Personal
About Mike.
Not through a clean professional path — but through podcasting, comedy, psychedelics, fatherhood, philosophy, and the slow work of becoming the kind of man who can carry what he says he wants.
My work is for people who have felt, maybe for a long time, that something about the world we're being asked to adapt to is deeply off. People who have done the work — therapy, ceremony, meditation, healing, spiritual seeking, psychedelics — and eventually reached the uncomfortable realization that the problem was never only inside them.
The Work & the Life
I am not speaking from the mountaintop.
I am in the material.
At a certain point, integration cannot just mean becoming regulated enough to tolerate a fragmented, lonely, ugly, over-managed, spiritually flattened world. The question becomes: what kind of life, relationships, homes, communities, rituals, conversations, and places would actually be worth integrating into?
Then I came through the heavier initiations: marriage, fatherhood, money, exhaustion, responsibility, the body, the home, the demands of a toddler, and the ordinary friction of trying to build something soulful while also needing to pay bills, clean the kitchen, send the text, and not become a monster when sleep-deprived and overwhelmed. That has humbled the whole project. It is one thing to talk about new worlds and another thing to be kind in the morning.
"So I am not speaking as someone who has completed the journey and is now selling maps from the mountaintop. I am in the material. I am in the contradiction. I am trying to build the thing while being changed by the thing."
Underneath all of it sits fifteen-plus years spent across media, markets, and facilitation — podcasting, comedy, advertising, sales, education, retreat spaces, and men's work — which is the real trail this current chapter grows out of. More on that below.
The Work
Different rooms in the same house.
I am creating multiple spaces to hold this central feeling — this diagnosis, this longing, this refusal, this stubborn vision that the world as it is does not need to be this way. Not from a blueprint. Not from a five-step life plan handed down by some guru with a Stripe account. From aliveness, play, honest conversation, friendship, beauty, food, laughter, grief, and the strange charge of a living idea that enters a room and suddenly everyone realizes they are not alone. The forms are essays, The Podcast, video, Soul Jams, Sanity & Soul Sessions, Heartwood Council, community gatherings, and eventually more embodied local experiments. These are not separate brands. They are different rooms in the same house.
Read the VisionThe Signal
Essays and conversations that explore the ideas, questions, and stories shaping our cultural moment and interior lives.
→The Circle
Gatherings and councils for honest dialogue, spiritual growth, and the renewal of our most important relationships.
→The Build
A long-term movement to rebuild the conditions for more rooted, relational, and beautiful ways of living together.
→The Trail
I did not arrive here through a clean professional lane.
I came through stand-up comedy, long-form podcasting, political and cultural conversation, psychedelics, men's work, spiritual inquiry, sales, marketing, education, film, retreat spaces, fatherhood, writing, and years of trying to understand why so many people feel quietly insane inside a world that keeps calling itself normal.
The podcast is the most visible part of that trail. From 2016 to 2024, I created and hosted Mikeadelic, a long-form podcast exploring consciousness, psychedelics, culture, spirituality, comedy, mythology, masculinity, media, cognitive liberty, and the strange work of becoming human in a disorienting age. The show reached 750,000+ downloads globally, earned a 4.9 average rating across 524 listener ratings, and gave me the chance to hold more than 200 long-form conversations with authors, comedians, researchers, philosophers, anthropologists, musicians, harm-reduction workers, psychedelic educators, spiritual teachers, and cultural figures. Mikeadelic is now archived — the full story of what it was, and what's coming next, lives on The Podcast page.
But the podcast was not just a show. It was an apprenticeship in attention, trust, conversation, timing, presence, discernment, and live thought.
Before, during, and around that work, I also spent years in comedy, podcast networks, advertising, sales, creative direction, education, film, retreat environments, men's work, group facilitation, and independent media. I sold advertising, worked with sponsors, helped shape campaigns, taught kids podcasting and mythology through movies, wrote and produced short films, supported retreat operations in the Peruvian Amazon, participated in local psychedelic policy work, facilitated men's circles, and kept returning to the same deeper question: how do human beings make meaning, build trust, gather in rooms, hide behind performance, speak honestly, lose themselves in scripts, and occasionally become more real?
None of these are separate careers to me. They are one long apprenticeship in language, story, culture, power, attention, group process, transformation, and the search for a more human life.
Selected Conversations
People I sat with, at the edges of consciousness, culture, and meaning.
Through Mikeadelic, I spoke with authors, comedians, researchers, musicians, psychedelic educators, harm-reduction workers, anthropologists, spiritual teachers, and cultural critics — over 200 long-form conversations in total. The point was never to become a conventional interviewer. The point was to follow living questions with people who had touched some strange edge of reality, and see what became clearer.
See the Full Guest List on The Podcast PageThe Larger Apprenticeship
The podcast is only one part of the trail.
I have worked in sales, advertising, podcast networks, creative direction, education, film, retreat spaces, men's work, group facilitation, and practical systems. I sold job advertising at Indeed, worked in podcast advertising and sponsorships at GaS Digital, led creative strategy for social campaigns at Jump 450 Media, helped improve marketing performance at Synchro, taught middle school students podcasting and mythology in modern movies, wrote and produced short films, and supported retreat operations and media at Temple of the Way of Light outside Iquitos, Peru. Along the way, I trained in psychedelic-assisted somatic processing through Innate Path, took part in a MAPS-approved training study connected to psychedelic-assisted therapy, and completed men’s work leadership training through Sacred Sons.
I also supported the Denver Mushroom Initiative 301 campaign in 2019, part of the local civic movement that made Denver the first U.S. city to decriminalize psilocybin.
Those experiences gave me different kinds of training:
- Sales taught me how people decide.
- Marketing taught me how attention moves.
- Comedy and performance taught me timing, rupture, and the sacred usefulness of not taking the performance too seriously.
- Podcasting taught me conversation, trust, pacing, and live thought.
- Psychedelic and ceremonial spaces taught me the power and danger of intensity.
- Men's work taught me the necessity of structure, responsibility, repair, and relational honesty.
- Teaching taught me that people understand through story, image, participation, and care.
- Practical technical work, including life-safety and fire-systems, gave me another kind of respect for infrastructure, codes, maintenance, and the unglamorous realities that keep buildings and people safe.
Gardening, fatherhood, marriage, and household life keep teaching me the same thing from another angle: the sacred still requires form. A beautiful idea has to become food, money, a room, a repair, a schedule, a conversation, a garden bed, a protected child, a tended home — or it remains a private weather system.
Home, Fatherhood & Lived Form
The home is the first village.
The greatest and most humbling work in my life is not public. It is stewarding a home, being a husband, raising a son, repairing when I fail, keeping the household warm enough to live inside, and learning how to make love visible through ordinary acts.
That matters here because I do not believe ideas are real merely because they sound beautiful. If I write about community, but my home becomes colder, the work has failed its first test. If I speak about soul, but become less present with my wife and son, the language is empty. If I talk about human-scale life, but cannot tend the daily scale of dishes, food, money, sleep, repair, work, and attention, then I am just another man with a worldview and no vessel.
For me, fatherhood and household life are not interruptions to the work. They are the first field where the work has to become real. Not because family life is tidy or pure or easy. It is not. It is humbling, repetitive, inconvenient, beautiful, exhausting, funny, holy, and constantly exposing. That is why it matters.
I am not trying to be the person with all the answers. I am trying to gather good people — including people more skilled than me — around the questions, ideas, practices, and forms of life that might help us become more sane, more soulful, more human, and more capable of building what comes next.
The current work — essays, conversations, sessions, gatherings, and whatever else grows from this — is rooted in the same question I face at home every day: can a human being live with more truth, beauty, responsibility, humor, tenderness, courage, and actual contact in a world that trains us away from all of that?
What I Do Now
Helping real work become coherent enough to live.
I write, host conversations, facilitate rooms, and work one-on-one with people who are carrying something real but have not yet found its clearest language or living form. My role is to listen for the hidden pattern, name the real center, separate living material from noise, and help find the language, story, architecture, atmosphere, and next form. Sometimes that becomes an essay, an offer, a podcast concept, a gathering, a clearer personal identity, a business narrative, a session frame, a public invitation, or simply one honest next move.
I am not interested in turning people into brands. I am interested in helping real work become coherent enough to live.
THE LONG VIEW
Where
this is
going.
The river is poisoned, and then we are told to integrate back into it. That is not integration. That is adaptation and assimilation.
The future worth building is ancient-future: taking what actually serves life from the modern world and placing it back under the governance of soul, land, family, friendship, locality, beauty, reciprocity, and human-scale sanity.
"Drop into the body. Drop into the home. Drop into the room with actual people. Drop into the living world."
Read the Full Vision →