What Did Mushroom Tell Dennis Walker: A Deep Dive with the Renowned Satire Mushroom Entrepreneur
Welcome to Psychedelics Design – where design meets psychedelics!
Explore the intersection of psychedelics and design at our partners' third online conference on December 11, 2024. Don't miss this opportunity to expand your perspective and get inspired already for everything that lies ahead in the new year! Tickets are just $28 – and yes, you will also receive the recordings to watch everything in your own time. See you there!
Dennis Walker, known as Mycopreneur in the psychedelic community, is a multifaceted figure who has made significant contributions to the field of psychedelics and mycology. As the founder of Mycopreneur, a leading mushroom publication, Walker has established himself as a prominent voice in the emerging psychedelic industry.
Dennis however is also the co-founder of a production house and launched his very own mushroom chocolate company.
We spoke with him about his unique perspective on the psychedelic industry, the cultural and medicinal aspects of functional mushrooms, his personal mushroom supplement stack and more. Enjoy the interview!
What Did Mushroom Tell Dennis Walker: A Deep Dive with the Renowned Mycopreneur Founder
Can you walk us through your journey as a media producer and myconaut, from your first psychedelic experience to the creation of Mycopreneur? How have your various experiences in media, travel, and education shaped your current work?
My role as a media producer and myconaut actually goes back to 2006 when I first tried psilocybin mushrooms and started recording and releasing music in MySpace as a senior in high school. In the fall of 2007, I enrolled as a freshman at the University of San Francisco and joined the Media Studies department. That’s when I really cut my teeth on the art of media production and started collaborating with a range of peers.
After graduation, I travelled and took random one-off gigs and teaching opportunities around the world. In 2014 I launched Untethered Together with my now wife as a way of documenting and sharing our experience traveling to New Zealand on a working holiday visa and subsequent circumnavigation of the globe. It was heavily inspired by Anthony Bourdain and everything was shot on a Go Pro camera and uploaded to a blog and YouTube channel we created called ‘Untethered Together’. The videos served as a production portfolio of sorts and landed my wife a full-time role at a production company a few years later working on major international video campaigns for the world's leading brands.
This up-levelling of seeing how things were done at a high level informed our approach to running Untethered Together, which took on different projects over the years. I also landed a full-time position as a multimedia teacher at one of the most prestigious high schools in the world based on the video portfolio built through Untethered Together. My wife was the producer of the Mycopreneur podcast when it first dropped in 2020 and having the professional network and high-level media experience in my corner for it immeasurably boosted the legitimacy of the project. Mushrooms always served as a sort of guardrail for me throughout the almost two decades since I first experienced them - they help me process the insanity of the world and recognize the signal amidst the noise.
What inspired you and your co-founder to transition Untethered Together from an adventure travel YouTube channel into a full-service production house?
The evolution from YouTube creators to a full-service production house happened organically over time and as a result of hard-earned experience and paying dues. Crushing a 3-minute self-produced YouTube video or a blog post that 60 people read is the first step to producing major media projects for international partner organizations. It’s my philosophy to ‘Mic Drop’ every project you work on regardless of audience size or recognition. Put in the work, and the opportunities present themselves.
How did you manage to bootstrap the company during its early stages, and what were some of the key challenges you faced in scaling up?
Bootstrapping is all I’ve ever done. It forces you to be creative, able to pivot and lean in a cutthroat global business ecosystem. More than anything, it affords you creative control. In terms of scaling, everything I’ve done has been rather unorthodox. There’s no universal formula that can be applied to scaling as every project is so unique. There are certainly best practices you might employ, but even then 90% of startups - including many extremely well-capitalized ‘psychedelic industry’ projects - fail.
So I choose to have fun and enjoy what I do now, to get into the ‘long-term mindset’ - committing to a lifetime of growth and development that measures in terms of decades or even centuries rather than quarters - and stopping to smell the fruiting bodies. I was golfing with one of my good friends and business mentors recently and he told me that I need to start thinking about brands outliving their founders and what that means.
As the founder of Mycopreneur, what inspired you to focus on mushroom entrepreneurship and education?
Entrepreneurs create solutions that advance public perception and policy downstream. Google, Patagonia, MycoWorks, etc. design and create the future before the general public or regulators even know what’s happening. Mushroom entrepreneurship is the Home Brew Computer club - where the early Silicon Valley founders congregated - of the 21st Century. We are very, very early in the deep fungal tech wave. Education is the key component of vitalizing and sustaining rapid development in a fledgling movement. If more people could make collaborating with mushrooms their full-time job, innovation would happen organically and at scale.
Have psychedelics played a role in enhancing your creativity or shaping your business vision for Mycopreneur?
Mushrooms have always been central in amplifying the creative process and vision for Mycopreneur.
I got to ask you: What “did mushrooms tell you”?
Two key statements: 1. “Create answers, not expectations.” 2. “Lose the loser attitude.”
Can you share your daily stack of supplements and tools that help you maintain peak performance as an entrepreneur?
I take a ton of functional mushroom products essentially every day. It’s insane how well they work for bolstering your health and vitality *if* you actually have good products. Mycroboost mushroom coffee is a mainstay in my rotation, as are Lion’s Mane and Cordyceps capsules from Real Mushrooms, tinctures from my brand Myco Mojo, Mycolove Farms tinctures, and whatever else I have on hand at the moment.
It is a ridiculous life hack to invest in a mushroom supplement regimen. There are a lot of counterfeit products and snake oil on the market since the ‘nootropic’ / supplement space is largely unregulated. This is one of the main reasons Mycopreneur exists - to educate people about the mushroom supplement market in addition to fungal innovation at large.
Which mushroom do you find most fascinating from both a business and cultivation perspective?
Lion’s Mane, Cordyceps, Turkey Tail and, Reishi are all in my daily intake protocol. Chaga is awesome. I take a Tremella extract from Real Mushrooms too. Psilocybin mushrooms are where the rubber meets the road, but I advise doing your due diligence and being aware that they could completely destroy your ontology/epistemology (your entire worldview/sense of identity/plans in life) at large doses, so don’t rush into anything if you’re new to altered states.
How has your background in culture influenced your approach to mushroom cultivation and entrepreneurship?
I grew up hosting exchange students from all over the planet and was regularly exposed to people with radically different world views and experiences than me - young adults who grew up in the USSR, Ghana, Venezuela, Malaysia, etc. Thus was a firm of ‘tripping lite’ in a way, as travel is. It shaped my ability to look at things differently, build rapport with different types of people, and communicate more universally as well as to be sceptical about my own biases and authority in general.
How important is kindness in business for you? Aka giving back, growing sustainable, supporting the land mushrooms grow on, community etc
Just be cool and sincere as often as possible and don’t make it a big deal to be excellent to people - treat the janitor like they’re the CEO.
As someone deeply involved in the mushroom industry, what future trends or developments do you foresee in mycology and its applications in business and culture?
This is the whole premise of my podcast, which is currently on episode 177. We go into this in detail and my guests say it better than I ever could here. Just start building a relationship with mushrooms now and learn how to listen to them in earnest. This starts with active listening in general. Minimize distractions where you can, have fun, and don’t take yourself too seriously. The future is fungi.
MORE FROM DENNIS WALKER
The Mycopreneur Newsletter
Dennis is also writing a weekly newsletter called “The Mycopreneur Newsletter” devoted to Mycopreneurs around the world - it profiles the entrepreneurs and designers building the future in collaboration with mushrooms.
Join his newsletter here
FROM OUR PARTNERS
reMind Psychedelics Business Forum
Build your business, make connections, and discover new opportunities in a rapidly changing marketplace. At reMind Psychedelics Business Forum, you’ll get practical business advice and an insider’s view of the market trends, policy updates, and latest developments guiding this space forward.
Hear our friends Joe Moore (Psychedelics Today), Henry Winslow (Tricycle Day), April Pride (SetSet) and many more!
In other words, exactly what you need to feel confident as an entrepreneur or licensed professional (especially in state-regulated markets).
Take 10% off with code REMPSYCHDESIGN10
