Elon Musk, Prince Harry, and the Celebrity Psychedelic Confessional
Famous people have been quietly tripping for decades. They’re just finally talking about it.
Something has shifted.
It used to be that admitting you’d taken mushrooms was a career liability, or the kind of thing you said quietly to close friends or not at all. Now it’s a profile piece in a major magazine. A chapter in a memoir. A podcast moment that goes viral before the episode finishes downloading.
The celebrities are coming out. Not all at once, not without careful PR consideration, but steadily and with an openness that would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago. And what they’re saying, when you line it all up, is surprisingly consistent: it helped. It changed something. I’m not who I was before.
Whether you find this heartening or exhausting probably says something about you. Either way, it’s happening, and it’s worth paying attention to. It turns out that when famous people talk, the culture listens, and this particular conversation is moving faster than most people realize.
The Billionaire in the Room
Let’s start with the most covered name on the list, because it would be strange not to.
Elon Musk has been publicly linked to psychedelic use (including psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, and ketamine) for years. He’s discussed ketamine use openly as a tool for managing depression. The Wall Street Journal reported on his broader psychedelic use in 2024, which he neither forcefully denied nor fully confirmed in the way powerful men tend to not fully confirm things.
What’s interesting about Musk in this context isn’t the specifics, it’s the cultural permission structure his proximity to these conversations creates. When the richest person on earth is associated with psychedelic use and the reaction is largely a shrug, something has changed. Psychedelics used to be the domain of the dropout and the dangerous. Now they’re apparently compatible with running multiple companies simultaneously, which is either a ringing endorsement or a terrifying advertisement depending on your perspective.
The Prince Who Told the Truth
If Musk represents psychedelics as productivity tool, Prince Harry represents them as grief medicine, which is the more interesting story.
In his memoir Spare and in subsequent interviews, Harry described using psilocybin and ayahuasca as part of processing the trauma of losing his mother at twelve years old, and everything that followed. He was careful to say he wouldn’t recommend recreational use. He was equally clear that for him, in that specific context of unresolved grief, something happened that years of conventional therapy had not reached.
That framing (psychedelics as medicine for a specific wound, not as lifestyle accessory) is exactly what the clinical research has been showing. Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London have both published significant findings on psilocybin’s ability to help people process grief, anxiety, and depression in ways that other treatments cannot. Harry was, without necessarily knowing it, describing his own case study in the existing literature.
What makes it even more compelling is the neuroscience behind why it works. Psilocybin doesn’t just soften emotions, it literally rewires the brain’s fear circuitry, creating a window where old wounds can be revisited without triggering a full defensive response. Harry’s description of finally processing his mother’s death isn’t poetic language. It’s what the research predicts.
A prince saying this in public does something that a scientific paper cannot. It makes the experience imaginable to people who would never have considered it.
The Quarterback, the Comedian, and the Pop Star
Not every celebrity psychedelic story is about trauma. Some of them are just about life going better.
Aaron Rodgers has spoken openly about ayahuasca and psilocybin, crediting them with helping him confront a fear of death that had quietly been running his life. He described mushrooms specifically as helping relieve the pressure of feeling like he needed to accomplish everything before he died. For a professional athlete in a performance-obsessed industry, that’s a meaningful shift. It’s also a near-perfect description of what happens when the Default Mode Network quiets down and the brain stops treating every incomplete goal as an existential threat.
Seth Rogen has been talking about mushrooms since before it was fashionable, with the cheerful lack of ceremony that characterizes everything he does. He’s described psilocybin as a “very introspective drug” that influenced some genuinely significant life decisions. He first took it at thirteen, which he now acknowledges may have had fairly deep effects on the brain he turned out to have. Research into adolescent neuroplasticity and psychedelic exposure is one of the more genuinely unsettled areas of the field, and he’s not wrong to flag it.
Harry Styles put mushrooms in his skincare brand. Not literally. His Pleasing line uses mushroom-derived ingredients, but the association is intentional and he’s been candid about psilocybin’s role in his creative process and anxiety management. In Rolling Stone, he described the afterglow of a mushroom experience as producing ten days of feeling like everything was going to be fine. If you’ve experienced that particular quality of post-trip clarity, it’s an extremely accurate description. It also tracks with why so many people end up outside after taking mushrooms. That same softening of the self that makes Styles feel like everything’s okay is the same mechanism that makes the trees feel like the only logical place to be.
Kristen Bell on Her 40th Birthday
Kristen Bell’s story is one of the most quietly powerful in this whole category, partly because of how specific it is.
She’d been living with depression for over twenty years. She read Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, the book that did more to normalize psychedelic curiosity among a mainstream audience than possibly anything else published in the last decade, and decided to try psilocybin on her 40th birthday, at home, with her husband Dax Shepard as a sitter.
What happened wasn’t a cure. She’s said that clearly. What happened was a fundamental shift in her relationship with her own body, a softening of the self-criticism that depression tends to weaponize. She described touching her legs and thinking you’re so strong, you’re so elegant, which is the kind of thing that sounds unremarkable until you understand how rare it is for someone who’s spent decades at war with themselves to feel that way even briefly.
It also explains something we wrote about a while back: why people cry on mushrooms even when they’re happy. Bell’s experience wasn’t sadness. It was the specific release that happens when defenses drop and something long-buried finally gets heard. That’s not a celebrity endorsement. That’s a human being describing something real.
The Steve Jobs Footnote That Isn’t Really a Footnote
Steve Jobs said that LSD was one of the two or three most important things he ever did in his life. He said this on the record, in interviews, attributed in his authorized biography. He also used psilocybin. He credited these experiences with fundamentally shaping the design philosophy behind Apple: the simplicity, the insistence on beauty, the conviction that technology and human experience were not separate things.
Worth remembering any time someone frames psychedelics as frivolous. The company that made the device you’re probably reading this on was shaped, in part, by a man who thought carefully about what it meant to change your mind.
What This Actually Means
There’s a version of the celebrity psychedelic confessional that is just marketing. Wellness positioning, brand softening, the carefully managed revelation that makes someone seem relatable and evolved. Some of these stories are probably partly that.
But there’s also something else happening. A RAND survey from 2025 found that psychedelic use in the United States is increasing, and that about 47% of people who used psilocybin in the past year reported microdosing. The culture is moving. The research is moving. And famous people talking openly, even imperfectly, even sometimes for the wrong reasons, is part of what’s moving it.
If you’re curious what microdosing actually looks and feels like from the inside rather than in a press release, we spent 30 days finding out. The short version: it’s stranger, more boring, and more useful than the headlines suggest.
Psychology Today has noted that one of the most significant barriers to people accessing psychedelic therapy is stigma, the internalized sense that this is something dangerous, irresponsible, or incompatible with being a functioning adult. Every time a well-known person says publicly that this helped them, that it was serious, that it was not what they expected, that stigma erodes a little.
Which is the actual point. Not the celebrity. The erosion.
A Note on Access
One thing the celebrity confessional consistently glosses over: cost and access.
Harry’s therapy was private. Rodgers’ ayahuasca ceremonies were private. The clinical trials at Johns Hopkins that produced landmark results were heavily structured and professionally guided. As Psychology Today has pointed out, legal psilocybin therapy in Europe can cost over €5,000 for a private consultation. In the United States, FDA approval for psilocybin treatment is still pending.
The most honest thing that can be said about the celebrity psychedelic confessional is this: it is democratizing the conversation much faster than the access. The stories are reaching everyone. The medicine, in safe and supported form, is still reaching mostly people with money.
That gap matters. And closing it is the actual work.
Trip safely, know your source, and respect the experience. Visit SmilesHigh.Club for more. Browse our full range of mushroom products here.
— Lennox
