sad place. Without an audience, it can be very awkward. I mean, I will when I started doing Instagram, I was like, Oh, I see people are doing Instagram lives Is that a thing? And I did it for a while. And then I was, I was just watching, like, starting at 30 viewers and then just watching it like 10 minutes down. I never like planned anything, I would always just like turn it on and be like what's happening right now? And so I'm really I'm basically your grandpa trying to figure out how things work. On most social media. I'm doing Monday, I'm doing a thing where we're playing the board game code names, with some with some people. And with Shaq games. Awesome. And then, and I think comedians do like virtual stand up shows. Right? Yeah. Have you seen any? I've been I've been on intro. Has anyone out there tuned in to any virtual stand up shows because I'm against them. And just generally as an idea i like i don't think that they would work that well. But I've heard people say that they've really enjoyed them. What are you? What do you think won't work? Well, not being able to have the like, like eyes on the people? I mean, the audience is the instrument. I mean, I think that for a think for a conversation or for a podcast and to have people chiming in and stuff like I'm doing a crowdcast event tomorrow. And that's like a live version of my podcast or it's me two professors in a second comedian talking about media use and when kids should use phones and how much and how online dating affects psychology and stuff like that. That's what that that's what their research and and, but I have. Oh shit, I forgot what I was. Oh, am I supposed to catch? You can swear? Yeah, this is the same place I got when I was going to say, um, you were asking about like, if it makes sense to do live shows. Oh, yeah. And why it does it. Why virtual stand up. So I mean, to me, like traditional stand up comedy, like, me, me going and doing late night television or something like that. The audiences so much of it's an instrument that I'm playing like, I'm building tension. I'm intentionally making the audience be like, oh, like, Oh, I don't know if we can talk about that. And then I and then you know, you deliver the punchline that's like, Oh, okay. And that makes it all okay. There's like this tension. There's this release, everyone laughs and everyone hears everyone else laughing. And I don't get how that would work. Virtually. I've heard that there was a you know, there's, there's people that have it so that they can hear the audience. You know, tuning in and laughing. It's all just, I you know, I would much rather learn something like this and have genuine cool conversations with people and goof around on the internet and everything else. And do stand up once we can do stand up again. I'm not even I'm not even interested in doing the socially distance. Stand up. I think it's silly. I think it's, if I'll say this. Imagine COVID never happened. As a stand up comedian went into a comedy club and saw an audience where everyone was based out six feet apart. Or it was like outdoors, in their cars. A fucking laugh, muffle their car, like the standard has always been this is nothing. This is nothing new. You don't have to be any stand up comic can tell you this. You want low ceilings, you want people packed together. You want you want to light it. You want it to be dark because people laugh more when, when in anonymity. Like people don't even realize if the lights are turned up a little bit in the room. You'll get way less laughs than if the lights are just turned a little bit just thinking about it like oh, much of a difference. Yeah, it's in the same way that like people are such dicks sometimes on like YouTube or whatever because they can be in Because, you know, they can say things they would they would never say to someone's face. I must check my Twitter. I'm as guilty as anybody. But, but the point is there's all of these subconscious considerations and to see all these professional comedians going and doing distance shows, it's like, Did you guys just forget? decades of experience? What do you think pushes them to do it? Is it like a money thing? Yeah, I mean, one. I think the I think the thing that I think the thing that is probably the best reason to do stand up right now, this is if you don't give a shit about spreading COVID is that, which I do? Thank you for clarifying. I was like, I'll just wait. I know, he, I know he will, is for the experience. And that and by the way, there, there are plenty of ways of putting together and doing a show safely. I just don't believe that there's a way of doing it safely. And having it be a good entertaining show. And the thing is, is as much that in the same way, there's there's a there's a cliche in comedy, where like, someone gets drunk, and they start like they're getting, they get too loud, they don't realize how loud they're being an audience member. And they're like chatting with the table next to they, they just don't, they're too drunk to understand how disruptive they're being. And they, you know, are warned a few times and then they're like, oh, but I was just laughing and they're like arguing and finally, after like eight warnings, they finally have to get kicked out the you know, the whole audience is grateful because this person was ruining the show. And and that person goes in is like, writes the Yelp review of like, I was just like, I got thrown out for laughing too hard. It's like no, no one's ever been thrown out. Her laughing too hard, you are an asshole. And in that, in that same way, there's there's no one that's going to people are going to go in be well, meaning they don't understand all of the subconscious things that go into, into things like a joke that, for example, a joke that kills in a live room also might not be as good at home. Like what what works live in a club isn't necessarily the thing that's going to be good on your CD or good on your special because when someone's alone in their car, the things that they laugh at are a different thing than when when there's a when there's a crowd around in a crowd, happier, safer kind of material tends to do better. On a special or album or whatever, more cerebral kind of more comedy savvy stuff that tends to make a person stand out and add your stuff works better because you or weirder, things work better because you can laugh at it in your car without worrying about what the person next to but it's the best of both worlds because you also still hear the audience laughing. So you're still laughing with a virtual audience. And so the idea of doing a distance show, it's, it's I know a lot of friends that are doing it. But compared to all of the other things that I could do with my time to set myself up to I'm not I'm not here talk while one I'm here talking to you, because you seem like a lovely, cool person. And I'm up for new experiences, and trying new things and learning new things. But what I'm after are things that can add stuff to my career. So I'm not I'm not interested in like getting on Twitch for a year or whatever until I can until I can tour again. I'm interested in getting on Twitch if it's something that I can actually integrate into my into my career and do even after I'm touring and everything else. So all of these like quarantined compromised things, I think are a waste of comedians, time is fine. They're my competition. I don't mind if people want to waste a bunch of time I'll pull right ahead of them in a year or so. And but, but there's also just the economics of it. Don't make sense and and it's nothing like people want to make it a political thing like well, it's either a lockdown or a lot or or free reign and we if we just open up everything, then we can all just tour and do whatever but that's not how it works. You still there? Like I usually go to a restaurant. I said okay, I'm just going off off the rails. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's I think my community expects that more than anything. So yeah, I've been I've been having to explain this to people all over and over again, where people think that that's like, well, we got to end the lockdowns, and that will save the economy, it actually won't help my job in any way. My my job, my ability to attract customers is more dependent on how much of a threat COVID is, than any law one way or another. So, so I need, I need consumer confidence that when, like, even if even if COVID were a hoax, which is not, but even if COVID were hoax, if 90% of people believe that it's the scary thing in won't come out to a show because of that, that, that means I can't get butts in seats, no matter what the what the laws are. And it's going in the only So, so what what we need is an environment where people will feel comfortable hacking in close to each other for stand up comedy to work again. And for that to happen. We need to have a country like New Zealand or something like that, that has, you know, insanely, insanely low rates. It's not just like, Alright, Comedy Club, open up. It doesn't like i was i was saying I typically when I was on the road, I was eating, I was eating I was dining out like two three times a day typically. So and I, I spend the I usually go to a nice restaurant, at least once a day. I tip Well, I'm I'm a target demographic for a restaurant owner. I've I've been to I've been to one restaurant since COVID. Now, like it's not a political like, you might be like, hey, Shane, well, you're just living in fears. Well, maybe I am. But But I know. I've been technologists and stuff and had conversations about this shit. And there, and there's people in the way more scared of things. Like First off, a lot of people are worried about like surface transmission and stuff like that. I'm not even that worried about I've just have no interest in going and being in groups of people, especially when I can't trust that people won't wear masks right now. Like I want to go rock climbing for example. And, and there's a rock climbing gym, I feel relatively safe. I don't believe surface transmission as a main mode of transmission. I'm happy to wash my hands. I don't think it's that big of a deal. climbers are introverts I think most of them would say it away, or wear a mask blah, blah, blah. But I still don't when I'm out and about I don't trust people, people don't distance they don't do, they don't make a nose and like the whole thing. And so consumer, my consumer confidence is dependent on other consumers, other people following along so so we need to create a condition where, where possible customers feel like going out and going to a comedy club or whatever. And so everything else could be fine. Like restaurant, say COVID never existed. And there's a restaurant that was like, at our restaurant, we don't see anyone within six feet or within 10 feet, I'd be like, sign me up. Awesome. That's a selling point. That's amazing. I want to go to that restaurant. Same with like jazz club. If I'm taking like a girl out to jazz or something like that, and you have some like VIP booth or something like that. That's 10 feet await terrific. I can't I can't imagine a better jazz experience that I've had and that I don't I don't need to be bumping elbows with someone while I'm trying to dine or listen to music or whatever. But with stand up comedy, you absolutely do and and and whether when when if the another cliche in comedy is if if people are coming in and you just let people sit wherever they want to, which you don't do you always see people unless it's unless it's packed and doesn't matter. Because if you don't do that, they all go to the back will they always go to the back because why it looks comfortable. You know, and people don't always know what's in their best interest because they don't have experience in this new environment. And people are worried about being in the front and being picked on or whatever, which I don't do but there are shitty comics. They're like your shirts done. And and, and so so you kind of you need to kind of seat people and force People into this experience for their, for the betterment of their own experience. And, and they wouldn't No, no, no one's ever gonna know. Oh, I laughed harder because the lights were dimmer. You know, no one's ever gonna know that. And then that same way, if people go out to a distant show right now bless their hearts for being supportive. And what a weird, interesting experience to be a part of. But, uh, but I, I'm sorry. I'm also trying to read comments. Yeah, that's Welcome to being a streamer. But at the same time, say you have like a decent. It's not going to be as funny because there's not as many laughs and laughs are contagious. afterwards. I don't I don't trust that an audience member is going to go. Well, I left some and I would have laughed more. Had there been more people around? No, they would be like, Ah, that comedian was okay. Yeah, that's what they're going to think now. You've now you've burned yourself, you possibly burn yourself in a lot of people. A lot of people maybe go to see live stand up comedy, once in a lifetime or once in a year or something like that. In unlike music, where you have a bad music experience, no one's like, I guess I don't like music stand up comedy. comedy is not for me, I guess. Funny. stand up comedy, one bad experience can absolutely make people never go out again. And and so it, it seems like it's possibly something that could negatively influence the stand up anyway. And, and I have the same worry with, with virtual standup. So that's why I haven't I like your attitude about like, I'm just gonna do my thing. And you know, let them do do the damage to their own careers. Do these shows where maybe they're not putting out the best version of themselves? And I'll show up after? I don't I don't think that they're damaging their careers. No, sir. It's just, it's just what's what's in it might be an awesome experience. And maybe it'll be a way of like, not getting too rusty and trying out new material and whatever else who knows, like, this is a crazy landscape, and no one's going to have the right answer. What I am saying is, is when I think of all of the things too, you know, you have to make a consideration how much time do I want to dedicate to twitch? How much time do I want to dedicate dedicate to Twitter, or writing a new book, or writing stand up jokes and right now, to go out and book a show that maybe people will show up to maybe it will get cancelled? And if it does happen, probably won't be that great because of everything going on? Yeah, it's I you know, COVID doesn't impact how good me writing a book is. You know, so I I'd rather I'd rather focus on on things like that. That's interesting. And there's, there's, um, there's this thing that people do online a lot like in the twitch world, and various live streamers, they make a big deal out of 24 hour streams. Like it's, it's this whole thing that you're going to just stay online for a full fucking day and like talk to people. And when I first started streaming, that was like very much a part of the culture, like you got to grind grind, you got to get those view counts up, you got to do this. And I noticed that 24 hour streams, everyone hyped him up, like you have to do these sometimes because your community will love it. And you'll get exposed to all these different time zones and stuff. But like in order to get through those, I was like, taking more of my I'm not on Adderall anymore. But at the time, I was still on Adderall. I was like spacing out my Adderall doses. I had a half inch or a quarter of an energy drink for every quarter of the day. You don't want to be great for your career. cocaine. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so I did a bunch of those realize that like, I always felt like shit, my sleep schedule was ruined after and I'm like, you know, yeah, I'm exposing myself to this. Different timezone that I wouldn't normally see but they're getting either me all like fucking jacked up and Adderall or they're getting me exhausted. And that's not they're not going to stick around if they see me when I'm tired as fuck. Because when I'm streaming Normally I'm on my shit. I can read really fast. I talked to the community quickly. If I'm doing a 24 hour stream, I'm probably missing messages. Someone came in and said Hi, and I missed it. Like I'm doing more harm than good. Most likely. Yeah, there was. I mean that that was a gimmick for a while and stand up comedy to wear, like Guinness Book of World Records, who can do the longest like I mean, Chappelle had was doing like nine our sets for a while for whatever reason, but bless them as like. I mean, I mean, here's what a bad idea that is. There was people walking out on Dave Chappelle greatest comedian alive. That's how bad of an idea doing a nine hour set is. But yeah, I by the way Thumper GG I'm in Wisconsin right now you asked and also you're correct that math would be a better Yeah. longer lasting right. Yeah, I mean, this is it's it's really illegal command rusting and scary that that, but inspiring that that. I mean, I think the what I think is the greatest tragic tragedy, besides the health consequences of COVID and economic consequences is, is that there's lots of missed opportunities coming out right now because we're having this big shake up of all these different things. What's entertainment going to be like? We're reassessing ourselves. We're calling old high school buddy. Buddy. We are snap. And they I whoops. I told him to pop illegal command. That's why you're seeing all kinds of shit there. I see. My bad, I won't make jokes about things we should not. It's so funny because we've talked about them so much. And my lawyer is actually one of my lawyers is actually a member of the community here. So he wrote up that little disclaimer. So if you look in chat, anything lawyers, you how many lawyers you rockin one for like most things another for a different thing I can tell you about that offline. That's the whole thing. But he wrote up this command. So like anything that you see coming out of the account listed as snap bot, that's my bot, so you can pre program the bot. So if like someone comes into your stream, and you're focused on something or doing something, and they want to know what game you're playing, or how long you've been live or what your social media links are, it's like pretty common that you can go into a stream on Twitch and type exclamation point followed by something like social, like lancing just did in chat. So he typed social the bot responds with my links. Someone types legal the bot responds with that. And then there's a bunch of other really ridiculous ones in here like I'm about to talk about my testicles fire the testicle bot. Okay. I don't think we have a testicle related commands. We do have this thing where you can type exclamation point and nickname in chat and the bot will tell you what your nickname where has Chuck Norris fan? By the way I know a missing through all this COVID stuff, huh? You got to grow a beard. Yeah, this is it's not as No, yeah, you do this. If you have a beard. You do this. Maybe you should just try try just doing this with your skin. Mexican, like if I leave this long enough, I could probably just do some like start getting a nice little stash real fast. Just to go back to contract and Chuck No, oh, god. This is fun. I'm enjoying this right. So like what you're experiencing here is what like I think you would probably really enjoy about Twitch and it is awkward at first. Because you come on stream and you're kind of just sitting there and like talking to yourself or listening to music or whatever waiting for people to talk. But because you already have an established base, it's unlikely that you would ever have anything under like five people. And even just five people in the community. Some of the people in here stream also they can attest, like even just one person talking back to you when you first start out on Twitch. It's such an exciting experience. Because like people are curious and you're a very curious person like that's very evident. So I think you would have a good time just getting to know Strangers on a daily basis. Ah, there was a line in there that I liked and didn't like at the same time as your deck flavor is case. Like I'm happy you did and I wish you wouldn't have yes we have. We have Name dick flavor and snatch name. There's a rate my penis and a bunch of other ridiculous ones. That's fun. Okay, so what do you how do you how do you program all these things? I'm one of your 15. lawyers. Yes. One of the team? No. So you see all the people in chat that have swords next to their names the green sword. Oh, yeah, aside from the bot, like anyone who has a sword as a moderator, so they have the ability to update things in the bot, they have the ability to depending on like, what level they are, they can make announcements in my Discord. They can time people out in chat, they can do all kinds of stuff. So I have some mods who actually know how to operate the bots really well. And they've helped me to create these different commands. And then we basically sat for a day just smoking weed and laughing as we collectively came up with nicknames and vagina names. Garlic cereals, Edwin, that's a good day, it is a good day. That's what I was trying to tell you earlier. There's some days where I like end stream and I'm like, my job is the coolest fucking job. I talked about decks all day. Deck names. That's tough. I mean, I mean, the crank that out. Pon somewhat intended in in just one day. Is that's terrific work. That's to have a twitch channel worth of nicknames in in just a short hour. It's less than a stream really long hours on average, I stream I think at most like six now. That's amazing. So in less than six hours, just bam, you're set for life. Just cranking out those nicknames. Yep, just cranking. Wow. Yeah, so you're seeing all the random commands that people are enjoying. without context. Some of them make no sense. Like the rate my duple there's a person in our community named duple. And for whatever reason, we created a command where you can rate your Drupal and it's not even a rating. Like the command itself doesn't make sense, because it tells you how big your duple is instead of a rating on it. Yeah, I mean, if there's someone Yeah, I think if there's someone named duple in any community, they're, you know, someone needs to say something about it. Yeah. Yeah, elephant in the room. There's someone named dupo. Here. Oh my god. You know, it's so funny. So there's a bunch of people in this community, who started out with totally different usernames, and then through like, inside jokes and shenanigans wound up getting called something else, so they just changed their name, like Lansing is in chat. His username used to be Captain lisney. And then I was really high one night and we were joking around about something stupid and I started calling him Lansing and it's stuck. And duple his his username used to be depraved God, and that was another like stumbling idiot moment where I was trying to say depraved God, is this a soup expert? No idea the context anymore, but I accidentally said duple, the supl expert. And now he's duple. And he renamed himself on everything. Like there's so many people who just become who they are in this community. Wow. Well, I hope that I called dibs on. Next, misspoken word. Okay? out of out of your mouth, like in life, not just on Twitch like in life, I expect to text from your something and be like your new name is whatever word you miss. Oh, hypothetically, hypothetically, do some drugs and come up with a great name for you soon. So huh? Alright, so what? All right. You You have a podcast you said to right? So you do that? Do you record the podcast through here and then put it out? Different so. So you're on Twitch, and then you go, Okay, we're already talking. This is a normal thing. And then 321 Hello, I'm podcasting. Is that what you could do it that way? Like there are there are a lot of podcasts and like group podcasts that run on Twitch, um, some people will be streaming the whole day and then they'll be like, Okay, well, I'm going to take a little break and when I come back, we'll be doing the podcast. So they might just put up a hold screen and then come back for me because of the way we're doing the video feed right now. I couldn't go live until we started. So it just made more sense. And like, I think I told you my schedule on Fridays like I only go on for a short time now anyway. So like, I just hop on, let people know we're going to be live shortly. And we kind of jump into it. And then my podcast editor helps create the actual audio file and put that up on my podcast account. So people can be here and they can watch it live. And if you want to, like if you were to do this on Twitch, start recording your podcasts on here, you can take questions from chat at the end and ignore them the rest of the time. And you can export your video off of Twitch, because you can either set it to save all your past broadcasts. And then if someone comes to your channel, and you're not live, they can look through all your videos. Or you can delete the past broadcast and like put that on your Patreon or something or put it on your YouTube account. So if people want to see it and not just hear it, they either have to tune in when it's happening, or they have to go to your other account. One of my things is I I don't because my podcast isn't like a comedy podcast where I have a bunch of comics on that already have equipment and are familiar with doing this and that I have academics who often have never done anything like this until now that now everyone's having to remote teach. But is there I know I came in through discord say just do a screencap of zoom. Ah, I see. Interesting. Yeah, so like with streaming, you have your broadcast software, right. So like there's I use this thing called stream labs, OBS also known as slobs, and stream labs. OBS is where I put up like, if you see on my stream, there's the overlay, like there's my logo and stuff above my name and all this stuff. And it's what pulls my audio feed and whatever it is that I want. So in this, I can have it just capture me or I can have it capture, like my desktop view. So for our conversation, that's all I'm doing is I'm just capturing a desktop view. So if you were going to be doing like a zoom call with someone, that's probably all you would do as well is just bring up kind of an empty scene is what what this is called, like what you're seeing on my stream, bring up an empty scene and do a screencap and basically just go live with that. Hmm, I like that idea. I think I downloaded OBS as well. It can be really confusing at first, there's too many settings and you don't really use like any of them. And everyone has a preference. Like there's XSplit there's slubs there's just OBS, what are some of the other ones I can't even think of some of them. But everyone has a preference of what they like I wound up doing XSplit for a while. And now I use slubs and I find it to be the easiest so far. In terms of like the interface and everything. So someone asked if I play games, I don't. I like video games too much to play them. Because I have really bad impulse control. I'm an abstainer I just quit drinking for like the third time back in May. And smoking cigarettes at the start of COVID. And I just I have a super addictive personality. The last gaming system that I owned was Sega CD. Okay, do you happen to remember Sega CD? I the only console I had growing up I had an LTS and then we had the N 64. We never had any Sega products. And then we my brother got a PlayStation and that was when we started like FPS games and stuff. Huh? Yeah, I guess CD. Yeah. And then I played PlayStation stuff, but I had I once I once stopped after a show I stopped in at a friend's house on the way home. They just to say hi and have a beer. They happen to have a guitar hero when it first came out nice. And I ended up at their house for like two days straight. Like I didn't I didn't go home. I had a girlfriend who was like What the fuck are you doing? Are you cheating on me? And I literally could not stop playing guitar hero. Are you friends doing were they just like okay, but are they playing with you? Are they a part of this trip? And so I had so I yeah, I can't Just can't, I've had I've had like, things like, you know, Angry Birds or whatever before on my phone, it's just like, I don't, I can't just like sit on the toilet, play Angry Birds and be like, that was a nice, you know, like six hours later and your legs are cramped you can't like walk normal anymore anymore. Exactly. It's like, forget about I mean, I have it as a stand up comic requires tons of self discipline. And you do you have to, I mean, how hard you work has an impact on on how well you do. And in many ways, there's a lot more to it of just like, some people are just such characters or personalities, people have natural talents and such. But it requires so much self discipline, but at the same time, you can also just not you can just coast. I mean, once you're like set up and going, there's there's comedians that like start headlining, they get on the road, they get a little comfortable. And then they just like stop, they stopped writing new jokes, they just tour around, and uscm doing the same exact jokes for like 1020 years. Sometimes and, and so if I have a video, like I can just dedicate two months of my life to Angry Birds, there won't be there won't be like a measurable difference in my life. And like a year later, I'll be like, gosh, I can't believe I spent that two months on anger. What? Now wonder, like, my, my, I haven't written much new material this year, whatever. But um, did I beat sewer shark on Sega CD? I know I hated sewer shark. That was the game that came with Sega CD. Hilarious. So anyway, can't play video games. I like board games. I'm big into board games. I like code names. As I mentioned, I like pandemic. I like cooperative games, you might really like have you seen among us. Among us it's like this eight bit game where there's you can have like up to 10 people in it and up to two imposters. So it's like everyone is meant to be crew mates on this ship. And you complete all these little basic tasks, which are kind of like super simplistic puzzles. And when you get all the tasks completed, you win the game. But within the crewmates, there's two people who are imposters and no one knows who they are, they are. So the imposters are going around trying to kill people and sabotage the missions. And then everyone comes together in like a group chat and they talk on little breaks to try to figure out who the imposter is and vote them out. And it is it's like the most wonderful hateful game ever. You know, like you will ruin friendships but also like them more because of like how savage they are after you might enjoy playing with that with some friends online and I don't think it's something that you would be able to know life you know, I don't I can't imagine anyone like soloing into some kind of among us game. I don't think that's the thing. Yeah, I I'll have to check that out that I've played some games to some mechanisms like that. I but I have. Yeah, so I don't know. I like what I like the most about board games is I'm like when I'm recording something, I can blab you can barely shut me up if the if the record buttons going. I've never run out of things to say. And then normal social setting. I'm somewhat awkward. I'm I'm pretty reserved. I was always very shy growing up I still am a little bit. And board games are such a nice way of it because you can play and be paying attention and then you have something interesting or whatever to say you can say you can have an interesting conversation and then get back to playing the game and it takes up that pressure of the oh my gosh, there's dead air right now on Yeah. Oh, we better fill it because silence is the worst thing. Do you feel that like normally outside of gaming like games and being around people do you do you spy on silence? No, I'm really comfortable with it, but it seems like other people do. And then when other people have, like, you know, forced conversation or forced to need to be like so. Whether I'm always like, Oh no, they're trying to connect with me right now. Like we're not It's not the right motor time or whatever this is forced and awkward. And so that that's, I mean, that's one of the big things that I, I absolutely love about board games. And I used to, I used to even bring some around. Because I enjoy hanging out with people after shows. Depending on my energy level, and how well the show went, or my mood or whatever, but I've quit drinking a few times in my career, this is the third and, and to not just like have drinks with people, so sometimes I would bring like, code names in or some other game like it in to, to show people because you can like play with a people. It's easy to learn. It's a fun, silly social thing. And it's better than people forcing a cop. That way you can hang out with people, and everyone can have fun and you can have some natural conversation. When people feel forced to into a conversation. It's the most awkward like after shows. People that I'm sure mean very well come up and they'll be like, I have a joke for you. Oh, God. And then it's usually like some awful like, treat joke is that first off, comics can't and wouldn't use treat jokes or jokes that they haven't written on stage. And it's always like super racist to usually like, I got a joke. It's kind of edgy, edgy person, bro. What about my act? made you think? I wanted to hear that? And it's always it's always an always like, you can use that. And, and it's always, I'm always the most startling thing is, is that it's always like, there's like a predictability to it too. And it's like lame. It's like, man, how are you both like, racist and boring at the same time? Like, if you're gonna be a racist, at least make me feel something. Oh my god. I gotta show you this. Look at this. Um, you're gonna have to open this up in your own screen for a second because if I show it to you on my scene, I think it'll look weird. But click that link I just put in chat. Hopefully it doesn't break everything up. Ah, yeah, it should say troll Bingo. Troll Bingo. So like the same kind of concept applies on Twitch like I did. The trolling is very predictable. It's always one of only X amount of things that people do. And they don't really realize how redundant it is. So we just started making a game out of it. So like, people start up a neutral bingo card, when they come into chat, everyone has their own because the card shuffle. So if you refresh it, it'll give you a totally different card. And as trolls come in, people come in and say nasty shit, we always give them chance. Like we're very compassionate. We understand the people who are doing that usually are the ones who need a community like ours the most. So we give them an opportunity to like chill and understand that it's fucking weird here and they could have fun if they just fucking chill. But if they don't, then we just mark it on our card and like have a laugh about it. Because it's always like the same shit. Hmm. You could have like a comic Bingo. And I'm sure you would have ones in salt. Yeah, that's just a common thing. People will come in and like Russian and they'll like call me or something. That's amazing. It's really fun. Last life you have when you were talking about the idea of like Justin, like dusting and stuff, I wanted to clarify like how it would actually be because like, when you start streaming, people want more and more and more, they want you to stream yourself cooking, they want you to stream your workouts, they want you to stream like, if they have the ability to stay with you while you do anything. They will do it because they enjoy like we people we enjoy this connection, right? But the problem is, is the more you let them into your life, the more you're also opening it up to the out the other people so like if I were to tomorrow, just be like fuck it, I'm gonna do this exact thing and I'm just gonna stream myself dusting my blinds. What you'll see is my chat coming in and talking to themselves and to me about random shit. And then some dudes gonna be like your form isn't appropriate for the way that you're dusting. You got to have your elbow at a different angle. I know this because I have a degree in dusting and then someone else will Come in and be like, clearly she's only dusting she's a whore. What a slut. We should get her off this platform like that's basically this wide range of just nonsense that would happen. Wow. Well, you're selling me on it. Yeah. That's honestly people get really upset over the trolling on here. But it really doesn't bother me because I know it's not about me, you know, like they're there. I'm just the one they found at that particular point. But like someone coming in here and calling me like an ugly whore and like saying all kinds of stupid shit. I'm just like, okay, bud. I'm sorry. You're having a bad day? Can I get you a juice box? Yeah, there's a lot of bad days out there, huh? juice boxes. So what what's like, so what's your what's your twitch schedule? Um, I stream on Mondays and Tuesdays from like, 10 to four. I stream Wednesdays and Thursdays from two to seven. And then Fridays, I'm either not live at all and I do like YouTube recording or I come on for bars, which is that becoming an anti racist society. Like, it's like a panel discussion that we do every week or every other week, or I'll do something like this or community nights. And then Saturday's like every other Saturday, we're doing community nights now where I do an open mic night or an art showcase night and just let people from the community show off whatever kind of cool creations they have, like, show and tell. But a little bit more purposeful. Hmm. Interesting. So you so you have a plan for each one basically, like you have, like, here's what we do on I used to, like the only things that are structured now are really like Fridays, and Saturdays. But otherwise, like, if I go live, some days, I'm like, I want to play this game because there's something specific happening. Otherwise, it's usually just pop online. Talk to people and see where the day goes. Like, there have been plenty of times where I've got online and I'm like, today, I'm gonna play video games. And then six hours later, we're still immersed in some really great conversations. And I'm like, Alright, no gaming today. Fuck it. It looks like it's just the talking day. Huh? That's what a lot of my streams are. I spend a lot more of my time and just chatting than I would have you ever expected to. But like, I just fucking love talking to people, man. I love it. Where are you from? Originally? Chicago? Oh, yeah, I knew that. Um, I and you're in Arizona now? Right? Yep. Okay. Two for two. You're passing this test so far. Phoenix. Yeah. Okay, I like Phoenix. What do you you folks with Sedona or Yeah, yeah, my my boyfriend actually, when we first met, that was where we had our first date was in Sedona. That's bad, right? Yeah, it was very chill. Last you. You got it's like, it's in case you're worried about the jealousy thing. It's nothing but old people. You got like all this beautiful scenery. A bunch of blue hairs, which make both of you look more attractive to one to all of the senior citizens in this stream, right? Yeah, no offense to all of you lovely. alderleaf in the context of your age. Yeah, we moved here for the geriatrics 100%. That was that was the vibe. A lot of insects in Arizona. One of my favorite insect researchers is in Tucson. Cool. I'm Justin Schmidt. He is the developer of the Schmidt pain index. is probably probably the most famous thing in entomology in terms of something that's permeated the zite case in any way. P he's gotten himself stung by any by every insect that stings. What is any? What is the scorpion? Where does that fall in? That's not an insect, right? Is that? Yeah. Oh, no, no, just like bees and wasps. Okay. Things like that. And yeah, yeah, arachnids are not insects. Um, they're, yeah, I saw them saying it's an arachnid. And I was like, I thought raccoons were only spiders though. So is it is a scorpion and ticks? Oh, really? ticks and spiders are arachnids? I didn't know that. eight legs. I think that's the criteria. I should know all this I've had like a few insect episodes recently, but this pain index is I had the dude on really bizarre dude. And he is one through four. But he he describes each staying as if he's reviewing fine wine. Oh one like a light one. He's like, you know, whatever, like, sort of be or whatever is is a one. I think a honeybee is a two for reference. Okay. And, and so a one is, is like you're walking across the carpet, you, you touch the light switch and receive just like a slight Static Shock, almost invigorating. And, and a four is like you are chained to the side of an active volcano. Oh, why did you start this study? It's really fantastic. I recommend everyone looking up the Schmidt pain index. But But yeah, podcast episode with this guy. Yeah. Yep. No, not recent. Just look up Justin Schmidt. Here we are. But I I've had two recent I just my last podcast was about gene editing mosquitoes, which they're trying to do in Florida to reduce the spread of disease in humans, reduce the spread of pathogens, and the pros and cons of that. They're the two researchers that I had on were kind of against doing that. I'm sort of for it. But yeah, you, you you, you alter the DNA, so that so that males, impregnate females, and their sperm can only make females or, or the females can only make males and any of their sperm that leads to eggs can also only make if it is a female, it can only make other it can only make males something like that, basically, basically, within a few generations. You they're driven to extinction in a in a given species is is the hope in in this. And do you remember like our mosquitoes? And has there been any any evidence yet that mosquitoes are necessary? Or is it still everything? Oh, yeah. they pollinate there. They they their food for like bats. And yeah, ecosystems are incredibly intricate, fragile, weird, dynamic, chaotic systems that it's have drastic, unintended consequences when you start doing things like that. But I did. I kind of got I was like, Well, if you're against doing that, are you for preserving a species that is like naturally going extinct? And they were for preserving a species that is natural, which is a bit playing God if you ask me. And so you could go either way. But yeah, they just Google Justin Schmidt. Yes, he is. He is a badass. So yeah, that's a weird kind of stuff that most of you talk about brain stuff on my show psychology. That's what I liked about it. They do. I think the first episode I listened to was you talking to someone about our vision? How vision works? No, I don't even remember that. That would have been a pretty old one. Yeah, I think this was like a long time ago. Ah, yeah, perception. Yeah, think back. I was at Madison. I can't remember his name. Yeah, I don't I wish I knew a little more about visual perception but it is off the top of my head. Nothing interesting. about it. It's it's amazing that our, what our conscious experiences able to put together is is absolutely incredible that that like certain certain neurons have decode like a dot and then other ones decode a line and other ones decode an angle and it has to put all of that together and it does it in a flash you wake up in the morning. You open your eyes. You can see it It doesn't seem like anything that remarkable. But you can hardly come. We still haven't been able to make robots that can that can see anywhere near the level of just like most insects or small mammals or whatever. And yeah, it's incredible. I do you know, Oliver Sacks at all. I know the name, but I don't know much past that. He has this great book called the mind's eye. That's all about perception. That's really, really interesting. And he's one of these cases were just lagging. Hold on one second. Yeah, I think we stabilized. That's interesting. Okay. Please continue. No problem. He, Pete. So he studied things like blindness. He studied perception. Generally. He's, he's the guy Robin Williams played them in. I forget the name of the movie, because he created l dopa for Parkinson's. Interesting. And so So anyhow, he, he there. So he studied things like Charles binay syndrome, which is where blind people that go blind later on in life will have visual hallucinations. And which is this really interesting. Now, he wasn't Patch Adams. Everyone thinks this Patch Adams. And now it's awakening awakenings, I believe no. So another one of his books, I feel like it's awakenings. Someone was saying that in chat to somebody without without googling it. What's that someone else is saying awakenings to Yeah, how come I can't see them saying that? Oh, maybe it needs to refresh for you too. It's right above like the snap bot thing. So I can tourist was saying awakenings question mark. Yeah, it was awakenings. Um, oh, I just hit. Yeah. Okay. What's happening? My stream may have froze on your laptop because it for a second. Yeah. So you might have to refresh. So anyway, then he lost his he lost like, sight in one eye, like later on in life and got to experience the, the, this is, there's this long history of like, these really weird interesting cases where someone will like study Alzheimer's their entire career, and then get Alzheimer's and be able to articulate the experience with like, you know, be the foremost leading expert on it, and, and then experience it themselves. And that's our world is so interesting. Yeah. Are the visual stuff, especially I think is really fascinating, and became even more fascinating after psychedelics. Like, experiencing synesthesia, and then reading about in a book was like, so mind fucky Yeah, oh my god, you can't you can't look at someone just staring out a window the same anymore. Because you're like I have, you could be seeing some crazy shit right now. Yeah, so synesthesia, I think is, that's one of the so it's a common thing. And with the psychedelic experience, synesthesia is what happens. So when you're born, your brains just like this blob, and and everything's like a wash, there's not much differentiating between what is what is an object, what is a sound, it's all just like, blah stimulus. And, and as the brain learns to be like, this is a shape, this is a sound, this is a, this is a parent, this is a you know, this is large, this is this is to have a thing this is, and when you differentiate, this is a, this is yellow, this is green. What happens is this process of synaptic pruning, where the brain kind of categorizes all of these different things that we know by, by killing off different neurons, in between these different categories to kind of compartmentalize and be like, here's, here's where our ideas of food are stored. Here's where our ideas of character traits are stored or whatever. And, and what happens in, in humans that have synesthesia, which most people have some sort of synesthesia in one way or another, but extreme examples are the ones that usually hear about where someone will like, smell where you like it. Someone will say microphone. And when you hear the word microphone, you use you like smell strawberries. Yeah, that's fucking nuts. So cool. What happened? What happened is there's this, there's this just some of that pruning didn't take place. And so there's just like a bit of crosstalk between those categories. And so during a psychedelic experience, so. So there's like, these kind of famous examples where before people understood what synesthesia was, like, there's this conductor. That was a really accomplished conductor, and he had synesthesia, and he saw music as color. Oh, man, zoomed everyone else did it the same way. So his orchestra here, he'd be like, Alright, violins, I need a little more. I need a little more orange. And they're like hat. And they would just like play a thing. I guess he had like, kind of a temper too. And he'd be like, no, orange, that's red. And then they like, try a different Vegas. And he'd be like, oh, sort of, and then, and then they try to be like, yes, now bring it up. And then they would learn to associate like, oh, when he says orange, he means like, E flat or whatever. I don't know, music. But um, but the idea is, is there's a lot of different ways our brains can subjectively put together perceptions of the same objective experience, much in the same way a bat has different a different kind of vision, or a B has a different kind of vision than our human eyes do. Different humans have that I have, like, when I see that number, 11, it's usually yellow. Ish, to me, at least in my mind's eye, when I when I hit when I think of the word yellow, I think of 11, I usually have to stop myself, if I'm going to say either one of those words, I have to like, make sure you're using the right one careful to make sure I'm using the right one, because I have a little cross talk going on in there. There's there's the the region, there's like a mind map in your brain of like different parts. So a part of our brain controls our hands, part of our brain controls our feet. And these different regions, they're represented, exactly. It's not like there's like a drawing of our body in there and our hand moves or whatever, there's these different regions in charge of these different parts. And so your hand because it has all of these, you know, you got to do all this fancy dexterous stuff with it. There's a much larger part of your brain used to, for you for sensing things with your hand for for movement than, say, your elbow, which doesn't. There's, you don't need as much fancy stuff. Do you follow David Eagleman? No, he's he's an interesting neuroscientist. He had a book called incognito that I really liked. And his most recent book is called locked wired. incognito was awesome. He's like a neuroscience poet. I read his words about our brains. And I'm like, thank you for making this pretty and easy for someone with like a very limited education to grasp. But in his, um, his most recent book live wired. He basically suggests that that map of the brain of like this is dedicated to this. That part of the reason why we dream when we sleep is to keep the visual centers going so that other areas of the brain don't encroach and take over those resources and reclaim them. Because apparently, in cases of like blindness or something, that area gets encroached upon very quickly, it gets reclaimed as new territory for other senses. So yeah, that might be why we dream is just so that we don't wake up with all of the resources, dedicated division kind of reallocated elsewhere. Interesting. Yeah. So there's all this plasticity in their in different connected in theirs. It explains so much individual differences. So they think so what's interesting too, about that body map is it's not organized in that like the feet aren't at the bottom and the head at the top in your mind map. The feet are actually like next to the genitals in New York. They think that's why people have foot fetish, because there's there's a little bit of like synesthetic cross talk going on next person who asks me to buy picks, I'm gonna be like, bro, do you know? Let's talk about why you might feel this reaction to want to fap to my feet. Sounds like someone hasn't gotten the proper synaptic pruning. But yeah, and so that's the psychedelic experience is now kind of well known for, for creating these new connections which, which lead to these synesthetic experiences. And yeah, that's that's why people have these strange hearing voices or seeing sounds and things I need to hear more about your DMT trip, man, because you touched on it briefly in your documentary. And like the body painting like you, you just went in, we're just like, fuck it well done. Well, that's that that was. So here for people that are going to people that are going to watch the documentary one, if you see the whole, you know, spoiler alert, it's not that much of a spoiler, because we start the movie by showing this. But we we had this idea of like, starting with, like a jarring scene that would like make me look really insane. And then back and seeing, seeing that, like, Oh, this is actually a normal thing to do, right? But and this is like, we were setting out to like, make fun of the idea of like, people think you do psychedelics and go crazy. Come on. Not Not knowing that I was actually going to lose my mind. And so what happened was, in actual chronological order was we had we had through through the movie, one of the things that got left at the cutting room floor, though there is like a flash of like, Fight Club. what's the what's the word? I'm looking for? subconscious subliminal, there's like a subliminal clip of this. There was, for a while we were trying to we were making this joke that like, comparing the stupid things that you do on other drugs, to the psychedelic experience, and how none of you wouldn't ever do any of that. So. So when like, I went and got a ketamine treatment, we had like, draw dick on my face. So I like wake up from Academy. And so. So we had this like, as this running joke that I would have like this profound, like spiritual experience or like meaningful experience. And I would always end up with like a dick drawn on my face. None of that ended up getting used. It was a fun idea. But I was so we're at this person's house. And I was going to do Iosco with this this Madison woman, and we were on mushrooms. And we were she had the stuff Syrian root, that's this Ma Li inhibitor, which Ma Li is what breaks down DMT. And so Ma Li elongates the DMT experience. And, and it without DMT it can just kind of be like a mood enhancer. And, and, but she had made some that glows in the dark. And we're like, This is hilarious. Let's put like a glow in the dark dick on my face. And we filmed this thing. We were just goofing around like a lot of times we were just go for it. We didn't really know what we're doing that we had all these great interviews, but we didn't know the structure of the documentary just yet. This is actually this actually on a weekend that we were like, me, the director and the producer. Were all just like, let's eat mushrooms for two days and figure out what the structure of this movie is. And yeah, what a great way to decide. And so and within that two days, that was like this silly thing that we shot just goofing around. We're tripping and whatnot. And then after I had drawn this gloma dark dick on my face, I was like yeah, it would be interesting is if I just painted my whole body in this Shit, and then smoked DMT and looked like a fucking lunatic just to get it and then it because what we wanted it to be like was was like that scene in the movie opens, someone gets shot and then it goes, Oh, yeah, six months earlier and then it leads up to that. And then you see what actually happened. And then there's thing afterwards, right? That's the structure. That's what I that was the structure that I came up. I mean, I'm on mushrooms, I'm like, I'm trying to make like the Christopher Nolan movie. And, and so so then I went and I smoked DMT, I ended up having a much more profound experience than I had intended to it had been a long time since I'd had it. That was a that was around. So So I've had about 100 DMT breakthrough experiences. That one was the last breakthrough that I had. And the last breakthrough before the one that I did was nine months for the film was nine months earlier. And it was I did about I did about 10 times the amount of DMT that it would take to have a breakthrough experience. And it was the scariest thing that I've ever experienced in my life. And so I just decided, I think I'm taking a break from psychedelics just jet or DMT for a while, and then the opportunity came up to do this documentary, which wasn't necessarily going to be even a be about when I first got approached to do a documentary, I thought that I would make one about evolutionary biology. But it just so happened that I was booked to perform at this psychedelic conference. That was the biggest one, the biggest psychedelic conference that there is. And it was in California, as psychedelic Science Conference in 2017 is in California, where my my director and producer in LA and so it was in it was in Oakland. So it was, it was convenient, it was easy to like, get to and go and film. And it was the who's who of psychedelic researchers. And this this thing was only only once every four years. And so it was like well, this is you know, this is such an opportunity that we should just go and shoot this conference, see how it goes. We went there. Just shot tons and tons of interviews, got all of the best researchers in psychedelics all in a weekend had all this incredible footage, and then we're like, okay, exactly. We're doing a movie about psychedelics. Now, what do we do? And then I was just like, I don't know, I guess we're just start. I'll just start doing psychedelics and the film me, I guess. And then we just kind of put together ideas and went to see where it went. And I was, it was like, at the time, I was like, well, this is perfect timing because I'm just getting hit with depression. And mushrooms have been like the most reliable defense to or different way of working through depression that have had chronic depression for about 30 years and psilocybin mushrooms have been the single best tool that I've found for getting through it faster and having better outcomes of it, you know, turning, reframing depression into you know, these kind of breakthrough experiences right come up with ideas for a next show or whatever and a big creative boost and inspirational and I maybe, you know, build some new positive habit or something like that. And so I was like, Well great, we can we can document this awesome I'll just start to you know, I'm depressed right now do some mushrooms will do will show me doing ketamine will see me like snapping out of my depression and like bettering my life, as I always have but then it weren't like my depression went away. And then I thought, Why? Just stop at not being depressed. I wonder if I could just like feel good. Oh done eating more. Mushrooms like three times a week. Which, that might seem crazy, but it's not a bad regiment to do that, like, three times in a week in the midst of a really bad day. And then that's it. That was my, my normal if I was hit hard with not not like feeling a little down for a few days, like, oh, here's the this is the big one. This is gonna be like, I'm not gonna be able to do shit for a month or two. Unless I do this. Do mushrooms like three times in a week? If it alleviates after the first time, great and of a dose Are you taking with your if you're dealing with depression, and you're doing three times in a week? It depends. I like to do like five grams. That's that's that's like the standard that was like the Terence McKenna heroic dose, I wish he would have never came up with that name and made it sound like some macho, like horseshit, I actually think that you're underselling yourself, not like some brave sort of way. But I think that it's just easier to I think that if you don't, you don't want to, you know, if you do too many things gonna go wrong, certainly. But if you don't do enough, I, I'd say the average person, as like, irresponsible as this is to say, I would say the average person when they go to trip, they misunderstand something like say, MDMA, or something like that, which MDMA, you can definitely do too much. It's a really, really stupid thing to do too much of, but they'll they'll go, I'll just do half. Whatever everyone else is doing. I'll do half that's the safe thing to do it like, like, like, you're just having one beer? Yeah, something like that. But it's not the same. Because what happens is, it leads to you get like this hint of the experience. And you just get all of the like, the anxiety, yeah, the come up is less than pleasant. And, and you don't get the breakthrough, you don't get the clarity that can come along with actually tapping into like that full state. And I and I actually think it can set people back, I think it's, I think it's more responsible for bad trips than mega doses are. For a lot of people. I mean, certain settings really important as well, but I and and they've actually both both in the maps, the multidisciplinary association of psychedelic studies, they tried half doses in their studies and cut them from the studies because they're doing more harm than good. And same thing happened with I want to say Johns Hopkins by I have a feeling it wasn't Johns Hopkins, but a, a, you know, very legitimate silicides and clinical trial for depression, same thing, where they start with half dose of psilocybin, and then they do one half dose, and then second time, they've given a full dose, and then they cut the half dose and started doing full dose twice. I think that makes sense. I feel like on the the higher doses, you don't really have a choice but to surrender to it. But on the slightly lower doses, you still have this like ability to not to not let it all go all the way to kind of snap things back into place too much. You need shit to go wild. Yeah. When you can try it off still too much. There's just, I mean, it's such a unique individual experience. It's, it's hard to I'm not being prescriptive here. I'm just sharing what my experiences are. And some of those some of what I've noticed other people experiencing, but so I got on this, I was like, you know, what, if I just kept going with this regimen, what would happen? And then I started feeling good. And I was like, What if I? What if I could feel great. And I started and then and I was just like, You know what? I am doing great. I and then I quit drinking, I quit smoking. I was like getting stuff together. I was like, fit. At the same time. There was like external things where the rug had gotten pulled out from under me like some real crazy unexpected things, not quite COVID level stuff, but like some pretty crazy stuff where I had this really stable touring things and then like weird shit happened with like Facebook algorithms and it changed like the way ads worked and, and like just weird stuff. And at the same time, like I was getting all of these deals to like host a psychedelic, like Universal Studios asked me to host a storytelling, psychedelic show and like things went from like like what the fuck has happened to all of the sudden everyone was just this is before Michael Pollan's book came out oh really more of a nor normalized thing. That's cool. But I just ran into all of these, like, huge, like people to slamming doors in my face not not just like my projects, but other projects, people like Universal Studios, or Comedy Central or whatever we're doing that I was just a part of, or tap to do. Like, we can't have content about, you know, illegal substances or whatever. And when, and, and, and it's about saying positive things about them. Because what, what everyone was after. This is like, 2017 what everyone was after was like breaking bad stuff and arkose stuff every you couldn't get enough of that content. What what no one wanted was like, Hey, you could have the take this thing and have a better life. Yeah, that was something that was that was really taboo. Still, like, believe it or not, that and it still is, but it was, it was, it was a big deal. And like, I'd never experienced anything like it my 16 years. And I pitched shows and stuff before I like Universal Studios at Denver experiencing Comedy Central people I'd worked with on on things I got hired as a guest writer on a show for a week to do some psychedelic stuff. And I had to, you know, I had no horse in the race. This isn't me, like complaining about it didn't matter to me when I got paid the same, regardless, but it was an interesting experience to have to deal with the sensors and, and everything that went into it. So anyhow, all of that happened, I started, I started having anxiety for the first time in my life. And, and I had never been I thought, like psychedelics submit, maybe fixed my anxiety in the same way they helped with my depression. And but my anxiety ramped things up, I also quit drinking at the same time, which also ramps things up. I'm bipolar and, and drinking keeps me like level keeps me from having a manic episode. And so there was just so many things that went into what happened in me having that aren't shown in the film, just because it's we only had 90 minutes and you can only show so much and you have to tell a story and figure out what the structure is going to be. And so there was a lot more going on than it seems. And, and also good. Like, the other thing is like documentaries, at least my editor one, there's always like, needs to be some story arc where we learn some wonderful lesson and some there, there was like, way too many like, heartfelt like slow motion walking scenes with like voiceover stuff. I like the throwing of the mushrooms in the air. That was like, Oh my god, I can only imagine how I would feel like I can see myself doing and I would be shaking my head at myself after like, God damn it. God damn it, but it was so wonderfully cheesy and the frolicking in. Yeah. And so, you know, there was it was. And I didn't really have much of a hand in the editing, we shot so much stuff, but I was I had gone crazy by by the time we were editing things. I thought that I was like, deeply paranoid, I thought that I was like, possibly like, in a simulation and like, the documentary was part of something to like, make a fool out of me or something. Yeah. And I just like, I couldn't watch myself and I thought like my editor and director had set all this up to like, blackmail me or something like that. Like I didn't like, non stop paranoid, like straw that broke the camel's back then, like you were kind of like already heading towards this and then you smoked this DMT Oh, okay. No, had had that experience that was really interesting, but that, you know, that's DMT for you. And then I had a and then I was like, I need I need to see more clearly what's going on. I thought I was like really close to figuring it out. I'm like, Oh, I'm just this far away. And I'm gonna unlock all of the mysteries of the universe. You know, I was going a bit manic. And so I was already manic and then I had a Iosco experience, and I had to two full cups. of, of some pretty pretty strong stuff and I had that Yeah, the single greatest experience of my life. And then I just didn't weird things happen. I never came down from it. And then just really, really strange synchronicities and stuff started happening. I didn't understand. I thought I was like a part of something. I thought that I had figured out like how time travel works. It was like things got pretty out there. And so yeah, that's, that's Oh, that was like very, very profound. Oh, and then, and then I Alaska. So I want I Alaska launched me into mania. And then like, a week later, while I was already manic, I ate mushrooms at Roger Waters concert. And then it really like, That was when things fuckin poof, that was that was a level of mania. I didn't understand. You know, what? Crazy? Could be. Until, until that. I mean, I guess you just don't think it could happen. Or I never thought it would happen. To me, I had had, I had just like, you know, hundreds of Yeah, know, I've had I've had like, I've had, like, at least somewhere between like, Is it like over 300 mushroom trips? In my life? I think, maybe not that many. And 100 DMT breakthroughs. And I just thought, like, this is just my thing that works with me. Like I knew alcohol wasn't some some people drive with alcohol perfectly. And I just thought like, I guess I just have like the right head for, for this. But, um, yeah, the DMT experience. It was, you know, it was strange, because I broke through and right away this thing was just like, Okay, good. You brought the cameras now you can like verify what. And it was, you know, this is now three years ago, a DMT experience fades away within like, five minutes of having it. So. So for me to really articulate what it was. I mean, it's kind of grasping at straws. It was the feeling was. So there's a feeling that I've had several times on DMT, which is that there's just like, these four different parallel universes that are all happening, like, that are almost just like this, that are happening at the exact same time. And I don't know why it's for there's like way more parallel universes, but there's four that are like, almost exactly like this. And then sometimes they just like cross or something, and you can like end up on another one. And it was showing me some sort of like mechanism of how it works, and why that's the case. And it wanted me to, like, express this thing to people. Fuck if I know. I remember. I remember the first times I started smoking DMT and it was just like, yeah, it's just the strangest experience. And, and yeah, get down and be like, Well, that was Yeah, that was a weird hallucination. And, and people that were more experienced than me would be like, well, we don't think it's a hallucination. We think it's some other like dimension or something like that. Now, I Well, I get why you feel that way. But I don't get how that's possible. I like I don't get how it can't I don't get how that could be real. And this could be real. At the same time, this duality and so I kept smoking DMT to find out and of course, what else are you gonna do? I tried smoking more and more to see if I could like see it more clearly or elongate the experience. And you know, I started asking questions, which I recommend if you're gonna have a DMP Do you experience maybe the first couple times? I would just have the experiences? I won't even recommend DMT By the way, I don't. I don't I don't not recommend it. But like in terms of laughter Yeah, that's that's a good point. Like, if you're talking to the average person who's looking for maybe like a kind of mystical experience some good therapeutic use of that. mystical experience. Yeah, go for it. DMT has that in spades. Like, I, I had no interest in any mystical or spiritual experience myself. I had. I don't see a lot of for me personally, I don't think that as like a therapeutic tool. I don't, I don't think DMT is a great therapeutic tool. I'm not saying that. People don't have therapeutic, you know, that something like psilocybin or ketamine or MDMA makes? or whatever? Yeah. Did you? Did you put your pants on I Alaska? No. Okay. I've heard so many stories of people. It goes both ways. Just you're puking. And you're pooping. And it's that's the thing that has made me say like, I probably won't ever do. I asked her. I just, I just want to put my pants. Yeah, I mean, I think there's more important considerations. Maybe that's maybe I'm very shallow because I don't want to put my pants and I was the same way. But after you. Like, I've had the on the last I've done iOS only three times. And the first two times I thought it was incredibly mild. And I was like, what, what is this like, just like making myself nauseous, or basically a mushroom trip. And like, that's why I'm the third time I really went for it. Because I want I want to see, like, I was getting ready to. So the way it's shown in the film is like I'm driving to do this plan does sign this, like clandestine experience. That's not what was happening. We shot that afterwards, just like make things work with the story. What actually happened was I went to go do iOS get get ready to go and to do iOS got on film, we were we were absolutely going to film the experience. I wanted to do one first, to figure out what would be the appropriate dose for me to enjoy and to feel like, what what aspects of the experience would be the most important to film and which ones would get like in my head too much if a camera was there. I don't want and and so I yeah, and then put that that's the one that put me over so we never got to film it and so then we just like film that little scene as a cheat. Um, just so we could keep the story moving. But yeah, so so Oh, yeah, but that that time I had the purge I had already I had always heard people talk about like, how good this purge feels that ever, as I've watched a bunch of crap, you know, like, a crate, we just love throwing up now is out of it. And but I, I had you know, the I actually remember distinctly there was I was there was like a mix between DMT and mushrooms This is on iOS go this is my last big experience. And I'm talking with this thing that is like that they created this reality but it itself is also simulated or something and, and it was showing me that we like all have these different addictions. It was it was it was that it it created all of these different worlds. And it it was creating so many that it couldn't keep up with it couldn't attend to the energy needs needed to like keep these different, like universes working and attend to all of them. And it was it was getting burnt out. And it was it was somehow like it was running parallel was like a metaphor for my own life and mice of burning myself out in my own addictive tendencies and, and then like my my relationship, let's say video games, for example or alcohol. And then it was it was also related to the human condition. And and like poverty and like, you know, Matthews, hardcourt drug addiction. And it was like, all it was, it was like all of these parallels, it was like we are all experiencing this just embodiment of, of suffering. It was like me and this other thing, the simulator God or whatever, we're experiencing this thing at the exact same time, just this embodiment of, of all of suffering in the universe. And then it was just like the most painful, horrific, but it was like, beautiful in a way. It was just like, it was like so. Like, unbelievably horrific, that it was like, all you could do was laugh. And right then, like, I just knew I had to purge. It was like, it really was just like, purging. All like the embodiment of suffering. And every everything that is wrong in the universe, just like shot out my mouth bucket. And it was just the most beautiful, amazing feeling I could ever imagine. I don't know if it would feel that way. If you share your pants, though. Like You're shitting out all of society's Whoa. I mean, I've had a few I've had a few times in the bathroom, where I felt like maybe I was shitting out. I've certainly I've shut out a bad day before I was I was tripping with with some with some of my brothers once and one of my brothers like, started, we were going for a walk, we were on mushrooms. And we were going for a walk at night. And it was we're walking down this like big hill with these trees overhanging it and like it's a beautiful night. It's relatively cool. And the moon is out and it's just like, fucking gorgeous. And I'm looking at the tops of the trees. And I'm like, these are the most beautiful things ever. The trees look like lace and they looked like they were trying to grab each other. And then one of my brother's starts kind of like tweaking a little bit, he starts getting really nervous. And I'm like helping calm him down, get them accustomed to everything that's kind of kicking in. And then he's like, I think I need to puke and I was like just puke man. Like, you're still gonna be trippin, let it out if you feel like you got to puke, any puked on the road. And like, it looked like he was like, like crawling along the road trying to like get all of this vomit out of him. And as soon as he was done, he was just laying there laughing. And all of us are standing around this big puddle of puke smiling at it because it looked like it was like glowing in the dark. It was beautiful vomit I've ever seen. But like anytime I think about that I think about that puke and I'm just like, God, it was magical. I wonder how that felt to get that out? Yeah, that's, I mean, there is there's some sort of a thing to with. I mean, there is some drug that's released when you I think. I think it's part of why there's eating disorders. I think I think there's like some sort of an endorphin thing or something other there's some reward mechanism that happened. I mean, I don't know that and so interesting. I know. I mean, I've as someone who's had pretty bad binge drinking issues. I mean, I can certainly relate to to a good a good relieving vomit. Yeah, interesting. Well, look we're at the we're at the like two hour mark. So I don't want you to turn into dust I know that it's a million o'clock over there. So do you want to keep going or do you want to try to wrap things up maybe take some more questions from chat? Yeah, what do you think about like 15 minutes or so? Okay, yeah, so wrong this I need to this this beard needs to be needs to get its little nightcap it's getting sleepy spirit has so many dreams to dream oh that beautiful beard it deserves to dream all those dreams and I've seen you almost like pretty successfully stifle several Yon so far tonight which like, bro, that's hard to do. Congratulations, friends and chat. If any of you have any questions for Shane while he's here. Hang in with us. Please ask questions continue to introduce them to twitch and get him get him a little more accustomed to the shenanigans here. It's interesting, right? That the dynamic of like just talking about some shit and then looking over and being like, oh people What do you Yeah, I mean, I definitely like, by the way, if you just oops, can you can you send people to my website to so they can check out my show tomorrow and 100% at it's roughly the same time from 830, central time until about 10, about 10pm. And we'll be talking all about the research of modern media use in making some fun jokes. But you can also go to Shane moss, Ma, USS calm. I'm dropping all your links, Trump's getting stronger with age. I mean, that doesn't surprise me, I don't think that there's any kind of linear tolerance, I feel like there's a tolerance. When you do them, like regularly you build a tolerance. Other people actually disagree with that. But for me, personally, I've felt like there's a tolerance. But I think that in terms of age, I think that I think that they become easier. I think psychedelics become more mild, the older that I get, because I don't know if it's just because I have more experience under my belt. But I think it's just getting used to mindfulness. And I think that I think that in, you know, having more experience in life having more impulse control, things like that lead to just have more of the ability to kind of surrender and go with the experience, I could see if you've never had an experience than you do a prayer first time, it's 60 or something. And it's like really jarring. Because all of us, you've gone 60 years of your life and never had anything like this. But I actually think the one of the big reasons why people shy away from the psychedelic experience is because they have their first experience when they're in college, with like improper setting setting, usually, but even if you have the right ish setting, setting, but are just like around your friends, or whatever and doing it. I mean, though, those are, you know, psychedelics are often considered nonspecific amplifiers. So they'll kind of amplify whatever is going rather than alcohol, which is like, okay, it's going to be this linear, kind of lack of inhibition that's going to take over or, or, or, you know, Adderall where there's this linear, like, it's gonna wake me up for this amount of time, these nonspecific amplifiers, you don't know if you're going to get exceptionally sad or exceptionally, like, happy or silly, or want to dance or want to cry and all of that in five hours. And it it's what do you got? What do you got going on in there? And you don't know because you don't have access to the contents of that. I guess it'd be like, the closest I can compare to is, is kind of shower thoughts on steroids, really. And so when you're in college, that's, that's the most confused you'll ever be in your life. You just left your parents home, you are trying to figure out who you are, what you're going to be what your career is, who you are, are you going to marry? Are you going to even be able to get a mate? When are you going to lose your virginity? Or when are you going to stop banging so many people? Are you going to have kids and and what what is a 401 k? And there's just it's, it's no surprise to me that when you're in your most confused time of your life, you would also have the most confusing, psychedelic experience. Yeah, cuz you're a confused person. And they can be they can hold up a mirror to you in a lot of ways. And especially when you don't know that going into it and you just think it's just like, you find Oh, you're Yeah, just gonna be this fun thing. You don't know you're about to get this intense therapy session. I you know, I think that that It's overwhelming for a lot of people. I think that as an adult, they only get easier. Yeah. And I think there's i was i was reading something that was suggesting that it's not necessarily better, but it's almost like people who are older and have more deeply established patterns can benefit more from something like psychedelics, because it helps them to see those patterns and break them with greater ease than they might have been able to, especially in an older age. When did you see the question grave? Doug was asking, Do you have plans of going back into heavy psychedelics? Well, yes, but I don't know when I've been itching to try DMT. Again, I have there's a few research chemicals that are lesser, no, you know, I'm in some interesting groups of people. And there's some, there's some odd, you know, there's just a lot of stuff out there that the average person hasn't heard about yet, and that I haven't done but I'm looking forward to. And so there's just lots there's lots of experimentation left for me to do. I sort of am interested in doing Ibogaine only because it's like, the most intense thing a person can go through it sounds like, but it's, it's so unnecessarily risky. But that's kind of like the story of my life. Anyway, so what's one more and I think that, you know, I'm, like I am in Wisconsin, I am really impacted by seasonal depression, which is why I try to plan my tours so that I'm in the south for all of winter. And I think that mushrooms would be a good defense for that for me. So I'll probably be dabbling back into mushrooms sometime soon, probably trying to do some micro dosing, which I've never had success with in the past I'm, I'm a Mega doser. person. I just don't I just don't believe in micro dosing that much. But I want to think that I just my past experiences aren't necessarily reflection of the future and I probably didn't do it correctly in the past. Yeah, cuz we were talking about the different like protocols available, like going like Paul Stamets style, because that yeah, that helped me a lot. I can't even tell you how fucking weird it was to watch like, because I used to be very depressed, very anxious, very angry, like really struggled. And then mindfulness and meditation and psychedelics and like, everything kind of changed after that. So like, I've gotten to a point now where I'm pretty balanced compared to who I used to be especially. And when I started noticing the crazy hormone changes after after changing birth control and stuff. Like it really fucked me up. I was really bothered by that because I'm like, No, I, I have my shit together. I'm balanced. Now I don't get upset over stupid stuff. I don't cry over stupid stuff. So I finally I started my micro dosing, where like, basically, as my little tracker thing tells me that I'm gonna be experiment experiencing PMS and my period soon, I start my micro dosing. And oh my god, it is such a different experience to deal with the potential for the highs and lows with that extra like connectivity, you know, so I don't I don't kick my own ass as much I don't stay in bed as much. Like, it's so crazy man. People make PMS out to be like this thing that just hits for like a little while and then you're done. But so many people I know have like two weeks out of every month that they're just fucked, like just exhausted, feel like shit. tired and cranky and micro dosing has helped so much. Yeah, it's a crime that these things aren't at least widely researched. I, I'm an advocate. First and foremost, for for psychedelic research in the the rescheduling of psychedelics I would advocate for them to be go from a schedule one to schedule two just just to make it easy for them to study and run these trials. I'm also believe in cognitive liberties and blah, blah, blah, but we live in a real world and and that's not going to happen, I don't think anytime soon and so. So even even to be able to do some trials was silicided and for PMS would be I mean that that could be Absolutely life changing for for so many people, but yeah, well I'm glad that I'm glad that mushrooms cured crying for no more. No more crying. It's a little different. It's more like instead of me starting to cry over something stupid, like, I'll see a TV commercial of like a parent hugging their kid after they did laundry together. And I just would start weeping like, like real, real weeping just they love each other. And now like when I micro dosing, I can see that and I get like, the little tears in my eyes, and I'm like, I got to look away from that. I'm not ready. I like my makeup today. Fuck that shit. And I just like turn. So it gives me that little bit of distance. That's funny. It's because I do mushrooms so that I will cry. I like I have. I really, I really don't like to think of myself as like a cliche, dude, I would love to think of myself as someone who's like, very comfortable with themselves and their feelings and whatnot. And man, I always find myself like, trying to, like, God, it's been so long I could use a good it's such a it's such a dude like trying to force himself. It's, it's such a pathetic feeling when you're like, almost there. It's like, it's like jerking off with a coke dick or something. That's it, trying to cry feels like trying to force a tear out. Because I know how good it will be. Yeah. When I do. And, man, that's a that's the that's the shit. So that's amazing. If If silicides and could help women cry less uncontrollably. And guys cry more when they have a need to. Yeah. Everybody wins. Yes. And like I've cried out some serious shit. There was a lot of traumatic shit that happened my life and like mourning the loss of like my sister and my dad and my grandmother and all of these different people like re mourning those through psychedelics has given me so much peace, like I've experienced a lot of death in my life. And it was crazy how like kind of normal it felt like to me until exploring it more through psychedelics and through this community talking about it more and being like, Oh, shit, that's I guess not as many people have. And I know a lot of you have friends but not as many people seem to have had this close encounter. So like with with like people who were going through cancer treatments and stuff and people who knew that they're like, people I was close with who knew that their family members were dying, like my ex's mom, we were really close. And she died of cancer and like I was there holding her hand when she passed. Like, I've been there for multiple deaths. And it feels very normal and natural, and especially now because of psychedelics. It feels even more normal and natural. I've had some wonderful moments of mourning. And one of the times I was like trying to call my sister back to me in like, my visuals I was having and then I was just like, no let her not exist anymore. Like she I don't have to like create this person and try to force her into some structure like she's being the universe now. I don't need to make her a person again. And then I just let it go. And I felt great. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, that that fortunately, is one of the I believe there is some PMS research going on with those. I haven't but I know that there's end of life stuff happening and that's, you know, that that's insane to me that that it wouldn't you know, someone's on their way out. Anyway. They want to do this thing like what are you worried about here? That is such a fucking question, man. My God. Listen, I don't want to keep you forever because I'll talk to you about psychedelics and shenanigans for another time perhaps Yes, I would love that I would love to talk more especially because I just in general want to pick your brain about science and talk about ridiculous shit anytime I'm sorry to I don't mean to be rude the yawning I am legitimately just I this is the latest I've stayed up and a little while it's okay. It's okay. I don't get mad at people for involuntary things. So you know, be a little silly motherfucker yawned on my show doesn't mean No, I'm a big deal. But I'm I'm really glad that you joined you're real. Thank you. Feel free to promote anything else that you want to like. Take a minute to talk about any of your chuffed stuff again in case anyone just kind of popped in Yeah, well my podcast Here we are. I have a different scientist each week. It's it's, you know, started the course we talk quite a bit about evolutionary psychology and biology but things like behavioral economics. Well being just cognitive biases are some of my favorite topics, animal behavior. And then I have a documentary called psycho nautics, a comics exploration of psychedelics. I'm pretty new to Instagram, and I enjoy Instagram. If you follow me at Shane, underscore moss on there, I have a lot of highlights from my podcast and sometimes, depending on my mood, put silly stuff up as well. And yeah, my new YouTube channel that I'm trying to get off the ground. That would be amazing if you checked that out. Oh, speaking of DMT just had a just the episode before last was a was a really long, big DMT episode with a neuroscientist Andrew gal Omar. And it's one of the better I don't talk about psychedelics very often on my podcast, tried to kind of keep that world separate, usually. And so yes, one of the few rare episodes about psychedelics and it's one of the better episodes that I've done, it's really terrific. So people want to hear more about DMT and my thoughts on it. I'm gotten a ton of feedback so far. I'm pretty sure you'll Your mind will absolutely be blown. Get your minds blown friends. Yeah, thanks. Thanks again, Shane. Like I really enjoyed just getting to talk to you the other day, let whatever Sunday that was we were chatting. It happened to be like a rare day off for me to Oh, you caught me at a good time because it was I don't normally respond to like DMS and stuff. But Trump got the cove. And I was just in a solid mood. I was just in a real good mood. That's when it was by the way. I reached out to you about the proud boys thing how it was trending because because the wonderful gays and taken back the proud boys thing. Yeah, we started. I was just like, I almost never respond to it. Like, I've had some bad experiences like Instagram, especially, I've had times where like, okay, I'll respond to someone and then they have like, 20 questions and then they're so angry if I don't get back to them and like, and Jesus well serves me right for trying to be nice and respond, I guess. And so I just as a rule, don't usually don't blame me, but I was just in such a wonderful mode. So I'm so happy that this worked. It was it was just great timing around that you happen to be as I don't even have Twitter on my phone or anything like that. I just happen to be in front of the computer. So anyway, yes. Lovely to meet you. And thanks for showing me how twitch works totally I hope to see you on here at some point because we'll we'll do what we can to help you get your stuff started. If you do decide to do that show tomorrow. Thank you so much. Be nice to yourselves. And please always, always remember to wash your butts

Mind of Snaps Podcast

Conversation with Shane Mauss | Episode 24 - Mind of Snaps Podcast

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