The Hidden Politics of Psychedelic Media | Dennis Walker

Dennis Walker joins Divergent States to unpack how psychedelic stories actually become “news,” why sensationalism dominates drug coverage, and how media narratives shape public perception around psychedelics.

We discuss psychedelic exceptionalism, corporate psychedelics, satire as social critique, harm reduction, underground culture, MAPS, FDA approval, clinical gatekeeping, psychedelic tourism, and the growing divide between real-world psychedelic use and institutional messaging.

Dennis is a journalist, satirist, and creator of Mycopreneur, known for blending humor, gonzo journalism, and cultural criticism to explore the psychedelic ecosystem from angles most outlets avoid.

Topics:

• Why bad drug stories spread faster
• Psychedelic journalism and narrative control
• Corporate psychedelics vs underground culture
• Why satire works in psychedelic spaces
• FDA approval and clinical gatekeeping
• Psychedelic tourism and ethics
• The “good drug / bad drug” double standard
• MAPS, media narratives, and psychedelic exceptionalism

Check out Dennis' work at https://www.mycopreneur.com/

Patreon supporters get the extended Integration Session and early access to episodes:
patreon.com/divergentstates

 Music by Sandbgz 

Chapters:

00:00 – Why Psychedelic Narratives Matter
 04:38 – Dennis Walker on Satire, Psychedelics & Media
 08:11 – When Psychedelics Became Politics & Money
 10:56 – How Drug Narratives Shape Public Opinion
 15:27 – Why Satire Works Better Than Lectures
 18:07 – Why Negative Drug Stories Dominate Headlines
 23:32 – Good Drugs vs Bad Drugs in Media Coverage
 28:26 – The Push Toward Clinical-Only Psychedelic Use
 34:02 – Who Controls Psychedelic Journalism?
 37:19 – The Missing Voices in Psychedelic Media
 42:13 – Field Reporting, Community & Psychedelic Culture
 46:16 – Social Media, Framing & Manufactured Narratives
 50:26 – Building a Healthier Psychedelic Culture
 55:00 – Patreon Integration Session Transition
 58:13 – Final Reflections & Why These Conversations Matter
 01:00:40 – Outro

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Transcript

3L1T3 (00:16)
So tonight's episode is one I've been looking forward to for a minute, really. We spent a lot of time in this space talking about psychedelics as medicine and therapy or an emerging industry. But what we don't talk nearly enough about is how the story itself gets told. Who decides what's true, what's dangerous, what gets amplified, and what kind of quietly just disappears. So today we're going to pull that apart. Welcome back to Divergent States. This is Elite, back again with Bryan. How you doing, man? Doing great, man. What's up? ⁓ not a lot.

Same old, same old trying to get a, trying to do a lot of stuff. You know, got the a Patreon opened up a little more. We just got, you know, one of our biggest supporters yet. So thank you Angie out there. ⁓ yeah. You know, if you guys want to join this, come support the show, go to patreon.com/divergentstates. ⁓ you get the longer integration session, get episodes a couple of weeks early. So, ⁓ appreciate seeing you over there. ⁓ yeah, absolutely.

All the support on Patreon is definitely, definitely appreciated. For sure. Yeah. You guys, ⁓ join us over there. You have the integration sessions, like I said, longer episodes for higher tiers. even get video auditions. So, ⁓ yeah, join up, help us out. ⁓ today we're joined by Dennis Walker. He's a journalist, satirist, and the voice behind the micropreneur. And if you come across his work, you already know he doesn't really play the standard games.

The conversation goes deeper than just psychedelics. We get into how drug stories actually become news, why the worst case scenarios tend to dominate the coverage, and how a satire ends up being one of the only ways certain things out loud, you can only say certain things out loud, and where the line between harm reduction and narrative control is, you know. We dig into something that doesn't really get talked about, the gap that happens in clinical settings and what's actually happening in the real world, because those really aren't the same things.

So it's really less about psychedelics themselves and more about the ecosystem forming around them and who gets to shape it. So let's get into it.

Dennis Walker, welcome to Divergent States.

Dennis Walker (04:41)
Thank you very much. for the invite. Stoked to be here. What's up, everybody? Que pasa, Mufasa?

3L1T3 (04:47)
We're super excited to have you here. So for people who know you by your byline, but not your process, how do you describe what you do?

Dennis Walker (04:55)
I think I have front load with satirist. think satire is a wonderful arena, especially for making social commentary around psychedelics, because to me, what gives satire its edge is that there's sort of a moral component to it. It's a guiding ethos in a way, not to take it too seriously. But I think the difference between satire and comedy is that satire usually has some kind of appeal to a moral compass. I'm a huge fan of like Danny McBride, Righteous Gemstones, he's down in South Park.

You think about a lot of the episodes, there's usually some kind of like message in it. And I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff.

3L1T3 (05:32)
Yeah, the best part about Righteous Jimstones, I thought, was like how close they got to the actual, you know, people say, it's, it's, you know, crazy and out there and like, well, it's really not that far off if you, you know, if you know anything about that world. Yeah, that's one of my favorite shows. I love how they like, they come off like little kids. Right. So what originally pulled you into covering drugs and psychedelics?

Dennis Walker (05:55)
psychedelics and drugs matter of fact, you know, I grew up in the dare generation was in elementary school in the nineties. I remember the dare officer there as pretty much anyone who went through the dare program will tell you none of us were talking about LSD or anything until the dare officer started sharing it with us. So that really kind of set the template for me to be aware that there were these substances that could change the way you perceived reality. And then

In high school, I started hearing anecdotal reports from friends, right? Talking about having a mushroom trip on the weekend or taking MDMA, things like that. So over time, it piqued my interest because the anecdotal reports I was hearing didn't square up with the cultural programming I had. It was a lot of what I would say were very intelligent people who had cogent analyses of their experiences, talking about their mushroom trips and so on and so forth.

And that just kind of set me off on a path of inquiry, which led me to Arrowid. That was the main hub at the time prior to our Psychonaut, right? And then I discovered Terrence McKenna, the food of the gods. That really put a lot of things in perspective for me at the time. And once upon a time, I was about 17, I decided to eat a half-eighth of mushrooms and go for it. Had a lovely experience. I feel like I was in a great group of people, right place, right time. And that just kicked the door open to me wanting to know.

why these molecules were in a blind spot culturally. They were draconianly forbidden and spoken of as something that will ruin your life. Yet my experience was quite opposite. I wanted to educate myself and learn and there was nowhere to learn about it really. There was such, you know, such limited resources at the time. Then I went to school in San Francisco, cut my teeth on that sort of hate Ashbury scene and the lingering remnants of the 1960s that were still there. And

kept learning and learning and eventually I decided to write about them kind of in a gonzo journalistic capacity at first because I think that actually does psychedelics a lot of justice rather than to be super objective about them. There's room for that. I think gonzo journalism and talking about your experiences that can really give it a new level of contour and depth that objective traditional journalism does not.

3L1T3 (08:10)
Yeah, I agree. I'm hoping we'll be able to do more of that as we go in further in. So it's definitely one of the goals. When did you realize this beat wasn't just culture, but politics and money too?

Dennis Walker (08:23)
Yeah,

that came a little bit later. Interestingly enough, I had never heard of MAPS, speaking of politics and money, right? Now I've got to collaborate with that organization a few times, go out to psychedelic science, lots of other conferences, until I started doing satire. And I made a pretty heavy series of pieces that was really fun, but also intentionally took on heavy subject matter. And that actually was made on the border of Israel and Palestine in 2022. And I stayed at Banksy's hotel there.

in Bethlehem and I was kind of doing this absurdist futuristic satire, like setting the skits that I was publishing on Instagram in the year 2069 and kind of coming at it from this point of view of this society dominated by consumer culture and like the Holy Land was rebranded to Taco Bell brought to you by Capital One presented by McDonald's or whatever. And it really resonated with people at the time. And then I realized like, I can talk about serious subject matter.

that's really difficult for people to talk about and normal conversation through this absurdist satirical vehicle. And actually the CFO of maps reached out to me at one point or prior CFO. And I learned that they were sharing my videos in circles and like people who were at Davos were watching these skits. I've just been hearing this from different people. like, I saw your skits. First. I was in a castle in Malta at this party and people were sharing it. So I realized like,

there's a lane to do this kind of really far out satire that touches on important geopolitical environmental issues. And I think psychedelics tend to have an overlap with that. When you think about like ⁓ changing your consciousness, looking for new ways to solve problems for these very deeply entrenched challenges. So I just started pulling on that thread and it got me to learn about where we are today with everything happening and actually start to cover a lot of this stuff for different platforms.

3L1T3 (10:18)
Well, you gotta think about how cool those have to be if somebody was at a party in a castle and they were watching your skits. mean, cause that's pretty bad ass already. So to stop that and go, hold on a second. I'm gonna watch this. It's pretty fucking good.

Dennis Walker (10:30)
Thank you, yeah, I was surprised myself when I learned.

3L1T3 (10:33)
Yeah, that's, that's especially the Devastate. They just had it again. That's so that's nuts. It's just kind of, you see how the kind of that, that thought didn't go anywhere. So cut that one. I'm not cutting it. staying right there. Yeah, always. ⁓ so what's the most common misunderstanding your smarter readers have about how these stories get reported?

Dennis Walker (10:55)
Yeah, I think a lot of people are still figuring out how to interpret what's happening because we have so many different threads weaving together. And I think, you know, for a lot of younger people, psychedelics can tend to amplify idealism, maybe for older people too. And there's this like ideologically peer idea about the way things should be in the world or the way you want things to be versus when you actually try to roll out policy, there's the sense of you can't keep everybody happy all the time. So

speaker-2 (10:58)
to

Dennis Walker (11:24)
You know, it's been a bit of a challenge in a sense to try to be diplomatic with people because you have people who are very staunchly ideologically divided politically, pretty much the whole political discourse in the United States and elsewhere is ⁓ quite divided obviously right now. So I think that is a challenge for quote more intelligent consumers or people who they want things to be a certain way. But what happens when you sit down at the table with someone

who has a completely divergent state or divergent worldview of you. And so I really think it's become sort of a diplomacy vehicle and a culture building vehicle. And again, that's where I think satire really shines because if I were to take a serious subject matter, like talk about FDA approved patented corporatized psychedelics and discuss that with someone who thinks that, you know, we should be focusing more on traditional routes and honoring ancestral legacies and

putting drug policy reform ahead of commercialization. That just becomes a messy conversation. And I've been in the room before, like at Harvard Law School, where people are having a very difficult time, very intelligent people arriving at the same diplomatic means of communication. And satire has a way of sort of blowing the cover off all of that and saying, OK, let's examine this through this absurdist lens. And especially when you throw psychedelics in there, I think ⁓

You don't always have to make sense with it. You can just kind of point out ⁓ glaring inconsistencies and hypocrisies. And it's done in a way that's not so critical or acerbic. It's done almost like, if I give my dog medicine, I put it inside of ⁓ a little treat or something. And I think satire is a similar vehicle for talking about very serious subject matter.

3L1T3 (13:12)
I agree with you there. really believe satire, and it's especially with the psychedelic world. Like we're especially primed for understanding that nuance or sometimes that contradiction that may kind of blow over some people's heads. But the fact that we're in the psychedelic world and you're kind of more comfortable with those contradictions, the satire is a lot more effective.

Dennis Walker (13:38)
say it's been surprisingly successful. You know, I didn't set out to be a satirist in any stretch, but just like you were sharing with me how you started our Psychonaut, it's just a thing I did one day. I made an Instagram skit to promote Mycopreneur podcast, which is the podcast I host where I interview mushroom entrepreneurs. I was about a year deep into that podcast. I was hosting CEOs of publicly traded companies because you know, you get one person on, they tell their friend and then next thing you know,

It's a mushroom entrepreneur podcast, but the ketamine CEO wants to come on, you know, or like the, the, fortune 500 person. And I realized a year after these types of interviews, like everybody's so very serious, you know, they're so self-assured and there's something about just kind of taking the piss out of yourself first. So the way I did that was the first skit that became popular as I kind of lampooned this white spiritual guru figure.

called Don Chad. And you know, like in shamanic traditions or like Coranderos, they call him like Don Alberto or whatever. And Don Chad kind of borrows from this idea of the Chad and the cannabis industry, right? Who came in, corporatized everything, wears suits. Maybe he took half a micro dose two years ago and he thinks he's at the level, you know, because he saw faces on the guacamole at the Super Bowl party or whatever. But like ⁓ taking the piss out of this character of this super self-assured, like I am a incredibly confident, incredibly successful white man.

and I'm going to show you how the universe works. And that sort of archetypal figure just really caught on with people. And pretty much everyone who watched it said, I know someone like that, or I used to be like that, or maybe I am like that to a degree. So I just, thought, well, if that was popular, why don't I just do it again? And then, you know, a lot of people now don't even know that I host a podcast or do more serious stuff. They just see me as the Instagram satirist and I'm okay with that because I have fun with it.

3L1T3 (15:26)
Yeah, I saw the one today. think I mentioned it earlier when we were talking before the show, ⁓ the spiritual bypassing. know, Chad, yeah, we don't need to worry about any of this stuff. We can just, you know, we don't worry. You know, this is, not about the dose. It's not close to our brand. Yep. All right, they calmed down. ⁓ Well, plus I feel like satire makes it easier to digest. You know,

Dennis Walker (15:43)
Amen.

3L1T3 (15:55)
I'm not the kind of person likes to sit down and listen to like deeply intellectual conversations. I feel like I will check out of that. I'll be like, man, this is boring. But when you had satire in there, to me, that's it's entertaining. And plus, like now I'm getting the message too.

Dennis Walker (16:08)
Yeah, and I kind of leaned into doing physical comedy, like Three Stooges. So that became quite popular at the time. I was in Brazil, actually. My wife was a producer or PR executive for a company that was working with The Last of Us, which was, you know, a hit HBO show about cordyceps. So we got to go down to Comic-Con in São Paulo and she was working with the cast and crew. And I was at the hotel writing the coat tails.

didn't have a swimsuit and I got a speedo that I saw for sale, made one skit and a speedo and everybody was like, this is hilarious. You're so funny. So I realized like, I can, you know, add another layer of absurdity to this where you wear a speedo and are in a bizarre location and you make really absurdist content. But then at the heart of that, you can try to bake in some kind of thread that's been in the public discourse and have people view it from a different angle.

And again, I think the litmus test for me for something gets made is if I think it's funny, I'm not out here trying to like be too self-important, which is part of why, you know, taking the piss out of myself tends to work well is I think I was very much ⁓ an evangelist, probably more so than I needed to be for psychedelics, just like almost anyone I think who gets really into them. You want to share them with everyone and you get on this Kool-Aid trip that like, if we just spiked the water supply with LSD, there will be world peace and

No one ever asks like what happens if they privatize the water supply, you know, just start selling it and corporatizing it, right?

3L1T3 (17:39)
Peace water now your local faucet Yeah, they ⁓ It's it's great. I think see how satire kind of it makes it Like you said, it makes it kind of a you wrap the the pill and the cheese The dog doesn't notice that you're getting a little truth nugget in there, So kind of could you walk us through how a drug story becomes the story like what who decides what's newsworthy?

Dennis Walker (18:06)
such a good question. And one I've tussled with sometimes with journalists because there's the old adage, if it bleeds, it leads. And we see a lot of that right now. And I think there's sometimes a tendency to favor the outliers for news coverage. for example, not to understate that these risks are present, but like if somebody unfortunately dies at an Ibogaine retreat or during an Ayahuasca ceremony or something that by virtue of the

phenomenon around it and you could say maybe the lack of ethical guardrails so on and so forth. It makes it maybe newsworthy and those types of stories seem to get published more so than if somebody just goes and has a wonderful experience and heals their trauma. I don't think that's exceptional for a news story. You there's usually another angle like it has to be veterans who go down to process the trauma of war. Of course, we see a lot of those types of stories or if an adverse incident happens.

that makes it more newsworthy. So I've certainly been vocal in trying to promote a more tempered approach to journalism in the space where I think we swung the pendulum from this like prohibitionist rhetoric about like drugs bad scramble brain to the other side, which was like utopian promise 10 years of therapy in one night. And there was a lot of that sort of narrative amplification going on. And then it kind of swung back towards the adverse incident side. So I'm a fan of

kind of independent journalism for that reason. I've pitched to some of the larger platforms and haven't had success yet. Would love to place a story with New York Times or BBC or something, but ⁓ the angles that they're covering don't tend to always incorporate or include like happy community becomes successful and looks out for each other. That's just apparently not as newsworthy as, ⁓ you know, man takes mushrooms and gets naked in traffic and.

and so on and so forth. There's a lot more there. So that's my take.

3L1T3 (20:07)
It kind of reminds me of that with the Bill Hicks quote, you know, that it's on the Tool album. Young man discovered today that he is one with everything and well, high on LSD or something. Yeah, that's not that's not a good story to sell. I can see that like the the guy that took mushrooms and then like three days later, tried to open a plane door or something became a huge story overnight. I don't know how much credence is to the story. But like you said, if it bleeds, it leads.

What kind of stories would you say are easiest to sell to editors?

Dennis Walker (20:40)
something sensational and something I think that will really engage readership. And there's a lot of evidence suggesting that more ⁓ pessimistic, would say, or like adverse event type story can engage readership because you can be polarizing. And ⁓ that's an unfortunate incentive, I think, to the way that the media models work, where you need a lot of engagement, like with social media, like

speaker-2 (20:55)
is

Dennis Walker (21:09)
For example, vice I've heard if they have an inkling of a notion that a story is going to go viral, they'll jump on it right away. And you think about like, well, what kind of content goes viral, it's a lot of unhinged stuff. It's a lot of like, people wanting to point their finger and be like, this person is just such a bad example of what can go wrong with psychedelics. And that's not uniformly the case. But I think that there's more of an edge to stories like that. I've been asked, like, what's the angle here? Like I went to tell you ride.

Oldest mushroom festival in the US, great costume parade, totally recommend it. And the editor was like, well, what's the angle? And I sadly thought a little bit like, well, if somebody would have got like, you know, hit by a car that probably would have made it more newsworthy than just like bunch of freaks who like mushrooms went and had a parade and had a lot of fun. One other thing I'll mention in regards to the plane story with the pilot. And again, I don't want to sugarcoat this because I do recognize there are adverse events and they should be publicized, but I just think it gets

more treatment sometimes than it should. But it was interesting timing with that story when it was kind of all over the place because that same week is when there was a bill that was sent to Gavin Newsom to decriminalize mushrooms. It was like one of the three bills that has been shot down that he vetoed. And that was largely the evidence that was cited like a news stories as we don't want, you know, mushrooms to be decriminalized in a state lot statewide level because look what happened with the pilot and he went crazy and tried to crash the plane. So again,

that news story kind of served a broader political agenda. And, you know, I'm also very open to having people debate me on these things, but that's what I'm seeing.

3L1T3 (22:46)
Yeah, it does seem awfully convenient that right before that happens, there's this strange new story. And from what I understand, it was like three days after. I don't know. I don't know if it's been even steady, but I've never even felt anything, you know, a day or two. Get a good night's sleep. It's over. So, yeah, I don't know the veracity of that story, how goes. But so it'd be kind of the story that quietly dies in pitch meetings. There's a bunch of mushroom heads just had a nice parade like

So Ken, already covered that. That was going to be one of my next questions. ⁓ So we're seeing psychedelics become good drugs while opiates and stimulants stay bad drugs. From a media angle, how do you see that happening?

Dennis Walker (23:31)
literally kicked off my last podcast with a wonderful psychedelic journalist and drug policy journalist, made the bus be with this exact question about good drugs and bad drugs. And I like this sense of ⁓ the drugs don't know they're illegal, you know, like people are going to use these and in different capacities, or I've heard it said like mushrooms don't know they're illegal. But I think you can extend that to various other substances that the substances themselves are largely inert.

And like a good example of this is fentanyl is getting so much bad press right now, but like the fentanyl dealers from Venezuela bringing their weapon of mass destruction and on the speedboat, like fentanyl is also used in the ICU. It's a schedule three, like cannabis is more prohibited according to the Controlled Substances Act than fentanyl. thereby like would manufacturing fentanyl or using it in the ICU constitute like deploying a weapon of mass destruction?

I think drugs very conveniently can be political cover for things. Like if you look at, ⁓ know, first, the prohibition of drugs in the United States was in 1909 with the Opium Act or some derivative of that, right? And it was largely targeted towards Chinese people. And then you see a lot of overlap with like the Nixon administration disrupting their political opposition. This is pretty well.

speaker-2 (24:36)
.

Dennis Walker (24:55)
cover news at least in smaller circles. don't know how mainstream the press gets around this, like, know, cannabis originally being called marijuana so that it was associated with Mexicans, things like that. unfortunately, historically, or certainly in the 20th century, drugs can be very convenient political cover for these broader agendas. And again, it's in a way you could say it's like the war on terror, war on terror. It's an invisible enemy and it never ends and you can kind of justify it.

by mobilizing people's xenophobia or their fear of the other. And I think it's similar with drugs. A lot of people have received this sort of cultural programming going back to the 60s or before the 70s about how dangerous and disruptive drugs are to the fabric of society. But of course, it's very selectively framed. So I think what we're seeing now is this bifurcation between like, well, psilocybin mushrooms and maybe five-MEO DMT and these things.

These are elite tools for biohackers, longevity, for Silicon Valley programmers who microdose it. But these other drugs like fentanyl and coke and heroin, these are street drugs that really pose a danger to society. I'm not fully convinced that we need to legalize and regulate all drugs. I think there's definitely an argument to be made for it. But I also realize that moving the needle on policy is pretty glacially paced. So. ⁓

I do think that we need more nuanced, honest coverage about these things. And Carl Hart does a great job of this, if anyone's familiar with him, talking about using heroin recreationally and being a distinguished professor. So that's part of what I try to do with my coprenure with mushrooms is in my own community, mushrooms are still heavily stigmatized, far less so now than five years ago. But you can tell like people are interested in them, but they still have these lingering stigmas about like,

I don't think in my professional position or my community leadership position, I can be known as someone who has taken hallucinogens or whatever. So I think we need more people speaking about their experiences, writing books, starting podcasts, sharing openly on stages. And ⁓ we should probably do away with this double standard of the good drug, bad drug. And one last bit I'll close with is like ketamine is a derivative of PCP. You know, ⁓ PCP gets a really bad rap.

but also it's something that there's been a lot of misinformation about, like intentionally stretched and dramatized stories to make it seem like it's something that people in the ghetto take and it turns them crazy. I'm not advocating for people to go out and smoke PCP, but I think that again, is a great example of a drug that's sort of been used to stigmatize and demonize certain populations. And that might not be the full truth of it.

3L1T3 (27:39)
Yeah, Dr. Hart is going to be on a future episode coming up. yeah, excited to have him. But I had heard him actually talk about that at psychedelic science and he had a talk called psychedelic exceptionalism is killing us. And he brought up that example exactly like PCP and how there's this misconception that, you know, the people get.

and out of crazy and have the strength of 10 men and just go on rampages. You can shoot them and it does nothing. And that's largely a myth. That doesn't happen. So yeah, I can definitely see that it says, what would you say is the crack versus cocaine and psychedelic coverage?

Dennis Walker (28:25)
Yeah, that's a good one. Right now, think one of the main coverage bits I hear and I try to clap back at it when I see it is there's a fair amount of journalism or stories coming out about the dangers of non-clinical psychedelic use. And I wholeheartedly refute that. And there was two this week that came out. One was with, I think it was Psychology Today, I want to say was the platform, but it was someone they always start with. While psychedelics have shown great promise for clinical therapeutic treatment,

there's an alarming trend of people using them recreationally or outside the clinic. And, you know, as someone who's been around these kinds of communities for many years and before they were talked about openly on social media, I have like a really deep pool of experience to draw from with different people, different communities. And I rarely have ever saw any serious problems with psychedelic use. You know, I would say that was the extreme exception out of a pool of thousands, if not tens of thousands of people over the years.

And so this idea that like, if you take mushrooms with your friends at the park, or you, you know, decide that you want to go to a flaming lips concert, I don't see any problem with that. And I also think, of course, people want to advertise that there can be some risks. And there are certain people who maybe won't benefit or will amplify some of their, you know, underlying genetic predisposition predispositions, things like that. But people should be educated in this idea that like we should

prohibit and put these nanny state prohibition tactics in place where like there's only one acceptable route to do this and that's through a clinic and through a patented, highly controlled model. I don't think that's a really good argument at all. I think that that is a lane that should exist for. But also I think part of the work with Michael Pruner and some of the other organizations I'm involved with is to make sure that those gatekeepers don't really have a say at the end of the day. And one important aspect there, I've got it right here.

speaker-2 (30:07)
sure.

and

Dennis Walker (30:20)
This

book that was written and this is of course Dennis and Terrence McKenna who wrote this pseudonymously or under pseudonyms. This was the first book that taught home mushroom cultivation psilocybin mushroom cultivation. It was published I believe in 1976 and I think that's a great example of taking the power out of these institutional gatekeepers hands and putting it out in the public where now you know if people want to learn how to grow mushrooms they can do that.

This was not knowledge that existed in the public domain when psychedelic research was quote unquote shut down in the late 1960s. There was nobody cultivating mushrooms at home. So this idea, know, when people talk about like, if we get too out of control, then maybe the powers that be are going to shut down this psychedelic Renaissance. That ship has sailed. You know, anybody can grow mushrooms now, ⁓ super cheap to grow them super cost effective. And I think that's really important.

Because at end of the day, I am a cognitive libertarian and I think, you know, this is nobody should come between my right to cultivate or build a relationship with naturally occurring fungus. And the idea, you know, even the idea that the government could tell you what you could put in your body, that is a modern invention by and large, at least in the U.S. Like one brief example in the 1850s, I it was called like the Laudanum laws, something to that effect where ⁓ opium tinctures and such were being used.

and there were patents that were put in place for some of these different formulations, but the difference was none of the substances were criminalized. Now what we're seeing is there's research speeding up for patented, rigidly bottlenecked access to various psychedelics, and then the substances themselves are still, are criminalized. You can technically go to jail. That's something that only really was introduced in the 20th century, at least in the United States. So I think.

That's a new thing. It's the exception to the rule, not historically accurate, this idea of prohibition.

3L1T3 (32:23)
Yeah, so kind of what would you say that we're kind of laundering the harm, what is it, laundering the harm reduction through kind of just therapeutic language or clinical language?

Dennis Walker (32:34)
Yeah, and again, I think that there's a place for that for sure, but ⁓ I've seen quite a few articles over the last year kind of talking about the dangers of non-clinical use and those always feel like sponsored pieces. I think you can have a carve out talking about that this isn't risk-free. It's not probably this ⁓ completely safe, 100 % perfect substance that's gonna deliver every time for every environment, you know, but ⁓ I think that people should make their own choices and they should be educated about it.

And like the Rand report that just came out on January 21st, it's a global think tank. They track that psilocybin mushroom use as the number one used psychedelic substance in the U S with an estimated 11 million adults who used it. That's roughly 5 % of the U S population. I personally think that might be a low ball. If you incorporate like go on Tik TOK, go down a rabbit hole, mushrooms, mushroom chocolates, et cetera, all over the place. And I think that

speaker-2 (33:13)
is.

Dennis Walker (33:30)
you know, part of what the Rand Corporation put out in their last report was like, it's urgent that people should try to figure out how to accommodate this with policy change, because right now we sort of have this blanket prohibition in place. That's not doing anyone any good if they're going to just go get it. You can get it pretty much anywhere you want. The spores are legal, easy to cultivate. So I think we need an adult conversation about how to actually integrate these substances into our very interesting time that we live in right now.

3L1T3 (34:01)
For sure, yeah. Dennis McKenna reminds me of what he was saying on our episode about, you know, it's so easy, just go ahead and get them yourself. Like there's the cognitive libertarian, as you were saying, just, it's your own mind, do it, you know? It's super easy to grow. You guys can just grow your own mushrooms. Right, it's easier than growing cannabis. for sure. I did the ⁓ rice tech, ⁓ got 20 years ago, you know?

rice flour and vermiculite so knew all about it was it was a good time good about 20 years ago, so So who gets quoted as an authority in drug journalism right now?

Dennis Walker (34:44)
Well, Rick Doblin seems to be making the rounds still. You know, he's had an incredible career as a public figure advocating for psychedelics to be integrated through more formal, like FDA systems, et cetera. But I see him pop up all the time. Paul Stamets certainly has a lot going on in that domain. And I've been quoted a few times. So that's been cool. I always appreciate when people reach out to me for that kind of stuff. ⁓ Yeah. So who else?

Yeah, he's great. Yeah, I try to mainly stay in the mushroom lane because I spend so much time kind of focused on the mycoprenur platform that's something plus sometimes I just get aggravated when I read some of these psychedelic pieces, you know, the whole kind of MDMA legalization, FDA approval thing, the way that went was pretty unnerving for me for a lot of reasons just to see how the press treated the situation. So, you know, that that soured me a little bit on like being more

a formal part of this industry. Like I've been fortunate to go to a lot of conferences and connect with a lot of these quote stakeholders. But again, like at my, at my heart, I'm kind of this like cynical satirist, you know, and I really like this kind of small group underground hangout. Don't get me wrong. I love a stage. I love being invited to stuff, but you know, at a certain point, five years into being a quote public figure, having the platform and stuff, I've really tried to like move away from this idea of

me as a thought leader. I've been to all the conferences and ⁓ it's hard to have a healthy disdain and skepticism for a lot of the way that psychedelics are being rolled out as an industry and then still be getting invited to everything because it seems to be, there's almost like a bandwagoning effect where you have to ⁓ hype people up and you have to get excited about things. And what happens if I disagree with something? I don't wanna start a whole quarrel. So I'd rather just stay out of it and stay on my lane.

So that's kind of where I've been at the last, you know, I just hosted my weekly incubator every Thursday. have mushroom entrepreneurs from around the world join and we do a live call like this and kind of tap in with people, know, what's happening in their lives. And I realized like there's so much innovation, goodwill, empathy, just great actors who don't get platformed because they don't kind of fit this more like polished public facing industry narrative. ⁓

Yeah, so, but I think there's a lot of great people in this quote psychedelic industry too. you know, I love hanging out when we get invited to stuff for sure.

3L1T3 (37:18)
All right, for sure. Yeah, to me, that was one of the best parts of Psychedelic Science 25. It was my first real conference. But I mean, it's also the biggest. It was huge. But being able to meet all those people, ⁓ just meet them in person, talk to them, shake their hand, it was great. ⁓ But kind of along the same lines as who gets quoted as a voice, what would you say would be the voices that we're missing right now?

Dennis Walker (37:48)
think a lot of underground people familiar with the global political and environmental situation. think sometimes it gets divided into this camp of like, there's people who are really well versed in academia and they've studied through this academic lens. And I think there's a big disconnect there because like nobody does psychedelics in this rigidly controlled clinical environment. It's probably less than 1%.

of psychedelic use 99 % at least if not 99.9 is happening in real world context. It's happening with people who are out at raves and who are at the beach and artistic communes or just like taking them recreationally. And there tends to be people want to shift away from that. And if they do talk about that, it's kind of been a more negative light about like, you know, what do we do to curtail this unsanctioned use? And again, that's sort of like this top down

way of structuring or relating to psychedelic use. And I see them more as a bottom out thing. You know, like I think they are inherently non-hierarchical and they're more on a peer to peer network, which makes them so hard to contain. So if you want to do the hierarchical way, that's FDA approval. You get your insurance to pay for it. You know, there's a whole industry, of course, built around that. There's like a dozen different licensures you can get. There's 16 different PhD positions, but like, what about

the people who are just effectively using it for pennies on the dollar. Like I don't think they get a lot of ⁓ press and certainly not mainstream press. So I think we need more of those voices. And I also think that's why I've had maybe some quote success with the lane I'm in is because I grew up on the first generation, I would say of like digital media, digital native people who got into psychedelics and then have a pretty good track record going back 20 years or so, you know, since the first time I tried it.

And I would find a lot of stories, people talking about like, it needs to be honored and done in this specific way. And that's true. Like we need to pay credence, incredibly so, to indigenous stewards. There's also the consideration of we live in a radically different society. It's a consumer focused society. It's a radically different time. And you know, lot of, I spent a lot of time in Mexico and have traveled fortunately to like 80 countries and like sometimes the way things are done traditionally there.

How would you fit that into like a modern mega metropolis or, you know, a hyper consumer driven culture? So I like to kind of talk about my own experiences and that I became a full on psycho not at the age of 17. I hit it really hard as a lot of people who get into this space do, especially when you first discover it and there's really no guard rails. But I also was able to like finish college, get a job. You know, I taught high school at a well known high school founded by Bill Gates for a few years.

I got married, I had a kid, and now I'm like a 36 year old adult who got to sort of experience these drastically different altered states and also find a way to integrate them into society as it is today. So I would like to hear more of that, like real experience. Cause one other thing I'll harp on is I think there's a lot of journalists I read who are like single, no kids, they write about this, you know? And they're writing about these like really intense.

drawn out ethical quandaries. And I think like, why don't you just have a kid, you know, like put your money where your mouth is. If you're concerned about the future, like that's one thing you can do to move the whole human experiment or human comedy forward as they say in Lebowski. And you know, since that's happened, it's changed the way that I relate to everything. And I'm not going to go out and like tell people like you need to do life this way. It's not my business. But I do think when you start really getting into this arena of ethics and the future and

heavens, what we will do with the future of civilization, like, well, you could rear the next generation and you can focus your time and energy on that. Maybe that's better. You know, I would say my little quip is like, if you're writing a lot about these ethical situations and not doing something like that, and like intentionally stewarding the next generation, ⁓ you're yelling from the cheap seats. you know, there's a tendency to do that to be like, we need to change the world and save the world. But like, the easiest thing I think is to sit behind a computer and draft up

some texts or whatever, a hard thing to do is to actually like really buckle down and focus on your immediate circle and your community and make sure that you rear the next generation.

3L1T3 (42:12)
Yeah, that's I mean, it's very true. That's you guys remember you should support your local psychedelic society, whatever you're from, you know, like that's the your local your local community. Same with voting and politics and all that. Support your local psychedelic society. ⁓ So you've kind of switching gears a little bit. You've reported from scenes where you could have just stayed home and written from a desk. ⁓ Why take the risk going out in the field like that?

Dennis Walker (42:40)
man, cause I love it. You know, I've been very fortunate to go to a lot of events around the world. And just to get back to like the idea of which voices are missing, like I just went to Uganda for the third African, third annual African rising mushroom festival. And there was no conversation about psychedelic mushrooms, but the conversation was around food security. You know, these are people who in many cases, abjectly impoverished with very few resources and

We brought people over from El Paso, shout out Max and Iksa from Mycelium Matters, they co-organized it. Somebody from Fungi Perfecti, which is Paul Stamets company was out there, Ted Anderson, flush crusher, teaching people how to grow their own food. They're getting into making medicine, like doing Rishi and lion's mane. And like that story was basically a void. Like nobody was reporting on it. And I'm like, look at what we're doing here. We're actively solving these generational problems.

with cross-border diplomacy and what I call fungi diplomacy crickets. But if the story was flipped and if it was something about ⁓ colonial power dynamics and this person who destroyed the cultural fabric by going over and opening a retreat center, it's like, that probably would have got some press. And just also say, I live in Mexico. I was born on the border, have spent much of my life traveling back and forth and been very involved in cross-border.

philanthropy and just like going to soccer games and all that stuff since the early 90s. And I see a lot of parachute journalism happening where people drop in, go to one retreat or something, and then they write this Wall Street Journal piece. And it just feels like it's so superficial in a way, like, great, that's your experience. But like, there's a lot more going on. And it's so easy to kind of use this divisional rhetoric about like, right and wrong.

But again, I think it's parachute journalism. It's like you have to spend time developing relationships with the communities and see where the impact is. and, ⁓ you know, a lot of journalism I've read about like over in Africa that happens where people go in and NGO comes in, they spend a couple of weeks or whatever. And then they publish the story as though they're authorities when guerrilla journalists or people can go out and spend time with the community and really learn what it's like. And like in Uganda,

We had no running water. was a hole in the ground for toilets. The light was like, you know, very rare because the generator had to be working. And you really get a sense of like how things are. Same thing when I went to India, I went to the first mushroom festival there, got to speak. I wrote about that for high times. And just like being part of that community, it's not just a story that you write as an outsider. It's like, I built relationships with these people, hosted them on the podcast. We've collaborated together.

I went over to visit them and spent a week over there. We're still in touch. So I think that there's a definite opportunity to treat journalism more as like a community stewardship practice instead of like this sort of like anthropologists from Mars who's just like dropping in. You know, I'm reading a book right now about like ancient civilizations of Peru. It was written in 1936 or so. And it's just like this white guy describing the primitive Peruvian cultures and like their facial features.

and it just feels so tone deaf and out of touch. And I fear that that's sometimes what the journalism is. It's like people drop in, I'm here for six days and I'm gonna pick this story, but like, God forbid you really build relationships in the community and ask how you can help and what they need.

3L1T3 (46:08)
It makes me think of Jack Skellington trying to describe Christmas.

Dennis Walker (46:12)
Yeah, shout out Jack Skellington.

3L1T3 (46:15)
Right. What's the most dishonest way that your work gets framed?

Dennis Walker (46:20)
I think I've been really lucky. ⁓ I was not super thrilled with ⁓ a critique of one of my satirical pieces last year, and I don't want to get too far into it, but it was, you know, these people who have, I'll just say it was symposia. They're a well-known platform, right? And I had personal relationships with them at the time, and I thought it was really distasteful in that, like, to make a public example of what I would call a cherry-picked sort of idea about the way that this skit was portrayed. And I felt very vulnerable at the time because

Again, like I'm the type of person that loves to build rapport with people, loves to see the other side of the story where I can. So was very unusual for me to be publicly criticized by a person that I had just spent like time with in multiple countries over the year. And I was like, you know, you could have just texted me or something, but that's okay. Like I'm not immune to criticism. I should be criticized. However, I'll say like the satire to tie it back to that, that I do, I do hundreds of videos. So the idea that like you can,

you know, not say anything about 250 videos and then make a public example of what's wrong with number 251. To me, again, that feels like sort of the divisive tactics that get deployed in the community. And I'm much more interested in bridge building. So it's why, you know, I haven't kind of brought that up or like pursued that because I've more or less buried the hatchet on it because I said, Hey, let's jump on a phone call and let's talk. So I think like, far as dishonest framing, you know, social media is very easy for people to pick.

cherry pick what they see and then present it and control the narrative in a certain way. And that's not nearly as easy to do like in person or like at a live event. And I think it's why ⁓ social media debates can be so deleterious and not constructive because above and beyond the loss of tone and context. A lot of the times there's also a lot of like bad actors and anonymous people who jump on this. And we saw that a lot with like

You know, I was not a fan like of the anonymous accounts on Twitter. there still are, know, and I actually, funny enough, I got kicked off Twitter. I've been banned from Tik TOK, Instagram and Twitter. back on Tik TOK and Instagram, but I thought Twitter would be the hardest to get kicked off of, but I literally posted a photo from a nice hotel on the Bosphorus in Istanbul, made a half joking caption that I was amongst oligarchs and Chinese diplomats. And that was enough to get me yanked from Twitter permanently. So anyways, back when I was on it,

I would find these like anonymous accounts like sharing my work and then framing it so selectively. Like when I mentioned I did all this satire in lots of places like in Baghdad, Iraq and at the Dead Sea and then on the border of Israel and Palestine, they took this one cherry picked frame out of like, you know, 15 different videos I made and then use that screenshot, took it out of context and essentially condemned me.

for supporting an apartheid regime and this and that and the other. And it was like this anonymous account. Like, I don't know who this person is. So I think that's an unfair framing when people deliberately selectively frame something and pull it out of context. And that's really easy to do on social media.

3L1T3 (49:29)
Right. mean, that's so many people. That's I mean, that's what podcasts are good for, I guess, is long form conversation to actually have talks.

Dennis Walker (49:38)
present.

3L1T3 (49:39)
Yeah, there's just not enough, I think, out there today where people sit down and hash these ideas out and talk them out. Well, yeah. And to be fair, though, think if you've ever been scrolling through reels or something, you ever come across one that's going to be a long one? Maybe it's like CNET or something, and you're like, there's a debate. ⁓ But then you realize it's going on for 20 minutes, and you're like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to keep going here. Right. Our attention spans just aren't good enough anymore, huh? Right.

ADHD on a countrywide scale, I guess. Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I can definitely speak for myself. yeah. That ADHD gets me bad sometimes. So if we wanted a healthier drug culture instead of a respectable one, what would the media change first?

Dennis Walker (50:25)
I'm a big fan of local community oriented action and covering those kinds of things. That's why I love independent press. Like shout out Lucid News. You know, they've been huge benefactors for me from the very beginning. They asked me to cover Wonderland in Miami. And I think this is good example of like how cool journalism, not to say journalism is supposed to be cool. It's supposed to get to the heart of a story and make people think and cover issues, et cetera. But they asked me to cover

Wonderland, which was this like mega convention, right? And, ⁓ and very humorous from a satirical lens because ostensibly it's the psychedelic conference. But I would say it was a lot of people who like, look like they just got off their tea time at the golf course, you know, and they're in between investing and, ⁓ strip clubs and in their hedge fund. And then, we'll go check out this psychedelic thing and see if we can make some money there. And so I kind of absolutely lampooned it and ridiculed it and

the audience loved it, Lucid News loved it, and then the people at Wonderland loved it. That's what I thought was so funny. And they said, you know, this was a convention that also got a lot of unfavorable press to some degree, because I don't know if anyone followed this story, but there was a whole issue where they actually kicked a journalist out. And, you know, that's something I wasn't involved with at all. So I was just reading about it, but it didn't really like look good for them. So I included that in my story, but I did all of this satirical coverage.

And then they actually use my piece to like promote the conference the next year, even though was just a lot of very thinly veiled shit talking about corporate psychedelia. And then I ended up becoming friends with everyone. And I think, you know, one thing I learned from that whole experience was that it was actually told to me by the then president of the conference was ⁓ psychedelics, what are they supposed to do for a lot of people? They open your mind. Isn't it ironic how many people have very closed minds about the way things should be? And they have like,

cling on to their echo chamber narrative about like, you're doing this wrong and you're doing that wrong. And that caused me to examine my own biases and realize like, yeah, psychedelics should like if you have your same perspective all the time, that's kind of closed off, you know, I'm not saying you should open yourself up to everything, but like, you should be able to evolve your perspectives as the society and the world evolves and such, I think.

Again, that's why I love like lucid news is from the beginning. They always emboldened me to use my authentic voice to lean into gonzo journalism and satire. And then I've fortunately been able to get picked up with a bunch of other outlets since then. So another good example, double blind magazine. I think they really do a great job of covering unheralded stories. They give a lot of opportunities to people who don't get published elsewhere to write about things that maybe are critical of power dynamics and structures and things like that.

very niche, nuanced, independent reporting. So shout out Double Blind. And I just greenlit another piece with them to write about psychedelic tourism, which is another really interesting angle. It's like, you know, some people are so for it. It's a huge industry. Some people are against it because they say that there's a lot of colonial dynamics in play and you know, this and that the other. So I want to take that middle road and not look at only the glowing testimonial of like, you're going to go to

Jamaica and eat mushrooms and it's going to cure your depression and addiction. You know, I think that's a bit of a stretch, but ultimate, you know, on the other side of that people saying, Oh, you're going to go and it's a foreign owned lodge and you're going to pay the local worker's, uh, you know, uh, poultry sums while you make thousands of dollars a head or whatever. And I want to find the middle ground of those stories and, interview people that are kind of, uh, from all different angles. So

Yeah, I think the way that's a healthier psychedelic culture in regards to journalism could come around as more transparency and open discourse and less like bandwagoning because I do think there are a lot of like informal, if not secretly funded syndicates of like signal boosting. I totally think that's the thing because it works with every other industry. Like you have, you know, a certain number of journalists or platforms or whatever that only cover a certain type of story and they kind of all work in tandem.

that would lead one to believe that's actual public opinion, when in reality, that's just like a well organized and probably well funded ⁓ syndicate of people who have one agenda in play. And I don't pull too seriously on the conspiracy theorizing, it's fun, but I think that's clearly something that has happened in the psychedelic space and probably gonna see more of it.

3L1T3 (54:59)
Yeah, I was gonna say that middle ground It's a real tough to Occupy that's kind of what we do here and you know, you're doing at the same time. It's it's it's a it's a it's a tight rope, you know, ⁓ I think there's a good spot to kind of put a pin in it for the public episode We're gonna head over to patreon Finish out the conversation a little bit. Have some fun talk over there if you guys want to Take a listen go to our patreon patreon.com / Diversion States

One more reminder, if you want to learn how to support someone through challenging psychedelic experience, check out the Zendo project. The training isn't free, but you get 10 % off with our affiliate code in the show notes. So we're going to head over there. You guys have a have an interesting trip and we'll see you there.

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All right, guys, thanks. Felt like a good place to kind of top the stop the episode, kind of landed here. ⁓ Bryan, before we close this out, you know, what was your takeaway here? ⁓ dude, Dennis is, ⁓ fucking hilarious. Yeah, that was one of the best things I've been watching his Instagram. You guys go check it out. But yeah, he's got the, ⁓ he's doing these little skits all the time about how he did two Iowaska journeys and he's ready to become a shaman. It's fucking hilarious.

Yeah, I like the whole Don Chad thing. Right. Yeah, it was pretty funny. know, as we came out of it, like we said, this really isn't as we came into it. This isn't really about psychedelics as much as the substances as much. It's about the narratives forming around them. You who gets to tell the story, what gets amplified, what gets buried, all that. Yeah, absolutely. I thought that was very insightful, especially from a journalist's perspective. You know, the things that

he was asked to write about or, or to look into versus the things he wanted to write about and wanted to look into. Right. And it's, it's good to kind of dig into in between that narrative of, a psychedelic world of, know, this will fix everything or this is dangerous and needs to be tightly controlled. You know, he really, uh, you know, kind of got in that middle ground that what we'd like to talk about here. So, you know, which is, is that's where reality lies, you know, right here in the middle of all that. that's why these conversations matter.

not really to pick a side or to actually look at the incentives, the framing and blind spots. That's what ends up shaping culture long before policy and everything else really catches up. So if you've got something out of this episode, you want to go a little bit deeper, we're continuing over on Patreon, the integration session where we get a little bit more loose, a little more personal. We talked about how Dennis's perspective has shifted over time, what he's pulled back on and some of the stuff that doesn't really fit in the public.

you know, narrative. So if you want to check that out, go check us out at patreon.com / diversion states. Again, huge shout out to our top supporters, Angie, Mike and Super D. Seriously, we appreciate you guys. You're helping keep the show independent and moving forward. One more quick reminder, if you want to learn about how to support someone through difficult psychedelic experiences, check out the sendo project. No training isn't free, but you can get 10 % off with our code in the show notes. So all right, that's it for this one. You guys stay grounded and we'll see you next episode.

Catch you later.