TrueLife - Dennis Walker - The Mycopreneur

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://instagram.com/mycopreneurpodcast?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==https://linktr.ee/mycopreneur?fbclid=PAAaYa18N_byaBOZbvjs7fkZaLusXIwGr6RochP1gZySthUsEqXqHLuB3wSHI_aem_th_AQ0LBM3gGIlZtgHuu5AIPCVaK07hHtY9006tJ-Rt_dmoV6gnjUdvUFJbVOBV0zfgMNchttps://open.spotify.com/show/6yEevBWWJUPsqAoJxlboWw?si=c_mpkZs1Qr2ypkFMd6WRkw10 Year + Multimedia ProfessionalSatirist featured in Rolling Stone and Forbes2022 Psychedelic Influencer of the Year atEntheo AwardsJournalist for Lucid NewsPublished in Psychedelic Alpha, Psychedelics Today, Honeysuckle Mag, Global Cannabis Times, Psychedelic Spotlight, NAMA Quarterly Puppeteer at Psychedelic Puppet Show Traveled to 75 Countries Probably Making Content Right Now One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins

maze, lights my war cry Born from the blaze. The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, happy Memorial Day. Welcome back to the True Life podcast. I have the one and only Dennis Walker,

aka the micro-repreneur. You've seen him, you've heard him. And if you're like me, you've seen it be like a breath of fresh air that's kind of reminiscent of the merry pranksters, in my opinion. For those that may not know, Dennis Walker, the micropreneur, has his own podcast. I've heard him describe it as a satirical platform representing the psychedelic space, the onion of the psychedelic space. However, I think it's imperative to lay down that it's also an incredibly informative, journalistic powerhouse as well. He's got tons of people that I think are really close to the roots, not only the roots of what's happening, but are also with the forefront of making things happen. Like Amanda Fielding, Colin Wells, the lovely Kyra Roman.

And you also do a lot of work in politics and geopolitics and government. But before I just keep ramble a little bit, let me pass it back to you. Dennis, how you doing today? Fantastic. Mahalo. Thanks for having me, George. And you hit the nail on the head with a bunch of the key descriptors I use. Thank you for using the word journalistic. I think good independent journalism is really important these days, right, especially in the psychedelic space with so much happening.

Saterical, I always like to differentiate what I do as being satire more so than comedy because there is a heavy social commentary component to it. And I'm usually trying to punch up and, you know, give the people at the top a little taste of their own ego death, if you will. And yeah, I like to have a good time doing it. So I appreciate that you can see the nuance in the platform that it is. satirical. It is supposed to be funny, but I do want it to be grounded in a serious journalistic integrity as well. Yeah, it is. I think you're, I think you're firing on all cylinders there. And, you know, when we look at the world of journalism, it seems to me that Colbert kind of hit it out of the park when he started, him and Stewart kind of hit it out of the park when they became more realistic information than any of the propaganda that was flying

to on the other sides. And I see, I see what you're doing as similar to that. Like, it's, It's such a good way to drive home, like what's really happening. And people dig it. Like, they want to watch it. They're informed and they're entertained. How did like, what's your take on satire as a good way of getting a message across? I consider it to be a Trojan horse in many senses. Yeah, I love it.

Right? It's like, you're sneaking it. I always use the metaphor of like, if I'm given my dog medicine, I put a little medicine inside of a treat. The dog eats the treat and then there's the medicine. And I think that, as you mentioned, a lot of mainstream news sources, for many good reasons, on both sides of the political aisle, have become very difficult to trust, right? And independent journalism, I think, can fill that gap. So that's what I'm personally interested in is when I launched this project, I never had the intent of it being, you know, at the forefront or the vanguard of, like, being the number one news source.

I just always wanted to be reliable, authentic, transparent, and stay in my freak zone a little bit, because that's one of my marginal concerns about the mainstream of psychedelics is that we're actually seeing a lot of the weirdness and the uniqueness and sort of the stranger elements being sanitized and sterilized in favor of a more corporate friendly messaging. And I have my own thoughts about those, but I try to embed sort of that perspective into the satire. And then I feel like the podcast and the articles that I write for serious platforms, you know, I've contributed to a number of very reputable platforms such as psychedelics today, lucid news. I'm a recurring contributor to psychedelic alpha, which is, you know, very far removed from the satire, more focused on business and whatnot. So I try to do that as sort of my authenticity and and legitimizing side to what I do so that people

who own the encounter the satire, you know, that that has its own lifespan. But then they can also see the serious side and kind of the more probing journalistic side. So I consider it to be kind of binary, like a yin and yang. You've got the funny, bizarre, cryptic, over the top, weirdo stuff. But then you've also got things that can, you know, make me fit in on the conference circuit or, you know, be taken seriously and get featured in more mainstream media as well. Okay, this is a dangerous, like, this is why this is why I think it's dangerous, Dennis. And I mean dangerous in a good way. Like, you have a lot of ideas.

Like, you just throw out there, like, in a satirical fashion, just playing around like a psychonaut dating app, satire festival, a roast. Like, these are all things that not only can happen, but they should happen. And like, I think that on some level, when you begin to have that kind of insight, like, you become a force to be reckoned with. Like, do you feel that? Like, do you feel that kind of happening? Like, I see it happening.

I'm sure other people do. Do you feel that happening? I've got a really wild response over the last year in particular, which has led to some growing pains. And it's in a sense, it's like when you're a small, independent creator, creating for your friends and your audience, you can kind of say whatever you want, do whatever you want. And as the scope starts to expand, there's an unfamiliar level of scrutiny. And that's been something that I'm very grateful for.

But also, I've come to realize, like, there's some gravity to this. And whether or not, you know, I want to keep it light, keep it injected with levity and fun and whatever, there's a growing base of people around the world who sort of recognize and sort of put your work on a podium. And so as a creator, it's an interesting place to be. And I maintain that. I want to stick in that little kind of ICA guy zone, I think it's called. But, you know, part of that for me is always being a little bit. weird is not ever going for you know i could probably 10x my follower based if i were to pander

to certain messaging and you know use certain best practices but i want to pander to the people who really vibe with me not just be another you know 100 000 plus audience base i'd rather have like 15 000 which is about where i'm at now of like pretty devoted people who get me almost like more like an independent artist as opposed to a major label musician is kind of what I'm going for. But yeah, I think, you know, people have asked me this question before, and it's been wild to see the response. This year, I've been recognized in public in Rio de Janeiro in a restaurant, Mexico City, on the street in Junku, Korea, and at all the conferences, you know, people at South by Southwest, people at Horizons, people at in Miami, at various, I've been to multiple

conferences out there, who will just stop me and kind of give me an earful about, you know, what a great job I'm doing, what, you know, essentially what you've done here. So now I'm trying to, how do I stay humble, stay hungry, stay motivated? And part of that is like, just keep making weird stuff. Put stuff out that not everyone's going to get. You know, put stuff out that you're probably going to challenge or maybe lose some of your followers or subscribers, you know, because you're hitting hot button issues. You're not just playing it super safe. So, and I think to wrap this up, when I really noticed that there was some, you know, audience beyond who was my, my sort of key target audience of friends and freaks and weirdos.

that was paying attention, as I did a roast of the Davos crowd because there was a psychedelics house Davos last year. And I just kind of ripped into it as being this sort of what I considered to be, although I wasn't there, I wasn't invited, superficial sort of kind of window dressing. And people who were at Davos and part of that conference saw it and reached out to me and were like, this was a really good on point satire. And I actually got invited to go to Davos this year as one of delegates for that. So it's pretty wild how that works. You know, one of my favorite roasters is like Ricky Jervais, like when he goes to the Golden Globes. And I would hope that you would take that spirit with you and just roast those guys.

You know, I mean, I don't know. It's such a cool thing. But there's another side to it, too. You know, when we look at the trickster archetype, for me, it was always Briar Rabbit. You know, I love how we got thrown in the Briar Patch and he really loved it in there. But you have like coyote or the crow. But it does seem to me that the trickster, who is also a very challenging. person is sometimes challenged because he is forced with this temptation and it's you know

it's awesome to make content for for all the freaks and the weirdos and i love it and i think you should wholeheartedly always charge that but do you think at some point in time like the people that are the vcs the people that have the money are going to come to you with a big check and be like hey man you're really funny but i want you to chill out a little bit kind of the dave the kind of dave chapelle you remember when they gave them like a big money and they're like you got to stop man you ever thought about that That's almost my exit strategy, George. Yeah, I've connected.

I've connected with a bunch of those people. And actually the satire translates really well, I think, to these more like higher echelons of the business, corporalic, psychedelic world. And I make that clear to people is that like, I'm kind of going after larger systems. And also I have a sense of humor about it. You know, I'm not super politically driven.

And I think that makes it more apparent to people in those positions that, yes, you can criticize and you should criticize. Like you should criticize power structures. Anybody who's afraid of a little bit of, you know, ridicule, then they've probably got some bad actor shit going on, right? I think that if you should be able to criticize and I should be able to be the beneficiary or the subject of ridicule as well. And I kind of take the charge on that.

And so, you know, one for us, one for them. Like I'll make fun of a VC and their firm or whatever. And a true story. Here's a good true story on that. I was at the Horizons conference with a press pass. for psychedelic alpha, who again is like a very legitimate sort of corporate approach to journalism and that covers the business of psychedelics. A lot of these VCs, a lot of the executives or the C-level executives, the psychedelic, corporate-ellic companies read psychedelic alpha. So I was getting,

you know, pitches thrown at me from people and like, you know, oh, you're with that platform. Let me talk to you about this. Meanwhile, they have no idea that I only wrote one article for them and it was a satirical piece, right? I'm at an after party put on by one of the biggest funds in the space. I didn't know any of this at the time, right? And I satirized them from inside the party where I just filmed different, you know, people dressed to the nines and all that. And I took little clips of them.

And then I dubbed in my own voice of what I thought their conversations were about, talking about like, you know, we just developed a research chemical that raises clout. We're collaborating with Travis Scott. My dad owns a hedge fund and all this stuff. And actually all the people who ended up passing the video around their circles, you know, going viral within sort of a niche of these kind of like industry types, they thought it was hilarious. And then I'm in Miami and the co-founder and, you know, manager of the fund tracks me down. It's like, you're the guy who infiltrated our party. And then, you know, since then he realized we have face-to-face conversation like, oh, it's nothing personal.

This is satire. Like I'm a South Park fan. I'm a Colbert fan, right? I'm a Monty Python fan, et cetera. a lot of these people are too. You know, you talk to the Rick Doblins of the world or the Paul Stamets, et cetera. They have, as you said earlier, like a rich vein of merry pranksterism. Yeah.

I think that's something that's missing, arguably, from kind of the current state of psychedelics, which there are plenty of people doing it, but it's just about creating a platform where you can communicate this satire in a way that can reach these audiences. And yeah, so as far as like getting bought out or collaborating, like I make no. amends or apologies for the fact that like I'm very happy to take your money if you want to you know see what I'm doing and that I'm prepared to do this indefinitely independently funded as well it's interesting you know when you when you bring up the the the merry pranksters and and sort of that trickster background and and that sort of inspiration is that what gave you the idea to drive the day glow school bus up to Denver this year no you know what

I have a rich appreciation for that element of humor that a lot of luminaries have had, especially cultural luminaries. Like Terence McKenna was really my entree into a lot, talking about like the roots psychedelic, at least from a Western perspective. That was my lens going back to, you know, sophomore junior year of high school when I started to read these crazy ideas. And then I got into McKenna senior year, I read Food of the Gods and I had had one small mushroom dose that was very impactful at that point. I had a half-eighth of mushrooms and it kind of filled in all the blanks that I felt was missing from the life or the reality that I was immersed in right now. And reading Food of the Gods and some of these going deeper into these various texts like written by Mark Plotkin

as another, you know, ethnobotanist from Yale who was a big influence on me and reading Aeroid forums and these things. I feel like McKenna really tied it all together for me and he had a huge sense of humor, right? That was, and people that I now know who knew, him personally will describe that and they'll say like he was hilarious you know like this was a funny person so as far as like getting into denver and going on there it's something i got to shout out maps for is like i'm kind of late i'm late to the in crowd you know i've been a psychonaut since 2006 or around there and i took the track of like music and culture right i wasn't really in this whole like research scientific community that kind of congregates around maps and things like that other

organizations like that. Like I was looking at festivals over in Europe, you know, and like bands that were touring. I played in a band. That was where my attention was. And now all of a sudden, I find a, you know, I find this sort of conference circuit and like the maps crowd and things. And, and I got a shout out maps for having a great sense of humor. Like for such a big, robust, influential organization, they've been awesome as far as like bringing me into things, you know, introducing me to the good trip team who produced Have a, have a good trip on Netflix. right and they're doing comedy shows so like at south by southwest in austin i got on the guest list and the director of that program reached out to me and was like hey i want to put you on the guest list

i'm sitting with the maps crew watching you know eric douglin and hamilton morris and all these incredible luminaries on stage doing uh psychedelic comedy essentially or you know psychedelic satire so yeah i'm very very thrilled to be recognized and invited into some of these circles at this point Yeah, as you should be. I think that the, I think the, what you're putting out there is, is well needed. And it does bring into this kind of narrative a little bit more humor to it. And that brings me to this idea of narrative. It seems when we talk about McKenna or Leary or, you know, Rondas, it seems like in the first wave, those were signed, those were kind of the thought leader.

You need Ginsburg and all these people. And like the narrative, they kind of controlled the narrative. So there was sort of a dark humor towards it now, but it seems almost in this wave that it's a clinical narrative. And it almost seems like there's kind of a tight grip on this clinical narrative. What's your take on the narrative this time around? And is there something trying to force it strictly into the clinical setting? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's the subject of much, much investigation and a lot of a lot of debate as well.

Because one obvious answer is that medical, clinical model fits in. with a lot of the current powers that be, right? So one of the key, key possibilities of psychedelics is to be transformative. So I think if we're only focusing on that model and we're trying to like fit psychedelics into the clinical medical model, then a lot's getting lost in the process.

Now, where I differentiate myself from a lot of other people is like I'm not fully opposed. I'm not opposed actually in any way to psychedelics being used in a clinical model. I just don't think that it should be pigeonholed into that where that's the only, you know, narrative dominating the field right now. I think, yeah, maybe psychedelics can hold some huge potential for, you know, various soldiers or women who have undergone crises and things like

this and, you know, people from all walks of life who have, you know, undergone various traumas. Of course, psychedelics, I believe, can potentially help that and they should be administered in a very rigidly controlled environment for certain types of people. Myself, you know, I had a half-eighth of mushrooms at a county fair and, you know, went and saw, oh, Mottley, an incredible Latin jazz fusion band, and that was a cathartic experience, right? I've seen the flaming lips on what I call a museum dose of mushrooms, which is not a microdose, you know, but it's certainly not a macrodose, maybe around two grams. These are really profoundly transformative, cathartic experiences as almost anybody who's had a psychedelic

experience outside of a clinical environment, which is 99% of us can attest to. So I think the missing piece right now is about education, and it's about tempering the hype, because there is so much hype, you know, driving psychedelics can treat PTSD. Psychedelic therapy can treat depression. Well, imagine all the people who are reading this who don't have access, you know, to a psilocybin session in Oregon, or they can't go to Jamaica or whatever. And I've seen a lot of irresponsible psychedelic use too, you know, myself included, like when you kind of first start getting excited.

What if I mix this with this, you know, and like, fortunately, you know, I've had enough grace from the gods or however you want to put it, that like I've been spared a lot of potentially, you know, I just, I just want to honor and recognize that there is risk involved, but that I think that cognitive liberty is super important. I think that people should explore psychedelics and you shouldn't let anybody tell you that it has to be done a certain way. Just be intentional, be safe, you know, be smart about it. Do your homework.

Do your research about it. So yeah, that's kind of my take on the whole thing. Like if they want to, you know, drive medicalization and create these. models of access, no one's going to stop that and I'm not going to try to stop that, but I am also going to advocate say, hey, what about this other side? What if I just want to eat mushroom chocolate at the beach with a few friends, you know, in a responsible, safe environment? Like there's no one who should tell you that there's anything wrong with that. Yeah, I agree. I'm cautiously optimistic for everything happening. You know, you have like,

I have like an eye for like, oh, that's interesting, you know, but I think that everybody's going to find their brand, you know, whether it's, whether it's a cream or it's a pill, you know, or it's a synthetic or it's a chocolate or gummy, whatever. I think that sometimes I think that there's this big debate about the people that need it the most can't afford it, but they kind of can. It's just a matter of access, you know, because it, I mean, it grows everywhere.

And it kind of gets back to the idea that, like, in Steve Jobs' book, he talks about when the visionary leaves the company, it's taken over by the marketing team. And that kind of seems what's happening now. Like, you know, you have, when I look at the different retreats, Like they all have like the same menu. Hey, you can get the, you know, you can get the, the mushroom with a side of ayahuasca and then a large doctor pepper, you know, or your integration and stuff like that. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm sure that that's a system that works really well for people. And people that are drawn to that should go to that and it'll help them. You know, but when I think back to the narrative, when I used to eat mushrooms as a kid, there was always this point where I would be delirious, just laughing, just hysterically at things that were like, just silly. You know, like there used to be like this silly phase to it. And maybe that's because I was a younger guy or whatever. But I don't see the silliness anymore. Like you don't ever hear people on at giving speeches at forums. Like, man, I just laughed for three hours.

You know what I mean? Or my friend was drooling and we started laughing. But like, isn't the laughter part also like a huge part of the therapy? Like if you just laugh for two hours, you feel so much better. But I don't hear any more about the laughter. Does that kind of just too far out there or familiar with that? Or what do you think? I'm so on that wavelength.

You know, I just got very, I was honored to be invited to breaking convention in England, which is like a true psychonaut convention. I've been to a few of the conventions in the states now that are overtly corporate oriented. And I met a lot of great people there too, you know. But breaking convention was really special in that they curated tracks and had the types of people there who honor this way of thinking and who I would call, you know, true pioneers and true psychonauts. people from the Saitrans music scene over in Europe, right? And people curating festivals over there and things like that. And I was giving a talk on a stage after Graham Hancock, after a number of notable academics,

you know, with PhDs behind their names, with published research papers, et cetera. And I remember saying that exactly where I described a scenario where I was in Austin, Texas, at South by Southwest. And a young woman of Pakistani descent came up to me at a party and started. literally crying and wanted to take photos with me because she had seen one of my videos kind of dissecting and roasting these sort of white shaman archetypes right of like the guy in Guatemala or whatever who's like or in Tulum who's like that he's from Venice Beach but he's reinvented himself as a shaman in Touloum doing ayahuasca ceremonies and again nothing necessarily wrong with that

but it's like we should definitely be able to roast that archetype she comes up to me and she's like that video was so powerful for me because I had just gotten back from Guatemala from an experience like that that I found to be very difficult and disenchanting. And when I saw your video, I felt seen and I felt like somebody understood. And so on the stage, I'm telling the story and I just said, laughter is psychedelic therapy. Laughter is therapy. And then the whole audience of like academics, you know, and doctors and researchers broke out into applause. And it was like, I wasn't planning on no creating this moment. But I was like, oh, that's going. in the highlight reel. I got to put that one in my reel for sure. So yeah, laughter is therapy,

you know, and for a lot of what I'm trying to communicate with my body of work is that we don't need to reduce everything that's happening in these psychedelic experiences and realms into an easily understandable, relatable equation. I feel like that's what, you know, the Western lens wants us to do is to reduce it and wants us to say, this is why this experience is happening. This is what's happening in your brain. Okay, there's some value to understanding some of that, but there's also some value in recognizing we don't have to understand everything. Some of it may be beyond our control. And that's actually really empowering to be able to recognize that. And I think that's where the laughter comes in, where you're like, this is hilarious, like how, you know, how grant brand the

whole universe and the cosmos and my place in it is, why am I trying to fit everything into this narrow little box where, you know, oh, that wasn't a mystical state. That was just the serotonin 2A receptors. So I think there's value and kind of recognizing our limits as well as to explore those limits. Yeah, that's really well said. It's this idea of taking ourselves so seriously, like we actually know what's happening. And then we trick ourselves into being like,

yeah, this is totally it. And you get a few people to start believing you, you know, and then all of a sudden you think it's a truth. And then the next wave hits you and you're like, what are we doing? That's ridiculous, you know? But that's half the fun of it.

You know, it really is a beautiful aspect of it. I, if I were to ask you your top five favorite comedians, who would they be? Man, funny enough, I only recently kind of got into comedy. Like, doing this was, you know, I actually won class clown as a senior in high school. So I've always had that like vein in me. But I haven't really paid attention to like the comedy landscape as much as I have the music. But since you asked, I have started to study some. Well, Dave Chappelle was a formative influence on me.

You mentioned that name early, you know, early. earlier in the podcast, but for me, Chappelle was one of those comedians who has entered the realm of being an icon, right? And of being far more like a cultural maverick of someone we look to to understand what's happening. And like, I think about the special he put out during the pandemic

where he was, you know, talking about George Floyd in that era and thinking like, I didn't actually find too much of that material funny, but I did see like, this is someone who can help me understand what's happening. You know, it was more like, I just remember seeing like he's crossed that line from just being someone we get a cheap laugh from and forget about our worries for a minute,

to being someone that we trust to help us unpack the very complicated and controversial dynamics of the cultural landscape. So did Chappelle, you know, and I remember watching Chappelle's show back when I was in sixth grade, probably shouldn't have at that age, you know, up late at night, watching all these skits. I'm like, that's someone who wasn't afraid to go over the top. He wasn't afraid to take on really controversial subjects, like the black, white supremacists. Clayton Bigsby, you know, things like that. That's so funny, yeah. It's just an incredible thing.

So Chappelle's up there, and someone I've recently started getting into a lot is George Carlin. You know, I'm familiar with Carlin's legacy, but just, I recently watched a documentary about him. I started exploring his body of work more, and I feel a sense of kinship or affinity for the way that he approaches everything, and that, you know, he is very satirical, very dark, and very honest. And to hear, I think Stephen Colbert, who's another one on that list, talk about George Carlin. He said he's the Beatles of comedy. You know, he was doing very straight-laced

club shows and just kind of like family-friendly and then enter the era of cannabis and psychedelics. And he turns into this really anti-establishment, provocative, kind of bankable brand that people trust. So George Carlin's up there. Stephen Colbert is up there. You know, there's something very poetic about doing something so unique at such a high level. And I think that, you know, I mentioned I want to kind of always pander to or focus on like the weirdos and the outsiders. But at a certain level, like, I would very much like to have more of an established platform, you know, where I can, like the onion or something, where people, a wide audience base is there. I don't want to sacrifice my principles of, you know, being an odd bird and kind of being,

you know, unafraid to go outside of the norm, which is what satire and comedy should do in order to grow. But like, it's really inspiring to see someone like Colbert or Carlin or Chappelle, all three I just mentioned, who have reached a certain status where they have quite large fan bases, you know, quite large audiences. So those three immediately come to mind. I don't know that I would say that this is someone I wholeheartedly agree with a lot of his principles and politics and whatnot, but Joe Rogan is a huge influence for a lot of people, you know? I grew up in San Diego. I grew up in a very like alpha male bro sports culture, which I think anybody who's been through

that, you grew up in San Diego can understand that. So the fact that, like Joe Rogan penetrated those circles where I'm at my friend's houses, you know, who's an auto mechanic and, you know, and a lot of the kind of leftist politics will never saturate that realm, you know, and to have Joe Rogan talking about, you know, smoking DMT and parallel dimensions and things like that. Like I can, I can see and I can value how far that influence spread into these circles that normally would be very cut off from the conversation of psychedelic. So I got to give him his dues for that. And also just says, of independent journalists being unafraid to go outside of the norm.

You know, I think I have a background in media studies. I have a degree in media studies from San Francisco, from the University of San Francisco. So I was like inoculated essentially in an ultra-leftist political sphere, right, working with independent cinema and with arts and music and quite high-level culture in the Bay Area. Like I remember classes that I had taking me to current TV that was owned by Al Gore, you know, talking and they're so like very far end of the spectrum so my goal is not to be on one end of the spectrum it's to seek out these independent voices and to hopefully continue to cultivate what I'm doing to be unafraid to you know take on new territory even if your audience might you know find it

dubious so they might question what you're doing and I think Rogan's a great example of that you know he's he's been very outspoken but again I just want to put a clause on here that I'm not advocating for Rogan's views I just think that his craft and what he's been able to do is very impressive any way you slice it. If I had to go for a fifth one right there, I would say The Onion, again, you know, and that's more of, one, his name's actually escaping me, but the co-founder of the onion, I find to be quite inspiring because he's actually not very well known and he hasn't made very much money. Like he's sold the Onion in the 80s, but I think there's something, I think he's based in Portland and there's something very inspiring about like giving birth to a platform that's gone global,

you know, that's valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And I'm sure he got a taste of that money. You know, he gets to always be the co-founder of the onion. But there's something about that. Like I envision, oh, okay, so I'll knock him off because there's one more I got give one more. Mojo fucking Nixon. Anybody know who Mojo Nixon is? Huge fan of Mojo Nixon. Again, just kind of like a freak, almost a shock jock in ways, but he's got a couple XM serious radio shows like Outlaw Country. He does a NASCAR show. Also lives in San Diego. And it's just kind of always been one of those weirdo, you know, off the beaten path, but somehow managed to become the spokesperson for MTV when they were launching, doing spots for them, you know, and playing, playing rockabilly

music with his band and all that. So those are my five. I've got to say, we'll say the onion and Mojo Nixon share number five. But Dave Chappelle, George Carlin, Joe Rogan, Mojo Nixon, the Onion, and I think I probably left one off there. So thanks for asking. Yeah, it's great. I think it gives some insight into the foundations of the way you approach the relationship between fear and comedy because all those guys really leaned into those you know when times got tough those guys just took their shirt off like let's go you know what let's go right now you know and i can see that same sort of you know fire in you when you are standing up to like i have a huge affinity

for anybody who gets in the face of authority and is like you guys suck you know what i mean like there's something to be said about that and i think that all of us especially the all of us who, and this is probably everybody, on some level, we all feel like we've been slighted, no matter if you were born in Beverly Hills or you were born in Tijuana. Like we all feel as if there's some sort of power that gets in front of us that we fear a little bit. And so we use humor to kind of knock it down. And I think that that's why so many people resonate with great comedians. And I think that that's what people see in you, like, you know, you are calling out the emperor, hey, that guy's naked over there. You're not wearing any clothes, man. It's

not funny? It's such a cool thing to do. What do you think is the relationship between fear and comedy? Wow, that's, man, you're on point with these questions. Yeah, these are very like philosophical, existential questions, but I find personally like dark comedy, the darker stuff to be the most compelling thing, especially in the media landscape we live in. And one reason I think as an independent platform, I've been successful is because I'm not afraid to go after some of these subjects that a lot of larger companies and brands have to walk on eggshells around. And I think it's so dangerous to have a whole community or a whole industry walking on eggshells, you know, and I look at certain publications like The Onion. And like sometimes,

if I have a piece I want to do, I'll Google, I'll be like, what has the Onion said about vaccines? What has the Onion said about this or whatever? Just to know, like, how far out can I go with this stuff, you know? Because there is a very real tangible fear, I feel like, with a lot of larger organizations and brands about like offending the wrong person, right? Or like somebody pulls their investment because they don't agree with. And we've been seeing that happen a lot. But like that's that's really risky. I think, you know, I'm not ever going to advocate for hate speech, but the idea of like overt censorship and pressuring and fear mongering, like it causes people, I think, to really dilute their coverage of what's happening and to

flat out omit certain things where they're like, oh, we won't comment on that. And I've run into this as a journalist where like certain platforms I pitched a piece to have acknowledged like this is a great piece. This would be opening up a can of worms if our platform published this. And I'm just like, all right, well, I fully respect, you know. Maybe that's the thing as I grow. Like I'll have to continue to navigate that, you know. So, but I find the dark stuff to be really compelling. And like, one of my, I guess, comedy routine bits I have is like people continuously ask me like, what's your inspiration? How are you always, you know, on point with your, with your analysis of these things? Where are all these things coming from. Oh, you know what it is? It's coming from deep alienation,

from society, depression, and paranoia. So there's your answer, you know. But instead of staying in a little box and being afraid of everything, like, I find that that can be just like mushrooms grow and shit, right? That can be actually where great growth can happen is you take a certain, like, for example, I did a lot of content around Israel and Palestine on the ground over there, like on the wall, you know, staying at Banksy's Hotel in Jerusalem. And, I think at that point, a lot of people started watching. And my whole take on it was like, hey, like I have a background, a very, very religious upbringing background.

You know, so I went there also for that sort of a pilgrimage to go to all of these sacred sites that are important to my family as Christians. You know, my grandfather was a Baptist preacher. And like they were taking trips in the 70s to what they called the Holy Land. So like being able to unpack a little bit what was happening and what is happening there through a satirical lens, like a lot of people started paying. attention and being like, oh shit, like you just went there and, you know, kind of poke the hornets nest on the ground level of doing it. And it was well received. So I think the key is like you

want to be as honest as possible, authentic. You want to do due diligence on these subjects. So if you're going to take on something that's really dark, that's like in the blind spot of our culture that's alienating and, you know, dividing people, you just want to have due diligence. You don't want to just charge in blind just for clicks, which is another thing that's, I think, denigrating the media landscape right now is a lot of journalism, a lot of business models. They're built around clicks. So like what gets clicks is amplifying chaos, right? It's, it's amplifying division. It's like, oh, you've got to pick a side. There's a tribalism element to it. And it's like, okay, well, I understand that media businesses need to keep the lights on, but there are certain

creators and platforms, like, that's the only thing they want to do is they want to rile up a certain audience base. And I know that if I go in on my platform and I post a certain thing, you know, I know that it will get traction. I know that it will get traction. So I don't want to do that. You know, I want to try to find sort of a sensible middle path and at least create an audience that's not on any one side of the political spectrum, but that's an audience of critical independent thinkers.

And I find comedy is a great way to do that. And a lot of the people we just mention are trailblazers as far as being kind of fearless in the face of authority. Yeah, that's really well said. And it's such a good mix, too, because. not only do you have the skits, but you have an incredible depth, probably because you've been to like 75 countries, you're always touring around the world,

and you're always getting like this different perspective of what the world is looking at. I know I lost you for a second, but for those just listening right now, Dennis is always traveling somewhere, whether he's in Thailand or whether he's always somewhere. And it seems to me that he's getting a unique perspective in his ability to see. the world differently. I was just telling people, you know, because you're traveling so much,

you have a really unique perspective. Most people are in there. Maybe they travel between the states, but not everybody goes to 75 countries. Not everybody's in Singapore, in Mexico, in Afghanistan, or in Israel. Like, maybe you could talk a little bit about how traveling so much shapes your views. Totally. Thank you so much for asking that. So I grew up hosting foreign exchange students. My mom was a regional coordinator for an organization called PIE Pacific Intercultural Exchange. It was a volunteer position, but essentially she would match exchange students from vastly different countries around the world with families in our community that we knew through church or through baseball or whatever it may be.

So growing up in that richly multicultural environment really shaped a lot of my worldviews at an early age where I had, you know, when I was six years old, we had a young woman from Brazil stay with us who would talk about the economic and the social struggles in Rio de Janeiro and the class system and the favelas and things like that. And then I had a lot of students from the former Soviet Union, people who literally grew up in the Soviet Union and watched it fall. And now they live in places, you know, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova. I've got contacts from all throughout that former Soviet empire. And I'm still on a very close basis with many of them. In fact, it was one of those students who advocated and sort of influenced me to start the podcast.

in the first place is he was kind of, hey, I think it's a good time. I know what you're about. I know what you can do. And quite frankly, like, he's still on the unofficial board of directors of the media platform. And it's someone who has achieved a great degree of professional success and recognition worldwide and, you know, written for the Washington Post and things like that, been interviewed on mainstream media, you know, specifically relevant to economic sanctions in Russia. So, like, having those kinds of connections and relationships from places people and places like Ghana, you know, Africa, Venezuela, the former Soviet Union, those really shaped my worldviews. And that is what instigated a lot of my desire to travel. It's just, you know,

once I reached a certain age, man, I was fortunate to go with my family on a few family trips over to Europe, over to China. My brother studied abroad in Hong Kong for a semester. So we went to do, you know, a three-week trip of China when I was a senior in high school. And then on my own, I just kind of caught the travel bug, you know, in college in San Francisco, also learning about kind of travel hacking, you know, in a way to kind of keep it more cost friendly to be able to stay with people, to be able to, you know, at this point get invited to conferences and things where, you know, I got to go to England and have my airfare and my hotels covered and things like that. So it's something that I never want to stop. I just got home after three months in Asia and was in Singapore, you know, on the ground seeing things. And I actually just published an article about the difference in approaches and drug policy between Singapore and Thailand, where I was in Singapore where someone was executed for trafficking one kilo of cannabis. And then I was in Thailand where the same sort of cannabis entrepreneurs are being gainfully rewarded for their enterprise.

You know, they're legitimately selling cannabis openly. And just this idea of this incredible bifurcation in the same region between you have one government who's executing people for cannabis. crimes and one government that's calling it legitimate entrepreneurship and they kind of are in the same ASEAN region, A-S-E-A-N. So that's sort of how it shapes my views as I see something and they're firsthand accounts and you get to talk to people on the ground, you know, so I consider myself sort of a fungi diplomat at this point. It's kind of a term I've coined fungi diplomacy where I've written about this. I intend to do more content around it. Everywhere you go in the world, you're going to find people who are interested in psychedelics, and they might not use the term

psychedelic. It might be ethno medicine. I spent a lot of time in southern Mexico and have very robust ties to the community here. And a lot of them are out there studying solosities or they have, you know, family connections to solosobes between Wajaka and Chiapas and Central Mexico. And they don't consider it psychedelic because it's just part of their folk heritage, right? So that's part of what the lens that I bring to the work that I do is not only just visiting these places as a tourist. And I try as much as possible to get off the Airbnb Uber track and to get into local communities with local contacts and to hear about what they're up to, you know, to experience life with them for a little bit. You know, to go to a Polish Catholic church service on Christmas Eve in Poland, right? Or to go visit North Africa.

And, you know, I lived in the Middle East. I live, or swana region is a better term for it. But I lived in Saudi Arabia. So, you know, I have connections there and have fostered relationships with the head of the Arab psychedelic society and, you know, have learned about some of what they're up to and what's happening in that region as far as people taking psychedelics, you know, and a lot of times outside of the country. They'll leave Saudi Arabia or Dubai or whatever it is and, you know, be in Los Angeles as a student

and have a psychedelic experience. So that's been monumental to shaping the way that I see the world. And the last bit I'll contribute there is I think that people who are glued to their timelines and just constantly living in the Twitter universe or the mainstream media universe or even, you know, some of the smaller independent creators and newsletters are no better. They're constantly fixated on that. They're missing the bigger picture that actually there's a lot of really, really good people out there. There's a lot of people who don't care that you're American.

You know, there's this sense of like, oh, everybody hates Americans because of our politics. It's like, I've meant so many good people. my wife and I were just talking about this last night. We were in Baghdad, right? The city and the country that should hate Americans more than anyone probably. And we found nothing but hospitable, nice people who wanted to get to know us. They were like, the only Americans we've ever met have been in military uniforms. And they're like, we know that that's not the representation of your country. We know that that's part of your country. And we don't want our country to be portrayed as, you know, these terrorists or these, you know, the other or whatever, like we want to just hang out.

And we would go to hookah cafes or go get tea. And strangers would come up to us, you know, we're the only Westerners there. And they're coming up to us to talk to us and use the 20 words of English they know and smoke a hookah with us. And wanting to pay for our bill. There were strangers fighting over paying for our bill when we're like, no, we want to pay for your bill. So I think travel brings that out in people. And you get to see like a person is not their government. You know, you don't have to be defined by the.

the culture you were born into, you're allowed to go outside of that and to be a citizen diplomat and to be a fungi diplomat. Man, it's so meta. Like, you know, when we talk about the language of a trip, whether it's a psychedelic trip or whether it's a trip to Baghdad, it's breaking down boundaries. It's understanding that the narrative that you've been conditioned with is just that, a conditioning narrative. It's not something that you should live by.

In fact, it's something that walls you in. And it, you know, it forces you to be. small-minded if you only listen to one stream of information coming your way. You know, when I think of the Middle East, I think of like the Sufi poets and like Rumi and all these incredible just words that you can read one line and just continue to read it for a month and still pull new information out of it, you know? And you talk about the difference in Singapore versus Thailand. And do you see like because you have this unique perspective,

is the rest of the way I guess I'll try to say it like this in the United States we have like Oregon and Colorado that are beginning to move forward and decriminalizing things maybe California but then you have like the idea of Thailand or you have parts of Mexico

or there's different parts of the world that are finding different ways to embrace the relationship with psychedelics or in theogens do you think that the whole world is sort of moving in this direction. Do the people, you know,

you talked about the difference between Singapore and Thailand. Is that the same difference between like Nebraska and Oregon? I mean, there are some similarities there? Or is this whole thing happening worldwide? Or what's your take on that? Yeah, I think that there's always going to be people

who remain in their echo chamber and that there's going to be actors who pander to that and stoked that, you know? And that's part of what we're seeing right now, I think, in the psychedelic renaissance as some people call it, a psychedelic movement, right? You have vastly different political ideologies

who are competing for a chance at shaping the future and the mainstreaming of psychedelics. Because as many people have noted, I don't think there's any way to put psychedelics back in the box. There was a period during, I don't know that they ever went away,

but certainly after the psychedelic counterculture in the 60s until today, there were very few people talking about psychedelic use, right? Like we got to encounter it a little bit in our neighborhoods. You know, I was like coastal elite, if you will, born into San Diego middle class. Like, you know, it wasn't a big deal. But like, you know, the fact that now you can be in Salt Lake City or Tokyo or places like

this and people are talking about psychedelics, like there's no way to put that back in the box. So for me, it becomes a process of amelioration about, okay, realistically, we're never going to have far left call all the shots. It's never going to be far right that calls the shots, thankfully. But like, very realistically, from my perspective, perspective, the shots in the middle are going to happen. You know, things, we're going to see some hybridization.

We're going to see, okay, psychedelics got legalized and a very therapeutic, clinical model. But also this narrative around what's happening, you know, people are going to find other ways. And I think Eric Davis, who's a phenomenal journalist, you know, used to write for a reality sandwich and lots of other platforms, has written about this, but like, mushrooms are always going to be here. You know, people are always going to be using them in different psychedelics.

And I think that's what I'm trying to contribute to the narrative as well, is this idea that, okay, the mainstream media or these larger entities would have you believe that, like, psychedelics are being used to treat PTSD and they're illegal and decriminalized in this place or whatever. But it's like there are tens of millions of people, I think that's a fair number, who are using psychedelics or entheogens in some capacity who fall outside of that boundary. And, you know, I was just in the Gilly Islands of Indonesia. and mushrooms grow all over the place there. And even though Indonesia has very punitive drug laws and very harsh drug policy, this island is kind of outside the purview of a lot of that sort of, you know, authority metropolitan vanguard or guard, if you will, people are openly selling and advertising mushroom shakes on the beach, you know?

There's thousands and thousands of travelers coming by. Every single bar has openly advertised mushroom shakes. You'll see the same thing at the full moon parties in Copenhagen, right? There's 30,000 people to go to this full moon party, and mushroom shakes are everywhere. And up until 2002, psilocybin mushrooms were legal in Tokyo and in Japan under a legal loophole. So the same in India, Kodi Kanaul. It's like a hill station in India. The mushrooms are very well known.

You go to Mexico, everybody is familiar with mushrooms, you know? Like, I don't know what percentage of the population is taking them, but like it's not 5%. It's quite a bit larger. and maybe people aren't, psychedelics aren't for them or they're not interested in it. They still know what these are. They're still talking about them. So I just think that there's this filtering process that happens and that the media bottlenecks a lot of these things. The storytellers bottleneck them.

But there are just communities all over the world. Solicid and mushrooms are legal in Brazil. A lot of people don't know this. But like I was in Brazil this year, actually on a professional gig. My wife was working with a major media production company. And we got to go down with actually The Last of Us, which is one of the biggest shows, you know, on television of the last year, about corticeps for HBO. So we were down there with the cast and crew, a skeleton crew for Comic Con, which was the Sao Paulo Comic Con. And I'm hanging out with former exchange students in Sao Paulo.

And they're telling me about how easy it is to order mushrooms and how, you know, they have these festivals going on. Everyone's got mushrooms. It's like, you know, all kinds of other things, too, all kinds of research chemicals. So there's no putting this back in the box. And the next step to me, as mentioned earlier, becomes about education. I really think it's important to educate people to be like, yeah, you should have cognitive liberty. You should have the right to have a psychedelic experience as you see fit. You should also have the right to know about best practices, you know, certain things you might want to avoid.

And, you know, having lived in San Francisco where Pandora's box was fully opened, you know, and like you had kids my age who were able to very easily go. go buy 100 hits of acid, right? Or go by whatever quantity of MDMA or mushrooms you wanted to. But then you had no frame of reference or guide or elders necessarily who are telling you, you know, best practices. So because I have about 15 years of experience from this more like Western kind of commercial oriented perspective, I want to sort of play that role a little bit and be like, yeah,

you know, I've had some pretty challenging times where like I got more than I asked for it because I, you know, maybe took a bigger dose in an environment where I wasn't prepared. And I think that we need to really button that up and just to tell people like, okay, it's your first time doing psychedelics. You want to do it at a festival or something? Like maybe you take a very small dose. Maybe you take a half-eighth of mushrooms, you know, as opposed to a four-gram dose of mushrooms. So I just think that's important as far as like Oregon versus Nebraska and Thailand versus Singapore, et cetera, that people are equipped and empowered with the knowledge about these things so that they can make decisions for themselves. Otherwise, some other party is going to make

decisions for you. And I personally don't want a future that's shaped by a few very powerful interests who are calling all the shots. I'm not naive to think those powerful interests are going away, but I don't think that, you know, these few entrenched interests should be the ones who shape the whole narrative around psychedelics. I think there should be legitimate independent platforms and communities that are picking up the, you know, filling some of the bandwidth there as well. Yeah, that's a really well said. It brings me to the idea of Aldous Huxley. You know, when everybody reads, everybody reads Brave New World and like you hear about them taking Soma. And it's, it appears that it's like this disassociative. And in some ways,

you can see that as like a multinational corporation's wet dream for production. Like, hey, these people hate their job, but let's just let them disassociative. And in some ways, you can see that. associate for a while and then come back. In a weird way, it kind of sounds like SSRIs a little bit. But in his other book, The Island, talks a little bit more of like a utopian view where, you know, kids at the ages. And I'm not advocating for kids to do this. But in the book, they talk about, you know, nine-year-old kids climbing this mountain and sitting in church with like a 14-year-old mentor and beginning to, you know, underscore some of the great philosophical text and beginning to widen their views a little bit. But, you know, sometimes in my in my darker moments, I'm like, man, I could totally see how a disassociative combined with a narrative of production could be a form of brave new world. You know, I tend to, I prefer to be the island, but do you ever think that maybe a disassociative could be used as a bad thing? Yeah, I think so.

I mean, interestingly enough, since the podcast got more traction, I've, you know, had requests. from ketamine clinic operators and telehealth ketamine centers, you know, people like that to come on. And my sort of take on a lot of this stuff is, okay, well, I want to at least sit down at the table and be diplomatic and like learn what people are up to, you know, because yeah, I think bad actors should be called out. But I also think that there's this tendency in the psychedelic community I've noticed since kind of like my formal entree about two years ago for people to have very utopian, ungrounded worldviews about, you know, the way that things should be. And it's like, Hey, from where I'm sitting, that's not the way things are.

Like, we can certainly push towards that. But, like, if you can't sit down at the table with some of these larger corporalic multinational interests, you know, people like Christian Angermine, like, I'd love to have Christian Engermeyer, on the podcast. I'd rip him. I'd love to roast him, too. Then, you know, some of these things have even been discussed, like being able to sit down with some of these kind of, like, I guess, thought leaders, if you will, or people

who are at the vanguard of driving the mainstreaming of some. psychedelics in a very corporate condition model. Like I've had a chance to sit down and get to know some of these people. Yeah. You know, they're not on social media necessarily. Like they're, you know, over in Australia or someone, you know, have a background as, you know, an Indian national who now has a multi-million dollar pharmaceutical company that's doing ketamine, if you will.

And so as far as like what these people motive, what their motivations and intentions are, I think it's good to question them and to scrutinize them. But it's also dangerous just to, you know, cast this. Stay away. You know, don't come into our space. Like the reality is there are pharmaceutical interests very deeply entrenched in the space already, right? And anybody who has gone to any of these conferences or paid attention to some of the stuff knows this. So to me it becomes about a process of diplomacy and of being able to sit down.

You know, I talked to Amanda Fielding, as you mentioned recently. Yeah. And she's been going to the United Nations, you know, for 25 years and sitting down at the table. with these policymakers and international bureaucrats and politicians and stuff. And I've been very open about this. Like, I'd love to do this thing. I would love to go to the United Nations, you know, be it at one of their New York meetings or in Vienna, which I kind of had a chance to go to Vienna this year to a convention,

but it didn't work out. But I want to be at the table and I want to be able to sit down with people and maybe present my case and my unique brand and even just by being there and learning what the conversations are to hopefully influence drug policy. And the other thing that I'll mention here is I think social media in particular and our current media landscape, they want people to be very crystallized with their views, you know? And I think psychedelics are the opposite. Like psychedelics, for me, they often change my mind. You don't just have to change it one time. Like you're allowed to question your own beliefs. You're allowed to be skeptical of your own beliefs, which I think satire comes in great for

this. So like, I'm not so rigidly entrenched on a lot of my ideologies and positions that someone who presents a strong case can't get me to change my mind about stuff, you know? So it is kind of a you know, it's a slippery slope because there's certain principles you want to have driving you. But I think, you know, the political landscape we live in right now, I think that we should have some room for flexibility and for allowing ourselves to change our minds and to adapt instead of being like, this is my camp. I've planted my flag here and this is who I am. Like, no, I think we should be, and I think that people in power can change too. Okay.

I really think it's possible, you know, I might get some good laps, unintended laughs there from the audience. But in my experience, you know, I have met people, you know, I've been in circles of billionaires in Saudi Arabia. I've lived in Malibu and very, very, you know, these kinds of things. And I've met people who if they haven't changed their minds, maybe their kids will change their minds, you know. And they're like, yeah, I'm a little, I'm a little skeptical about that too.

So that's kind of my take on it. Is it just pissing in the wind? I don't know. But at least I can get some laughs and be satirical and have a good time doing it while hopefully advocating for and influencing real change. Yeah, that's really well said. Let's say that after being on the True Life podcast, the United Nations calls you up.

And they're like, hey, Dennis, we heard you talking to George and we want to give you a seat at the table. Like, what would you advocate for there? Well, I like to lean into what some of my elders or influence are advocating for. And a big one is just a more sensible drug policy. I think that's really getting at the heart. You know, psychedelics, I think they will always be available. And people who were called to them found them, as you said. It used to be a much smaller percentage of the population, but like, these are not a secret, you know, so people who were called to that. So where I think this is all

heading is I would hope for just a different relationship with drugs, as you will, you know, at large and drug policy. And that's my interest in like being at the table, sort of as a diplomat, if you will, is to, I wrote about this for a green state, which is a fantastic publication and the cannabis space, but about my experience in Thailand and in Singapore. And it's like, why would you allow this, unless it was for nefarious purposes, why would you allow an illicit black market, underground market to continue and all of the associated potential human rights abuses from that, you know, things done in the shadows

of, you know, shady interests involved in this stuff. Why would you allow that to continue when you can bring it under government control? You know, and this is something that a lot of people also are opinionated about. Even people who are pro-psychedelic are like, don't let those assholes fuck it up, you know? Like don't, but it's just like from a perspective of governance, like, why would you not legalize and regulate and tax that market? Okay. So, and again, I'm a proponent of cognitive liberty. You know, I knew plenty of very successful, you know, people who had diplomatic power.

passports, people who are in control of multi-million dollar operations. And they were breaking laws left and right, right? You know, they were getting really high-grade DMT and smoking it on their houseboats and stuff like that. So like that stuff's not going to go away, okay? But as we've seen with cannabis, which I'm not an expert on the cannabis market, I understand a lot of people are very upset about the way it's gone. But just the idea that like, now I can buy my cannabis and consume it openly and I'm not breaking any laws. I'm like, I don't have to lose my job or whatever. or, you know, I don't have to be looked at in a certain way because I choose to use cannabis. I'd like to see the same thing happen with drugs as a whole, you know?

And again, I'm not a policy expert, but I am pretty good at learning. I'm pretty good at, you know, filtering influences. And that's what I would advocate for at the United Nations. It's just, you know, a different approach to drug policy, one that's more aligned with the times that we live in and not the Reefer Madness era, you know, more something that's backed by science and data, which there's plenty of data, plenty of science that's coming out suggesting that psychedelics and that various drugs can be profoundly beneficial for certain people. So can we create those experiences in the future? Can we create those frameworks? Can I go to Meow Wolf

in Denver or, you know, New Mexico and take a microdose or a museum dose of LSD, right, a small dose? Can I do that legally? And can we find a way to fit that into the social fabric? So, you know, we have an uphill battle ahead. There's no doubt about. about that. There's going to be a lot of competing stakeholders and interests and trench powers and things like that. But there's no way to put psychedelics and a lot of drugs, quite frankly, back in the box. And I don't want to live in a society where like I go to Frankfurt, Germany or go to tenderloin, San Francisco. And there's just a whole street, you know, street full, a whole community full of people living on the street, essentially as junkies, if you will, you know, like,

I don't want to see that. I want to see a future where those people, it's recognized that, for whatever reason, be it social determinants, environmental determinants, et cetera, that that's how they want to spend their time. They're not hurting anyone. You know, they want to be on opiates. And, you know, again, sometimes I get into uncomfortable territory, but I'll go there with it. I don't want to see a future where that's how we treat people. I want to see a future where everybody has dignity.

And if you choose to use a certain drug that as long as you're not harmed in anyone, you have safe supply, hopefully, you know, that's regulated by some source. That's saying, like, if I want to buy an opiate and I want to use a drug, So if it's I know what I can take without killing myself or without, you know, posing a threat. And so that's kind of where I'm at on it. Again, I'm super open to these conversations that people want to question my logic and question my idea. And I think hopefully that's what makes me sort of a good diplomat is that I say, oh, yeah,

I want a reasonable debate with you. And I want to create the environments, usually in person or an extended podcast like this, where we can talk about these things without reducing them to 40 characters on Twitter, you know, or without, you know, Facebook where everything gets decontextualized. Yeah, it's really well said. And there's so many people are dancing around all the issues and you hear the 40 characters or you hear a sound bite here or you see something there. You know, one thing that I'm kind of fascinated by that I was talking to a previous guest is, you know, it seems that the addiction model, it's not a bug. It's a feature.

And, you know, you can see it throughout our community. Like, I'll give you the example of like Xerox. Like Xerox will sell, they'll give you the copier, but they'll sell you the toner. That's like a good drug dealer. You gave you the first one's free. I'm going to give you one box of toner free. And then after that, I want you to buy it all the time. And if the addiction model has permeated the business model, you know, it's something that is scalable.

It's something that is being used. And if we can see the addiction model in the business model, doesn't it kind of shed light that maybe that's what's happening in the medical model? When you talk about people that are on Suboxin and they try to get off of it, then they're immediately cut way down. And then they're told to go to a program where, okay, you can't do any drugs at all. that they set up these parameters that are almost setting up people to fail so they get back on this treadmill of addiction. I think that's true, at least on some level. I don't know that to be true. I'm just saying that that's my opinion to be true. And it seems that psychedelics on some level, at least when I hear the accounts of some people coming back from war, or sometimes you'll hear

a heroin addict talk about, look, I just took this and I, I'm, is really helping me. do you think that first off do you agree that potentially that addiction is a model and if you do agree with that do you think there's entrenched interest that would try to keep that model live yeah 100% you know I've been pretty unabashed about my perspectives on this and I think that's where microdosing fits in quite frankly you know like I'm not opposed to people microdosing but again it should be tempered with this other side of the narrative that's like if that's all you do as just you take you use psychedelics so that you could become a little bit better and happier at your job, then we're missing the opportunity for deeper structural systemic change.

I'm like, I grew up bombarded, especially towards my teens and college years, with all this messaging about how like humanity doesn't have any time left. Like we've, you know, inundated the world with carbon and we have to do this, this. And, you know, we've reached peak oil. It's like, I can't help but internalize that messaging and say like, well, maybe then we need actual systemic structural change. If these things that all of these world leaders and influencers are thrown at me are true about, you know, that we need to radically transform the way we do business. You know, there's different perspectives of how you do that.

You've got David Brunner talking about conscious capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, different ways. So I think that's where something like microdosing fits in because it would be convenient to create a scalable product that people take and go about their same days and go about their same routines. And I think there's like a fallacy or like a, you know, political rhetoric title for the. but it's essentially like it feels like the psychedelic crowd won. I'm like, look, you got your psychedelics. But did they? You know, was that really what people are pushing for? It's just like, we're going to have slightly better code writers and we're going to

have slightly better athletes. And that's all that psychedelics were for. I think that'd be a huge shame, you know, if that's all. Because yeah, man, and this is something I've critiqued a lot with my work, too, is this idea of the overnight authority, people who see this trend happening and they see psychedelics are in vogue right now. And, you know, they jump straight into that and you use your back. background in marketing and you use your background as a business executive or whatever, just to

essentially become a psychedelic advocate. But it's like, but what are you really advocating for? Are we looking for structural systemic change? Or are we looking for this, this deeply entrenched model hamster wheel, as you put it, to just go a little bit faster and a little bit better, a little bit more efficient. So one thing I'll always double down on, though, is like, it's not terribly difficult to have a psychedelic experience if you feel called to it. You know, it might take you a little while. Like if you live in the middle of Kansas, you don't know anyone, it might take you a little while, but like, it's really easy to order mushroom grow kits on the internet. Really easy, you know? Like there's, there's, you can, and most of the world, you can find

mushrooms growing naturally. You just have to know how to identify them. And that also brings into, uh, our, our view of broader relationship, too. I think sometimes like psychedelics, they're sexy, you know, and like people want to talk about psychedelics, but it's like, okay, what about after? What about after you have this experience. What do you do? And so something for me with mushrooms, a lot of what my podcast focuses on is not just the psychedelic, you know, aspect of mushrooms or the experience. It's like, you can make mushroom leather, you know, you can, I've got 25 different supplements people have sent me over here for Lions Main, for neurocognition, you know, for Rishi mushroom, for tempering your central nervous system and being more relaxed. And like, so you start to learn about the broader

legacy behind these things. And you learn like, whoa, China has a 4,000 year lineage and legacy of mushroom use of over 800 different types of edible and medicinal fungi. You know, in the region where I spend a lot of time, it's the same. You know, they've got over 300 different types of edible mushrooms and things are used for various reasons, for various ethnomychological uses. I think that's for me, like the ultimate goal of a lot of psychedelics is like to become more curious about the world to start looking for solutions, things like that. And some of the solutions might be disruptive, you know.

And so, you know, this is a conversation we could have ad nauseum. But I just think that this addiction model and like, you know, insurance companies providing psychedelics. So their employees can be more productive. I think that unfortunately misses the bigger picture. And, you know, there need to be people who go outside of that structure, if you will, and who go seek it out. And at the end of the day, you have to build a better mouse trap. That's what I'll close this particular bit with. It's like, if you find that you have an issue with,

capitalism. You have an issue with productive enterprise and the way, you know, the industrial economy and things like that. Well, you have to tangibly demonstrate that something that you're doing is going to be beneficial to people. And if you start getting more clients, and I think that's why, you know, I started the podcast about mushroom entrepreneurs because it's people, it's successful entrepreneurs and businesses, I think, who drive politics and who drive policy. It's like if someone comes along and they demonstrate, hey, I just grew, you know, 30,000 pounds of food and at much better way and a much, you know, much lower input and lower resource and lower carbon footprint, people are going to pay attention because they're going to be like, oh, shit, that person just built,

you know, a profitable, productive enterprise with a system that's not our system that we're foisting on people. That's how you drive change, I think, is, you know, at the entrepreneurial level and look at tech to, you know, look at Facebook, look at Mark Zuckerberg, look at like Elon Musk. I don't know about Musk, but he had some wealth and whatnot. But these people who build these products that revolutionize the way we do everything. So I think that's where there's a lot of value. You know, and like, okay, you know, I've taken flack for being like a mushroom entrepreneur, bro, or whatever. But it's like, hey, that's what's going to drive systemic change is people building better mouse traps.

Yeah, that's really well said. And it's interesting to think about the crossover between tech and psychedelics. It seems like there's a large number of people that are, you know, straddling one foot in each camp right there. And you can't deny the innovation that has come from tech. And another relationship I see between tech and psychedelics is, you know, technology seems to be deflationary. Like it seems to drive down the price of everything. And if we look at the price of cannabis, you know, it's a lot of people that are upset at how cheap it is. In my opinion, I can't see how mushrooms would be any different.

You know, you have all these people, whether they're moving for the delivery systems or they're making a cream or they're making a pill or whatever. Or like, but isn't all of that just going to drive the mushroom prices down like rock bottom, which I think is a good thing. I know some people would love to have the revenue source behind it. But do you see a pattern there between those two business models and the same thing happening? Yeah, totally. I can't imagine why anybody or why, you know, a scalable unit would apply to mushrooms, honestly. And I think that you know what?

I just think that like a lot of people who get into this just purely for the business element. purely as like a high growth industry, an emerging market or whatever. Like they don't have that relationship with nature or with what I consider to be a divine intelligence. And I think that, yeah, that's it. And like, so I'm an advocate for like, yeah, get high on your own supply, you know, like grow your own mushrooms or know your grower or something like that. And it shouldn't just be about trying to make a quick buck off this.

Like for me, it's far more valuable if someone has a transformative psychedelic experience that mushroom engenders, mushrooms and gender. And then they go do something awesome with their life. Like that's the testament you want to look for. I don't need to, you know, to try to build. And I do think that there will be mushroom dispensaries. There will be a demand for it. Because of course, there's always going to be people who don't have the bandwidth,

the time, the space, et cetera, to grow their own mushrooms. You know, it's like, for example, me traveling a lot, it's quite difficult to grow mushrooms. I've had, or weed, too. I've had plenty of scenarios where it's just like, oh, man, I got to get someone to come take care of this and that, you know, because I'm going to be gone. But, like, there's always someone who's going to do. it better and bigger. There's going to, you know, warehouse grows. There's huge, you know, state-of-the-art facilities that are able to produce very high-quality mushrooms, you know,

and make your chocolate bar or whatever. So like, I think that's going to happen, but it is going to drive the price down. So what that industry looks like, I don't know, but I've also been very vocal since day one of the podcast, or very shortly thereafter, about this picks and shovels approach, right? Like, if you were to use the analogy of the gold rush, if you're interested in, like, psychedelic business, Levi's made all the money in the gold rush, right? selling genes to minors and things like picks and troubles. So I went to meet Delic in 2019 or whatever it was. No, it was after that, maybe 2021.

And that was like the first psychedelic industry conference I went to in Las Vegas. There were three VCs on the stage. And it was called Big Money in Psychedelics. And somebody in the audience asked that question of like, if you had $250,000, you know, or let's say a fraction there. If you have $5,000 to invest in psychedelics in this ecosystem right now, where would you put it? And two of the three VCs on stage said, I'd put it in education and media. And I already had my platform at that point with the podcast.

And like the bells just started ringing. A, it's not illegal to do what I do. You know, you look at some of these larger players. There's plenty of psychedelic media platforms in the space. And I'm not advocating for everyone to go out and start a platform, but start thinking that way, start thinking like, how can I, if I want to be a part of this, if I want to create some income, you know, how can I support these things as opposed to just like, I'm going to, I'm a mushroom farmer and that's what I'm going to do. I think it's still very profitable for a lot of people, but also there's, you know, exponentially more risk involved, especially if you're

doing something at scale. So just start thinking about it in that way or like, you know, how can I support what's happening? There's a lot of people bring integration and like I would hope that you would do your due diligence, you know, and not just jump in and start offering. But like I think psychedelic tourism is going to be a huge thing you know there's there's already been a ton of people going down to peru going down to mexico traveling for this stuff but like i've thought about the idea and i've hosted people before overseas i've thought about the idea of doing like a psychedelic tour of paris or something you know like we're going to go to france for a week or you know the netherlands truffles are legal there we can go and kind of build in this value added experience so these are

kind of liminal or like, you know, upstart ideas that I haven't fully executed on. But yes, if you're getting involved in investing in psychedelics and you're coming from the outside, you don't have a personal relationship with these things. I think it's going to be a sore disappointment for a lot of people. And we've seen that in the market. It's kind of a race to the bottom. Like there's 50 or so publicly traded psychedelics companies right now. I've met the founders of CEOs of well over a dozen of them.

I've had them on the podcast. Like not a single one is profitable. They're all banking on some tightly controlled future where they're able to sell some narratives. But it's like, dude, you've been doing this for four years already and you're losing, you know, millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars. And you're getting out competed by the dudes in your parking lot of your clinic who are able, you know, to offer what you're offering for, you know, a much more accessible price. And I don't see how anyone's going to make money. You know, there's going to be a few companies that probably are successful. But even then, it'll probably be an oligopoly.

Like there will probably be a handful of very powerful and transatlantic. interest, why would it, why would psychedelics be different than any other industry? If there's going to be, you know, investment in it and we're going to see these people come into it, honestly, why would it be that different on a fundamental level and the way it's being structured from something like the petroleum industry or like the food industry or like the media industry, where there's, you know, six or seven very powerful interests who have a number of, you know, sub-interest and things like that. And that's the way, that's the way it's going. Doesn't mean I agree with it, you know, but I do double down on the fact that there will always be Mojo-Nick

and style outlaws like myself with our little studios who are able, you know, to satirize and to do things a little differently and say, hey, that's one route we could go, but it's probably not going to be successful for most people. And 99% of people using psychedelics or drugs at large are doing so outside of a clinical model. Why would that change anytime soon? Yeah, that's very comprehensive, well said. I really think it's a brilliant insight. You know, I think another issue, are you okay on time, man? Because I can keep talking. I'm enjoying, I'm super enjoying this. Me too, me too.

Okay, here's what I got then. So when I think about like the CEOs and I think about these publicly traded companies or even people that are getting into the business, whether it's, whatever it is, you know, they have a really difficult time trying to measure things, you know, like it's very difficult to measure something that's subjective. And it's like, oh, well, you know, what if we had this different model or now we can, you know, some neurofeedback, you know, and they're really grasping at all these ways to try to measure something.

that you can't really get your hands around. It seems to me like a more effective way to measure something would be to, hey, this person went through this program with me and now they started their own company doing this. Like it gets back to the idea of what you said. What do you do with the insight once you get it? And that gets even further one step back to the divine relationship you have, like these insights that you have. Maybe instead of trying to measure something in a lab, you measure it over like a seven-year period.

You have a journal. This is the insight that I had. This is the business that I started from there. It seems like a more robust form of measurement is to track someone from what they, and maybe it goes to optimization instead of healing. I know it's kind of a shotgun at the back door, but what do you think about trying to measure something or manage something you can't measure? Yeah, that's a great way of putting it.

And I think that too often, this is where this reductionist worldview comes in. I'm like, yeah, people trying to assign metrics to a psychedelic experience. But in reality, it should just be, what are you doing with your life? Like, you know, if you're like, let's say you're an evangelist for a fate, for a religion or whatever. And there's a lot of uncanny resemblances now for people in the psychedelic community, like almost like knocking on doors, like Mormons, you know, being like, do you have a minute to talk about microdosing? Right. It's kind of turning into that. But like I think a far more effective way of measuring it is like you look at a person and then you go, wow, I like what they're doing.

They're awesome. They're enjoying their life. you know they're productive they're happy they're fulfilled like that's the metric i'm looking for i'm not looking for this metric which you know people are talking about is like how many ceremonies can i do like you know how many you know how i'm going to reach a hundred million people to influence or whatever it's like that's not really what i think the messaging is one of the core messages that i've got from my psychedelic experiences are about considering uh value to be much more comprehensive than just monetary value you know and i think the other side of that is people sometimes

people sometimes throw out the idea that money is important. It's like, no, money is extremely important, you know? Like I think we can live in this idealistic, utopian, visionary Twitterverse where, you know, nobody has money. It's like, that's not the reality. Like so I don't think the fault lies there. I think it's the idea of having like a much more inclusive approach to wealth management or, you know, wealth building and whatnot. And like, for example, help. Like so easy. Like focus on building your help. Your relationships, you know, one of the key things I always get is about like, man, like I just called my parents today, you know, it was tough when I was over in Asia with the time zone stuff, but it's just like, I needed to check in on them. I need to maintain that

connection. You know, I'm lucky. I had a friend just lose their father and it's, you know, he's my age and he just lost his mother and his father. And it's like a crisis for him where he goes, you know, I'm 30 years old and I have no parents anymore. And like, you know, he had told me just like, people who are upset with their parents or whatever, you have an issue. He's like, you don't know how lucky you are to have a living parent, right? So like, it's that kind of stuff. where I'm just like, I got to call my friends. I got to check in on this person. I got to do that.

That to me is part of wealth, you know, is having really good social relationships and to be part of a community fabric. And I think that like this idea of investment and like thinking financially with psychedelics, when people reduce it just to like a number on a spreadsheet or whatever, you're missing the whole fucking point, dude. You know, I've worked at a company.

I've worked in education for a few years. And we were owned by a hedge fund at one point at a language school in San Diego. And they had the, executives and the brass come in. And all they cared about was cutting costs. They did not give a shit about the quality of the instruction. They did not give a shit about the teacher's well-being, the students. They cared about, you know, they're owned by a hedge fund. And this company, you know, we need to increase quarterly revenues or whatever. If that's the way you're approaching

psychedelics, you're missing the whole fucking point and your operation's going to be a failure. Okay, even if it's a success, it's a failure. So I just think that, yeah, you want to have some productive enterprise, but we need to redefine our measurements for, what value is, you know, and how we, and I think a lot of people have had this insight too. You know, I would rather make $30,000 a year with a ton of time working a few hours a week than make $120,000 a year, you know, chain to a desk somewhere where, you know, I'm constantly on call. And I've met plenty of people who have said the same thing. Like, yeah, actually, like I'm able to go pretty much anywhere I want. You know, I'm flying out to Portugal in August.

I'm flying out to Denver. I'm doing this. I'm doing that. And I make a fraction of the salary that some of my friends are doing, but also, you know, they've chosen that path, and that's fine. I don't disagree with, you know, what they want to do. But my perspective of wealth is much greater. It involves time. It involves well-being. It involves my social relationships. And so I just think that's part of, as a community, hopefully, as a planetary civilization, I would hope that we would get beyond this idea that, like, money is so rigidly defined, you know, as it has to be this unit of value. Like it has to be, if I don't have $100 million, then, you know, I failed as an entrepreneur. Like what happens if you make $100,000 but you have a really awesome life?

You're very content with yourself. You have great relationships in your community. You know, what happens if it's less than that? What happens if you make no money or, you know, you bust as a business? But you're also able to learn a lot from it and grow a lot personally and demonstrate, you know, contribute tangibly to your community and uplifting your community. Yeah, I love it. And I do think that that is the download or the insight that most people begin to see. Maybe it's just maybe that's what happens when you remove the fear from the conditioning.

He's like, what the fuck am I doing? I don't even see my family, man. This is ridiculous. But I want to kind of piggyback that a little bit. You know, you had said earlier in the conversation that there's no putting this genie back in the bottle. And that reminds me of a really cool story that, Terence McKenna told Ram Dass. You probably heard it, but I want to tell it to you and then get your opinion on it.

So they're sitting in this coffee shop in Prague. And Terence McKenna asks Ram Dass, like, so, you know, what do you think happened with the, you know, the psychedelic awakening that happened in the 60s? Like, what, what did you think went wrong? And Ram Dass says, of course, he tells his answer in the form of a story. And the story is something like this. He goes, imagine a warlord that is just. just moving through the Southeast Asian continent. And he is just ruthless.

And the only pushback, the only resistance he really gets is from, you know, the monks, the people of faith. Because he knows those are the only people that could rally up the fight and the love and the power to beat him. So he makes a incredible show of all the monks. And by incredible show, I mean, he hangs them up and like skins them and just just horrible things so that all the monks will be afraid of him. And his reputation is growing throughout the country. And as he makes his way into this next town, the leaders of that town meet the warlord. And they're, oh, great warlord. Everyone here is afraid of you.

The monks have ran for the hills except for one. And the warlord is furious. He's like, what? What do you mean? There's dare be someone that stands against me and spits coming out of his mouth. He's like, where is this monk? And they're like, oh, he's in the ashram. So the warlord runs over there.

He boom, opens up the doors. And he stands in front and there's the monk in front of him. I'm like, oh, how are you? And the warlord gets all up in his face, and he's like, don't you know who I am? Don't you know who I am? I could have my sword, and I could run it through your belly in the blink of an eye.

And the monk just says, and don't you know who I am? I could have your sword run through my belly without blinking an eye. You know, and so Terrence McKinnett says to him, well, that's kind of what happened, right? Like we had this huge show of love. We had this huge show of force. And when the guns came out, when it, when it became, came known that you can die, we ran for the hills. Do you see this idea that we just talked about about money being a control system, a lot of starting to lose its control and the idea of authority

in its last gasp of control trying to assert power. Do you see that that could be something that happens again? I think so. I mean, it's easy to be philosophical and talk about what you would do, but like how many people put their money where their mouth is, you know? think that's a reality for a lot of people. You know, we've seen that with various mandates and stuff like that, where it's like, people will ultimately choose, like, man, I got to put food on the table, you know, and I'm afraid of risk. I'm afraid of what it might look like.

And I think that's a very strong motivating factor for a lot of people is to say, you know, I want to be safe and I want to, I want to continue down this path because the other side is scary. And unfortunately, you know, very powerful interests of people with authority, they're professionals at this. And you know, what I will say about all this is like, this is where the role of the satirist, I think, comes in. And the trickster archetype is that throughout history, this has been omnipresent, every culture. Like, it's a part of different empires, you know, the Joker in the King's Court, right? Or the jester in the court. Like, it was a, it's always been a part of cosmology and of society, too.

You go back to indigenous cultures, you have the coyote and the fox and this trickster element. And it's something that I'm continuing to focus on where actually this might be a necessary part of power structures is to have a designated role, if you will, that is pointing out that the emperor is naked and that is openly mocking these interests. And I don't know the full backstory of everything, but that's where I'm at with a lot of this stuff. I do think that there is going to be a very strong push towards trying to tightly control people's behavior and habits and patterns. and things like that. And I've seen a lot of that in my travels. Like, for example, in Erbil, in northern Iraq, in Kurdistan, I was there in April of last year. And there's probably a hundred high rises that are being built right now. And these, you know, are all connected, smart cities, if you will, where everything is trackable, everything's monitored, everything's surveilled.

And these are empty high rises. And I asked the proprietor of my hotel, who's also involved in the real estate industry. I was like, why are there 100 high rises? Like this is a massive boom. He's like, oh, the people who are building those high rises, they know what's going to happen in the next few years, you know? And it was just such a like a cryptic, ominous answer. And, you know, seeing this over in Asia, too, there's just like these kind of tightly controlled, rigidly controlled environments everywhere, whether it's the subway, the nano apartment that you're staying in inside of a high rise, right? And you go through an airport and you see a 150, duty-free shops and you're forced to go through this, you know, intense scrutiny and

conditioning process. And then they funnel you through 100 shops and you have people buying things and they're marketing to you on the airplanes talking about enjoy this shopping. And I just think like when you have the powers that be who are benefiting from this sort of corporatocracy, if you will. And again, you know, this is a little bit, it starts to get into Timfoil head territory, but if we can't talk about this on the true life podcast, I love it. It's something that I, it's something that I think is very, very real that we're seeing is we're seeing a lot of social engineering happening. And especially like with social media and the internet, it becomes very difficult to discern what's

correct or what's best for a person. And people like to think in herds in a sense. There's safety in the herd, right? It's like if I see everybody doing this, everybody jumping on this bandwagon, I don't want to get left behind because it's dangerous. And like then you have people labeling independent, critical thought leaders or thought thinkers as heretics, you know, being like, you have a dissenting opinion, you're a heretic, you're dangerous, we need to de-platform you, we need to cancel you, et cetera. So we're in for a giant cluster fuck, I guess is what I'm getting at. And I think the key here is to be very discerning and to try to take from different worldviews. And I very intentionally follow people online that I don't necessarily agree with politically.

Like, I want to understand what are they thinking, where are they coming from? and, you know, hopefully finding a way in your own life and in your own community to hybridize some of these different thoughts and to find a way forward. Because I don't want to live in a future that's a giant shopping mall, you know? And I saw that. Like, like, I went to Borneo. And I thought Borneo was going to be the most wild kind of like epic, wild place. It was so tightly, rigidly controlled, you know, as far as like, okay, you get on the boat here. You have minders and people.

Your single file queue, get on the boat. You get to the lodge. You know, they have a nature. walk at the lodge that's supposed to be a walk through the jungle. A tree fell and they closed the whole walk for everyone. And I find myself thinking like what they're like oh due to public safety concerns, right? I was at Disneyland and Tokyo. They closed down the camera that takes the pictures of you on the rides and their official reasoning was due to safety concerns. We cannot take your pick. But it's just like that was so tightly controlled every step of the way. Whereas I was thinking Borneo and you know these other

places going to be this really wild experience. No, it's a, very bottlenecked experience about like, oh, you have to use, you know, certain types of pay. Like, we don't accept cashier. You have to download this app and you have to use this, right? And then you're at the hotel. We have a very strict procedural check-in process. And it kind of robs a lot of the spontaneity and joy and independence. And then at the end of the day, you're left with a shopping mall. You're left with, oh, there's nothing to do necessarily. You know, I went to a headhunter village in Borneo, which is like you think it'd be the most metal far out stuff and it was just like a package tour you know of like okay you stand here they

tell you for five minutes about this and then you go there and i long for a sense i guess a frontier of just like yeah you know being able to make your own decision i think a lot of people who have had psychedelic experiences downloads get that it's like i don't really want to be controlled you know then maybe i am being controlled you know to a degree i don't even recognize but like when you start to see the manipulation happening. Like, I don't want to live in a nano apartment where every metric, you know, my body is tracked and given to a third party. And I go on my timeline and I see individualized ads that are just for me, you know, for a new toothbrush or whatever. Like, that starts to get a little bit, you know, a little bit dystopian to me. But also at the end of

the day, you know, like, I might not be able to fight back effectively against this. So having a sense of humor about it, you know, creating, using these triggers as inspiration for my work. Those, that's what I do. That's how I respond. It's like, you know, the final thought on this. I've been very fortunate to go to Maria Sabina's house twice. Yeah. With her family and the mountains of Oaxaca. The first time was in 2010.

Second time was last year. And it was just me, not with like a group of people, not a tour group or anything, just like going out into the hills and seeking them out and spending time with them at their invitation, you know. And I spent a night, two nights there and did a mushroom ceremony with one of her direct descendants. And during that ceremony, you know, the first time I had a. really powerful, cathartic, visionary trance state that happened very naturally. The second time, that wasn't happening. And I remember thinking like, okay, maybe I got all the info I need. And I started writing plot lines for satire like there under the influence. And then the mushroom started hitting me

and literally started just like cracking up with me. And it was this sense of like empowerment where it's like, the mushrooms think this shit's funny, dude. Like they think, you know, they're there. And so that's where I'm out with it. It's like, look, we can get all bog down. and being afraid of the warlords and the dystopian, this and that. Or we can use that as sort of as inspiration for living our life. And we can write a song about it or we can do a comedic piece about it or a bit. And it is what it is. I love it.

You know, when I think of authority, like the one thing they hate is to be laughed at. You know what I mean? Like it just takes away all their power, you know. And whether it's the mushrooms or whether you're in a situation, where maybe you're getting beat up, but you just laugh at the people. And I think there's a lesson in there. And I think it's one of the lessons

that I learned from taking mushrooms is that everybody around you was kind of a mirror. And that when you see things in other people that you don't like, you're really seeing things about yourself that you don't like. And I went to this whole long phase

where I figured that out, you know, and then there's like this transition phase of like, okay, well, for me it was like, I didn't like this person because I thought they were weak. And I'm like,

this guy's a big week. fuck pussy dude i don't even like this guy but then i realized like someone pulled me aside and they're like dude why are you so mean to that guy and i had to think about it i had a long trip and then like it just hit me like dude i don't like that guy because i'm weak and he reminds me how weak i am and then i had to go apologize to him and be like dude i'm such a dick i'm so sorry man you know and he's like yeah i know you are but i forgive you it was really i was really stoked and he forgave me and stuff like that but then the next the next phase for me was like okay well if you don't like that you're weak, what do you do? I'm like, well, I should try to make other people strong.

Okay. So I tried to like, you know, motivate some people and I'm like, ah, it's not really working. You know what else can I do? And I'm like, well, maybe you can make other people strong by making yourself strong. And then you get that idea of like, oh, yeah, I got to be the change. You know, oh, yeah, that works. And then all of a sudden, you start stepping up like, okay, well, who are the people that I think are strong? What attributes do they have? Okay, well, can I mimic that? And pretty soon you find that you can become that change that you didn't like about somebody else, then it becomes you. And I think that that is something that I would love for people to do, that if you're taking mushrooms, just to understand that.

Like the people you see, and whether it's a good attribute, that's something you have. And especially if it's a bad attribute, focus in on that because that's something you recognize in them is trying to be shown to you. And once you harness that, then you can change it and you can become a better version of yourself. And I think that that, to me, is another message that the mushrooms give you is like, look, we don't want you to be controlled. We're trying to show you all the problems that you have so that you can become an authentic version of yourself and you can help other people. I think that's one of the most powerful messages I got.

And I think that we can stop the control mechanism by each individual, not helping each of everybody else, but becoming the best version of themselves. I think that's one of the most powerful messages of mushrooms. What do you think about that? Totally. Preaching to the choir here. You know, for me, it all starts at an individual one-on-one level. I think, like, people who get so meta about, like, I'm going to drive this systems change. I'm going to do this. It's like, okay, how are your relationships with your neighbors?

You know what I mean? Like, that's for me what it always comes back to. Yeah, me too. You know, yeah, I've had a lot of challenges, honestly, with growing this platform. And, like, I've been in a funk even the last few days, you know, transitioning from this three-month trip back to my home studio, trying to get in the flow of work and stuff like that. And like, you know, there's a million things competing for your attention. And I was just like, I'm going to call my parents right now.

And then I'm going to call my best friend. And then I'm going to go down and have a cup of tea with my wife. And like, that's what I'm going to use as my kind of protest against the system. Right. It's like, how are your relationships with your neighbors? I've met people, you know, who online have this grandiose persona or whatever. And then you see them like at a party with someone and they're just kind of an asshole, you know? And it's like, you know, it's easy for us to dilute ourselves.

and social media makes that so easy, right, to present and to be performative and stuff like that. But like, you know, staying connected to groups, to authentic relationships, to people, you know, when your internet is not there for you anymore or whatever, who's there for you? You know, like are these people you've built relationships with that, you know, so, and that's kind of odd, like, as a, I guess, public figure, quote, and quote, where I've now a lot of people pitching me a lot of ideas and, like, I have these relationships with all these people. It's like, I can't keep investing all this bandwidth in those because it spreads you too thin. Like I'd rather pick, you know, eight core people that I'm going to invest the majority of my bandwidth and build with them, right?

And then there's an outer circle, maybe like 25 people that, you know, I'm a little bit closer to. So that's my take on the whole thing. I was like, yeah, I think we need to invest in on the ground level, boots on the ground. What are you actually doing who are actually your people? And there's some people, you know, doing great work with that right now. And that's where I think the value of these in person conferences comes in. in. It's like you can meet people. And, you know, I've never been to one of these, I've probably been to 12 conferences now. I've never had a conference where I didn't have some kind of tangible

result that came from it. Someone inviting me to publish on their platform. Somebody, you know, inviting me to the board of directors for this or that or the other. Yeah. What's that like? Like, you're at this critical juncture where like, you know, you've built this thing up. And all of a sudden, like, you're at this level. Like, you're starting to see like a whole other, a whole other realm a little bit. But you can still see where you came from. and you can kind of see where you're going, but you're like in this transition period. People are starting to put their own labels on you,

like, hey, you're that guy, you know? Is it weird to kind of have that rap put on you? And how do you, like, how is it like to be in that transition phase? Yeah, it's been really humbling, really awesome. And I think that's where I doubled down. I'm wanting to be like a niche outsider, weirdo creator, because that's part of it. It's just like, there is something when you notice people paying attention.

And like, I'll give you an example. I've become pretty good at doing this. like I'll pick a certain crowd that I want to send a message to, even if that's a cryptic message, you know, and I let them unpack it. And one of those, you know, people or the groups, I've guess been, I've been accepted or, you know, recognized by like this very niche, like, ultra-performer, biohacker entrepreneur crowd, you know, who go to the Soho House and who go to, and I just did a video about the summit at sea, which was, you know, invite only. Richard Branson was there, Sergey Brin, I think, from Google was there, people like that, right? And it went kind of viral in that community. And

people were passing it around. And a lot of those people jumped into my audience now, right? And they're like, and these are people that I consider, you know, they would label themselves as change makers, people who are, you know, founded multi-million dollar companies. You know, they have some resources. When they, you know, publish an article, people read it. When they send email, people open it, things like that, you know. So it's been very interesting to kind of like have that connection to people in those spaces who are now pitching me ideas that are really interesting. I've been approached to be added to the board of directors for essentially what's going to be a multi-million dollar psychedelic company. And it's all kind of in the larval phase right

now, right? It's being incubated and inoculated. But the people involved have had successful seven or eight figure exits. They're not just stringing together a team like they're doing their due diligence. So it's been interesting to kind of navigate what I call like the increased opportunities and the increased scrutiny. And so rather than try to constantly pander to those people, I sometimes put up, I put stuff out to be difficult to them intentionally to be like, you know, like you're not going to bring me into your project. If you want to buy my silence, as you put it earlier, the check needs to be bigger. You know, like, I'll, and that's like definitely an exit strategy for my door. It's like, I'll become annoying enough.

and big enough, were you going to have to co-opt me and the check's going to have to be the right size? Or also, you know, I'm going to keep playing ball the way I know how. I love it. I love the line, like, they're all together with their genetically superior, polyamorous others. And then all the pictures up there, it's so spot on and so damn funny, man. It's like, who are some of your heroes? I hear you talk about like Hunter Thompson sometimes, but who are some of your heroes and influences? Love this question. Yeah, probably my biggest all-time influence is Tom York of Radiohead. I'm a massive radiohead fan. And, you know, I try to emulate some of what they do where they're very independent,

very cerebral, very thought-provoking, very odd, but they also managed to reach the, you know, upper stratosphere, the peak of commercial success as well without prioritizing that, you know. And so, you know, Radiohead and mushrooms change my life. and I was very fortunate I considered to be a gift from the universe. I discovered them at the same time. And they just kept coming back to me. I was like, I wasn't even seeking it out,

but like I had a mushroom experience my very first time at the San Diego County Fair, back then known as the Del Mar Fair. And while I was waiting for Ozo Motley to come on, peaking, you know, 1.7 grams of mushrooms, very manageable, had all of the giggles, had all of the body buzz and everything. The sun's setting there by the sea and Delmar, purpling, orange, orange clouds, just the most divine scenario. And I'm standing against a wall of speakers and the radio head song, Idiotek, comes on.

And it just blew the roof off my imagination. You know, I'd never heard anything like it. I'd probably heard the song before, but not like that. And I could literally feel the sound waves washing over my body. And that's what I always say for me. And what I hope for other people to have the experience with is like, when I got introduced to psychedelics, I didn't have a smartphone. You know, I didn't even have a social media account.

This was before all of that. And I got the roof blown off my imagination. And I hope people know that there's more to psychedelics than microdosing. You can literally blow the roof off your imagination. So yeah, Tom York, Radiohead, huge influence on me. And also the way they approach business, right? It's like they're quite successful financially. But they're also deconstructing and driving a lot of change,

doing things like changing the record industry model of pay what you want, you know, with their in rainbows release, as opposed to like, we're going to do another major label deal. like, no, we're going to try something different. We're going to experiment with a different pricing model. Leaking one of their albums, or Tom York leaked an album. The name's escaping me right now, but he leaked it online. It's just like, here, oh, BitTorrent, you know, putting it out on BitTorrent.

That's what I want to do is be like, hey, let's fundamentally question some of these broader systems that are in play about the way we engage in commerce, about the way that we run our businesses. As far as like, you know, writers and thinkers, Terence McKenna, huge influence, as with so many other people. you know, again, at a seminal age, I remember reading food of the gods and just being like, this is the first thing I've read in a long time that really, really makes sense to me. And like, it's ambitious, you know, it's really far out there. It's not, it doesn't walk on eggshells. It makes, it posits incredible theories, right? So, and reading about the whole skeptical approach that McKenna had, you know, skepticism, skeptical of the mushrooms themselves.

You know, how do I know what you're telling me as true, right? How do I know, you know, you, you, told me that I need to quit my job and go start an ashram. How do I know that's true, right? I think that that element of skepticism and humor that he introduced is really, really interesting. Yeah, Hunter S. Thompson has come along later. You know, I've always been familiar with who he is, but like people, which is a huge honor and also the kind of thing I've, you know, had to adapt to a little bit. Numerous people have like applied that label to me and been like, dude, you've got like a Gonzo thing going on. Like you've got a Hunter S. Thompson quality to what you're doing. And like, that's a big name, you know, to have very respectable people applying to you.

But again, I just like the bizarerness. I like the bizarerness of him, you know, like he contradicts himself, you know, he's a multitude. He's all over the place. And kind of this, that same transition of like being a serious journalist, you know, who's on the, you know, doing very serious journalistic work, but doing it through this insane, bizarre, cryptic lens. And that's something I've turned. I think I lost you there for a minute. Yeah, Hunter Thompson was amazing. I remember he was on. Now you're back.

Oh, there he is. Now he's back. I lost you there for a second. Yeah. It's Claudia and I've got Starlink. So hopefully, yeah. Nice. You know, that brings up another point, too.

We do, maybe it's just the lens that I've been looking through. But have you noticed like an explosion in creativity? since we've started talking about the psychedelic renaissance, whether it's mushrooms or some of these new analogs coming out. Like I haven't really seen a whole lot of creative explosion. I'm wondering if you have. Yeah, I think that that's always been happening and you have to gravitate towards those circles. And again, this is part of this just, I think, broader cultural homogeneity that's going on. I think there's a, you know, globalization and kind of the global brand is robbing a lot of people of their

creativity, you know, and this is obviously debatable, but, you know, I taught multimedia in high school for several years. And that's like the most creative subject you can have. And I found that like a lot of people have become desensitized to that stuff because, you know, they're the glued to their timeline. They're on social media and whatnot. And so, you know, there are communities that are wildly creative, but you might have to log off of the internet and go over there. You know, I've been to creative conferences like the Adobe Max conference. That was a wonderful one. But again, when everything becomes bottlenecked by how much it's valued, you know, that, you know, and valued in the sense of purely monetary value, that's a problem because like the United States, they don't invest

in art, you know, if it doesn't make money, they're not investing in creativity. And I've heard other very highly respectable musicians and artists say that. Same thing in the UK or in England. It's like the government and the powers that be don't necessarily, you know, offer fellowships to artists or they're very exclusive, you know. So I think that's part of the issue is that society at large seems to deem like unless you're commercially successful, unless you sold 50 units or whatever or 50,000 units, you're not successful. And a lot of young people who are inherently creative have that kind of bread or conditioned out of them where they say, you know, maybe I'm a great painter or like, I didn't know I was good at stand-up comedy until I got invited to do it. You know,

I've never explored that avenue. And part of it is just like, man, it's hungry. I've been in a band for years where you're not making any money, you know, and like you become, you know, outside of your bubble of high school or college or whatever. And it's like, God, it's hard to seriously pursue art when no one's paying you for it. And like people are asking you to do stuff for free. Like, oh, I can play at our venue or whatever and we'll give you, you know, you walk out the door with 150 bucks for five band members. It's like, this is totally unsustainable. So I think that's part of the broader issue. It's like, you just have to find time yourself to create and you have to go to those communities that are doing it and nurture that, you can't expect it to happen for you.

Yeah, that's well said. And I guess that that's kind of what breeds the real genius in creativity is making something happen when everyone around you tells you it can happen. Yeah, and I think there are some organizations like Patreon is a good one. And I want to get more active on that where it's really, I think creator and artist is an invaluable part of global society. and we need to create structures to invest in them. And like Canada does it pretty well.

They've got all kinds of fellowships, you know, and all kinds of, I've had friends in the U.S. who go out to Canada and they're like, wow, like I just did a six-week residency in bank. And like I got a stipend or whatever, you know. And I would love to see more of that stuff. I would love to be a benefactor one day. If I'm financially successful enough

where I'm able to create fellowships, I would love to be able to invest in that. And yeah, you know, it's a broad subject area there. but I think at the end of the day, people are afraid to not make any money because life's expensive, you know, and you want to, and that's socially conditioned into us. We have to have the newest model of iPhone. We have to have this. Well, if you're an artist and no one's paying you, you know, and you're like, it's tough to keep that up. So obviously, you're going to go to your bread job and you're going to, you know, find a way some people do it successfully. Unfortunately, a lot of people decide that there's no value in creativity and artistic expression. There's only value and, you know, following the paper trail. And all your travels and seeing the different types of exchanges and attitudes and cultures. And we talked a little bit about the clamping down and the control and the potential destruction of money and stuff like that.

What do you think about the idea of parallel structures for economy? Like, do you see that that being something that's kind of popping up with like crypto and, you know, just different kinds of exchanging energy or something like that? What do you think about parallel economies? Yeah, I love to roast this one too. It's really easy because there's just as many crypto scams as there are psychedelic scams as there are, you know, whatever it was before that. And I'm sort of of the persuasion that there's no free lunch anywhere in the world. You know, there's no free lunch. So like the idea of like get rich quick turns me off. And that's what a lot of like some of, you know, some of what I've seen online at least, these models are being rolled out in almost a pyramid scheme like fashion. Like, oh, this person made X amount of money. money on Dogecoin. It's like, okay, I don't think there's a free lunch. Like, I think that there can be value. I've had some crypto pioneers on the podcast. I had Jeremy Gardner, you know, who made a $300 million fortune with crypto. And, you know, it worked out really well for him. I also know lots of people who lost lots of money on crypto, you know, because they went big with it. So as far as

parallel structures, again, I come back to like, roots level, systems level thinking of like, you know, am I part of a community agriculture project, community supportive agriculture? Am I buying a farm box? from someone who's launched this enterprise in my neighborhood. You know, I have a group of cannabis entrepreneurs that I work with here. And I just love to get invited to stuff and go smoke joints with them and support on a ground level what they're doing. It's like it's so much better than, you know, joining a Zoom thing. And obviously not everyone has all those opportunities. But my take on it is just like create those parallel structures and create a way to be as self-sufficient as possible.

I think that's one of the recurring themes of, you know, psychedelic downloads. It's like, you know, I'm in a very good financial position right now because I don't spend money on a lot of things, right? Like I pick my purchases. Travel is very important to me. So that's a high ticket item. Like I got to find a way, you know, flight over here. And then I'm there. Okay, do I need to go to a five course dinner with bottles of wine?

It's like I might want to do that once a month, you know? But like that's, I think where you really can button down or double down on these like closed loop economies is trying to be self-sufficient. I built my own studio, you know? I did my own logo. I did the music for the podcast. You know, I have someone who offered to build me a website. I built my own on Squarespace. And then a professional website architect was like, shout out Nate Segar.

I was like, Nate Segar to get authentic. He just hit me up. He's like, hey, I'd love to build your website for you for free. I love what you do. And, you know, just taking control of all that, I realize, like, that's why I think mycpreneur is going to be successful in the long run and why it's been successful. It's like, I'm not dependent on funding. You know, I'll gladly form relationships with people.

I'll promote certain products or, you know, take speaking fees. But if that stuff goes away, I have my studio and I can do this independent of funding. And that's where I want people hopefully to get with their other lives. It's like, as you using that analogy or that story of the monk, it's like, yeah, they're going to double down. They're going to try to control everything, you know. They're going to want you to live in a shopping mall and be funneled through and, you know, have your smart house that's picking up everything.

And good morning, Mr. Walker. Would you like a refill of your coffee subscription? Like that's maybe where we're headed towards, you know. Yeah. If I can be super self-sufficient as much as possible, and within an ecosystem, and I've gravitated towards living in a community like that where there are a ton of artisans, there are a ton of gardeners, there are a ton of people growing their own cannabis and mushrooms. Not enough.

I think everyone should grow their own mushrooms. But that's what I want to see in my future. And then I can choose to participate in the global economy, you know, because I'm not dependent upon it. And this also doubles back to the idea of solopreneurship, you know. My wife and I have both been in positions where we've worked. for reputable world-class organizations. She worked in production. She was doing shoots for Google, and the Department of Homeland Security. And when you're part of that, it's like, it's awesome,

but then you're so dependent on that funding and on that, you know, income and what, and you build your life around that. I've worked in education at a, you know, world-renowned high school founded by Bill Gates and Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm. And I got let go. She had a very serious health issue with the cancer at a point, so left her work. And we were kind of like, like, like caught in these systems, you know, like where a lot of people are, it's like you're dependent on the funding. But we also had the foresight and the oppressions to start doing side hustles all the way back in 2014. And, you know, by 2017, we were registered as a sole proprietorship. And now, fast forward, it's like we have maybe five or six different streams of income from

six different places, including the podcast. And it's like, if one of them dries up, you're not fully dependent on it. So I think that sense of resilience, of creativity, you know, of treating your business in your life as an artistic project, which is something Amanda Fielding shared with me, how she runs her foundation. It gives you a lot more bandwidth and resilience in the face of change. And there's always going to be change. For most people in the world, your employer doesn't give a shit about you. You know, you die tonight. They're going to replace you by midnight, you know, like you don't want to be in that hamster wheel. So like start planting seeds or spores right now that are going to help you be a little bit more self-sufficient.

that's so awesome man i love every bit of that you know i in for some like let's say there's like a young george or a young dentist out there and maybe they live in the united states or maybe they live in singapore and they they think to themselves like man i'm just caught up in this game right here like my parents they they work of you know they work a nine to five my grandparents worked a nine to five i went to this school where i was trained with bells and whistles and had to get a hall pass i've been conditioned you know you found yourself living, I think you moved to Mexico at some point in time. Like what like, would that be something like obviously travel is a big way to learn about the rest of the world?

Do you think that a younger version of yourself could benefit from advice like, hey, maybe get out and explore what it's like to live in another country because that might be the catalyst that gets you out of this rat race? A hundred percent. I've lived and worked in four different countries. I've lived in Saudi Arabia and taught English over there. I've worked at a green shell muscle factory in New Zealand for three months and spent six months on the South Island of New Zealand. I've spent time in Nepal, a period of time, a few other places. And yeah, I spend a lot of time in Mexico. I have a base here.

I think that, you know, you have to invest in whatever community you're in and you have to try to be part of the social fabric as part of it. There's a very real danger with, you know, people creating little bubbles wherever you go and you seek out the other expats or immigrants, if you will. And like, only hang out with them and you don't learn the language. I think like that's deleterious to a way just to like drive up the local prices when you could look for ways to support and benefit. Like I know a few people who are like this, you know, who move, get to experience life in a different place and adopt the culture. And like the other day I was hanging out with a group of all local cannabis entrepreneurs speaking Spanish, smoking cannabis. And I was the only gringo there. And there was something really poetic about it where I was like, this is great.

Like I'm having to use a different part of my brain, you know, engage, build my personality. out and it's so much cooler than just like going to the fancy restaurant with the expat gringos, you know, which is so easy to do for a lot of people. And I think that there are an abundance of opportunities to get out of the country wherever you are and that you should, you should go see. Even if you go back and do, you know, go back to your hometown. It's like the story of Santiago and the Alchemists, you know, going so far and then you find your treasure at home. But like that period of living somewhere else and seeing how other people think and embedding yourself in that culture, like tremendously beneficial.

for you as a human being, for, you know, learning about the world and getting out of that box. And I go back to San Diego now and I'm with friends. And like, I feel enriched for these experiences. They want to talk to me about my travel experiences. And, you know, at the same rate, though, I think, like, if you're always just constantly wandering, like, that's your lifestyle, if that's your choice. But like, maybe, you know, the answer is actually back where you came from. Because wherever you go, there you are, right? You can't just expect, like, I'm going to move over to the mountains of Nepal and do this and that's going to solve my problems. Like if that's what you're doing, you know, or like the hippie movement in the 60s going to the ashrams in India, or even now,

today's parallel, like a lot of people who I've met many people like this, I've been invited to do this stuff. Go and start an intentional community, an ayahuasca community or whatever. When it's like the local Peruvians there would desperately love a visa to the U.S. in many cases, just to work at a restaurant that you're saying is such a bad, you know, system or whatever. So like I just think, you know, it is life's too big for one person to figure out. It's very good to have a macro perspective of things and to recognize like, hey, the U.S. and, you know, wherever I'm from might not be the best way of doing things, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You know, I love watching professional baseball, even if I don't agree with all of the politics and the way the sports run or whatever. Like I love watching my Padres, you know, I love going out to a restaurant and ordering, I love then and out, you know, like I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I don't want to be totally, totally dependent on one worldview and one way of thinking. You know, sometimes fear is just so paralyzing. And, you know, you talked a little bit ago about being laid off and your wife leaving her job. It's been my experience that sometimes like these biggest tragedies that happen in our life,

they tend to be the catalyst that allows us to grow into the person we're supposed to be. And sometimes when you're all worried about these things like, oh, my God, what am I going to do with this meeting? life has a way of presenting you with an olive branch that you never saw coming. And it wipes away the fear. Like you live in this fear sometimes because all these things you think are catastrophes. And maybe they are. But life has this weird way. And maybe it's the trickster God coming back into play of like, hey, come over here.

And like it shows you this new avenue. Have you found that to be true? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some of the most intense transitionary periods of my life have yielded the most abundant fruit. Like my goprenore podcast and everything I'm doing now directly came out of that sense of confusion and of transition of being like, wow, like, you know, I remember we've been in positions where like my wife applied to work at Burger King one time. We were like strapped for cash. And this is like someone with a university degree, you know, in psychology who had considered

going to grad school. And it was just like, I've sent out hundreds of job applications and, you know, tried to do, and it didn't work. A lot of it didn't work. And then at a certain point, I was house sitting, you know, like we got kicked out of our apartment too. You know, that we got the 60-day notice because developers bought the building and everyone who was living in the apartment. You know, I was doing everything you're supposed to do. You hear this story a lot of like, you know, people and leading psychedelic companies or whatever they're doing. It's like, I was doing everything I was supposed to do. I was teaching at a very world-renowned public high school. I was living in my one bedroom apartment and a really hip area of San Diego and North Park. And then the life threw me a huge

curveball. It's like my wife got cancer. She ended up having an amputation on her hand directly related to that, like, you know, was going through all kinds of treatments. At the same time that was happening, I'm getting kicked out of my apartment. I go to look at a new place and there's 200 applicants making more money than me, you know, and it's just like a race to the bottom. Like, okay, maybe I can go and find a place near the trolley and this, the other side of the tracks or whatever. And we can do this and I can do an hour commute each way. No, you know, I'm losing my teaching position, all kind of at the same time where you take a step back and you go, what the fuck is happening? It's just like, you know, when it rains it, pores. And then all of that directly led to this,

okay, you know what? I'm sick of being in the psychedelic closet, as I put. I'm sick of having to moonlight as a psychonaut. Like people are talking about it a little bit. I have a wealth of experience, personal experience, you know, going back well over a decade. and many different scenarios and seeing how these things impact you over a long period of time, I want to bring this to the table. And that was a huge leap of faith to like come out of the psychedelic closet, starts sharing my stories. You know, I have very conservative parents and friend group and peer group and all that. Even yesterday, I was with a group of church people.

And they're like asking me about the podcast. And I'm so reluctant to talk about it, you know, to certain types of people. But I just put it out there. I just said, I'm going to do it. I'm going to share my story. And it's ended up like going quite viral, you know, affording me a ton of opportunities to speak in England and to speak in Denver and to, I've been invited to India for a mushroom festival, right?

And like right now I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out to Hungary for a week one psychedelic festival out there. I've been invited to participate in and all kinds of stuff like that. You know, this year, just in the last couple months, I've had the podcast profile. They're included in stories in Forbes and Rolling Stone. And like that stuff, none of that shit would have happened. if you don't like have the first part of being knocked off course by this hurricane of change. Man, I love every second of that.

I think it's so important too because a lot of people that could really live their dream or at least begin down that road, they get that first shot in the face and they're like, okay, maybe this is a sign not to do it. I would like to tell those people, maybe that's a sign to do it. You know what I mean? But Dennis, I can't tell you how awesome this is, man. I enjoyed every second of this. It exceeded everything I thought.

I love the podcast, but more than that, I love to get to know the person behind the podcast. And I think it's awesome. And I know that so many people in the community are stoked on what you're doing. I think you're providing an awesome service and you're providing a sense of humor that's been lacking in this community for a while. And maybe it hasn't been lacking, but it just hasn't shown up in the way people had wanted it to. And I think that you're doing that. And I can't wait to see what you come up with next. man, it seems like you have such a cool outlook on life.

I love that you're traveling. And I love that you're this ambassador for not only psychedelic mushrooms, but mushroom leather and mushroom composites and boxing. And like I really think you're bringing a dimension to this space that obviously people are paying attention to and it's resonating. And I'm super stoked for you. And you deserve all of it plus a million times more, man. Thank you so much for being here. Before I let you go, where can people find you?

What do you have coming up and what are you excited about? Totally. Well, first off, thank you so much for having. me. This is definitely the most in-depth podcast I've ever done. My episodes I do are usually like 30, 45 minutes. But to get to the heart of matters, you know, there's so much happening. I appreciate you taking two hours out of your day to platform me on the True Life podcast. And as far as what's coming next is probably the big one I'm looking forward to is being in Denver, you know, at the psychedelic science conference and having an opportunity to do a panel with actually just myself and

Adam who runs healing by healing and who's pursuing his post-grad studies right now. And I don't even know him, you know, but he's someone who's also very influential, who a lot of people have told me you need to get together with him. So I'm really looking forward to being able to share the stage with him. And I'm absolutely humbled and flattered to have been invited to this incredible influential event put on by the most prominent, influential, psychedelic organization in the world. It just feels really like so humbling that they essentially picked me out of a hat and invited me to come do this and to be a part of this. So I'm very much looking forward to that. And if you're hearing this before

that June 20th to 24th around there, you got to get out there. You know, take a leap of faith and get out there. And if you're hearing it after it, do it for the next conference. You know, it's worthwhile to go out. So I'll be at that in Denver. And then I'm flying out to Europe in August and there will be a number of things going on. But as far as what people can look forward to or like where you can find me, you can find me at micopreneur, M-Y-C-C-O-P-R-E-N-E-U-R. I'm sure it'll be linked in the show notes. Absolutely. You know, I do a regular podcast.

I try to get one a week out on most weeks, unless I'm traveling from Tokyo to San Jose to Guadalajara to Mexico. So there's that. Instagram's a good place to keep in touch. That's, you know, I do a lot of my short comedy form for Instagram. LinkedIn, Dennis Walker, my entrepreneur. And I'm very responsive to messages and to ideas. You know, George hit me up.

And he's like, you want to do this to say, yeah. Like, I'm all about trying to meet new people, trying to hear what you're working on. At the same time, I do have a fairly limited bandwidth. So, like, I'm super, you know, selective of the projects I get involved with, right? Like, if it's like a podcast or a chat, that's great. I feel like, especially because the podcast focuses on mushroom entrepreneurism and psychedelic entrepreneurship, I get invited to a lot of, like, interesting projects that I just don't have the time for the bandwidth. So if somebody has like a really button up pitch, though, and you're dialed in, like, I can make time for you

for sure. So thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it, George. man that's so awesome hang on one second i'm going to hang up with the audience but i want to talk to you for one more quick second ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for hanging out with us today go check out dennis walker all the links will be in the show notes definitely check it out you'll you'll laugh your ass off you'll be intrigued with the interviews and i think that you'll love all of his content out there so thanks for today that's all we got aloha yeah you're a