🫠 Psychonaut POV

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Welcome to Tricycle Day. Our psychedelics newsletter is email only. But if we mailed out physical copies, you better believe they’d be spore-printed on mycelium paper. 📄

Dennis Walker wears many hats: wide-brimmed and spiritual (as pictured), bucket (to win over Gen Z?), and jester (if only in spirit). But don’t be fooled by the whimsy; this “mycopreneur” means business. He's spent years documenting the global mushroom revolution, from Amanita to Z-strain.

We asked Dennis how psychedelics shaped his philosophy on entrepreneurship, which mushroom-based innovations could disrupt entire industries, and why he’s building Global Psychedelic Week to connect underground communities worldwide.

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How did you become so obsessed with mushrooms that you took on the portmanteau, Mycopreneur?

I've been a psychonaut from the very first time I had a mushroom experience when I was 17 years old. I didn't go into it blind though. I poured through Erowid forums, talked to people who’d had the experiences, and found Terence McKenna. I'd been researching mushrooms and entheogens for a few years by the time I had that first experience. I was in a great place mentally and could appreciate that I was in a transitionary phase getting ready for my senior year of high school.

After that, I just wanted to know why we weren't talking about psilocybin mushrooms in our culture. It clearly was a misrepresentation. All of the DARE propaganda around psilocybin didn't square with reality. I knew really intelligent, personable people who had used mushrooms. That story about how psychedelics would scramble your brain didn’t add up.

What really took my interest to the next level was when I started meeting accomplished Silicon Valley pioneers who were into psychedelics. All of a sudden it became apparent that there was a way to integrate psychedelics into your life that actually expanded what you could bring to the world. There was this trope with the Leary crowd of "turn on, tune in, drop out." I had the opposite impetus. I wanted to take these experiences and contribute to society, not opt out of it. I wanted to build, make, and find ways to integrate.

You've talked to 200+ mushroom entrepreneurs from around the world. What are the most exciting fungal innovations you've seen that most people don't know about yet?

Years ago, I learned about the UN's 17 sustainable development goals. There's $4 trillion committed to lowering the carbon footprint and creating a more sustainable economy. I realized that mushroom entrepreneurs were already addressing every single one of those goals.

For example, there's a company in Namibia called MycoHAB making tiny houses out of mycelium composite materials. NASA has invested in this technology to build moon bases out of mushrooms. Instead of transporting heavy equipment, you could take spores to space and grow habitats. When I found out that Ikea, Dell, General Motors, the Department of Defense, and NASA were all investing in fungi tech, I thought we need more people scaling this technology.

Another example is mycelium packaging from Ecovative. You can use the packaging and then throw it in your garden and it actually increases yield. Then there's Hiro, a startup making mycelium diapers that break down and go back to the soil after use. There are 300,000 diapers per minute thrown into landfills worldwide, so this addresses a huge issue.

If you factor in the economic potential for carbon footprint reduction and carbon credit trading, fungi tech adds up to a multi-trillion-dollar economy. There are over 400 species of mushrooms that eat plastic. In Australia, Fungi Solutions deploys oyster mushrooms to eat cigarette butts. We’ve developed a tagline at this point. Whatever problem you're trying to solve, “there's a mushroom for that.”

There are a lot of exciting things happening with functional mushroom extracts and product formulations as well. I'm the marketing director for Mycroboost functional mushrooms, which has emerged as a category leader in the mushroom coffee market that's taking over the planet right now.

It's also interesting to note the sea change in public acceptance and use of Amanita muscaria. This mushroom has been weighed down by stigma and misinformation in the West for years, but even former skeptics like Paul Stamets are starting to recognize Amanita muscaria’s medicinal value. There are a number of studies emerging to investigate its therapeutic potential, building on generations of traditional use around the world.

You went from covering mushroom companies to launching your own chocolate brand. How has that pivot changed your perspective on the industry?

I think it's really important to have skin in the game. I'd been covering mushroom companies and learning about publicity, journalism, and PR for some time. I had the media property down, and then people started approaching me with projects. Mycoday mushroom chocolate was one of those. A good friend had started making his own chocolate, and we wanted to scale up a premium product that took the functional mushroom component seriously.

Having a physical product has been a baptism by fire. It wasn’t just the tariffs that got put in place. Customs intercepted a thousand of our bars and extorted us. We were missing one line on our packaging about the street address where it was made, so it got detained and rerouted. We ended up paying absurd fees. Despite the trials and tribulations, we've brought to market the highest-quality functional mushroom chocolate in the game. We're super proud of it.

Part of what Mycopreneur does is incubate mushroom brands. We help grow them by connecting founders to resources and mentorship. That's why I host the weekly Mycopreneur Incubator every Thursday. Now that Mycoday runs mostly automatically with 3PL partners handling storage and shipping, I have bandwidth for other projects.

Tell us about Global Psychedelic Week 2025. What are you building and why does the psychedelic world need it?

We've got 42 confirmed in-person events in 42 cities, including Amsterdam, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, London, and Los Angeles. We also have well-known speakers like Rick Doblin and Robin Carhart-Harris, but the real aim is to platform lesser known or unsung heroes from all over the planet.

A lot of conferences are pretty exclusive. If you're a psychonaut in Mumbai, it's expensive to fly to New York and get a hotel. We wanted Global Psychedelic Week to be decentralized and global in the truest sense, with speakers from places like Zimbabwe or Serbia. My co-founder Milica is Serbian herself. There's a festival in Hungary called OZORA that's like the European Burning Man. It feels so different from things happening in the United States.

There's also extraordinary ancestral knowledge that needs to be preserved. A community I work with in India just produced a documentary with a remote northeastern Indian indigenous tribe about how they use mushrooms. In Chiapas, Mexico, there's detailed morphological knowledge passed down through generations about exactly which mushrooms to look for, what trees they grow with, and when they grow.

We wanted to celebrate this diversity and create something accessible where anybody can get plugged into the network. You get access to all these different thinkers from around the world, plus independently organized in-person events. I see mushrooms and psychedelics as a tool for diplomacy. The political discourse is in the gutter, and psychedelics can help you break down barriers and see other people for who they are. Global Psychedelic Week is essentially a diplomacy initiative with psychedelics front and center.

Where do you see the biggest opportunities in the mushroom space over the next 5-10 years?

It's going to be huge. So many people are literally quitting their jobs to focus on mushroom entrepreneurship. I just met a new friend earlier today who used to work at the Mayo Clinic and now she's all in as a mycopreneur.

One big opportunity is genetics. There's exciting work sourcing wild genetics and building databases. Some people have 200+ different psychoactive cultures. Astromycology is interesting, too. An Australian company just grew mushrooms in space and fed their crew for a suborbital launch. Even terraforming, using mushrooms to impact landscapes, is an area to watch.

I think microdosing is only going to get more popular. Not everybody wants to do a full 10-gram send to the moon and be ontologically shocked. Some people just want to vibe a little and feel good. I used to be more of an evangelist that everybody has to have the “heroic dose” experience, but I've backed off that. If you want to, great, but you should educate yourself.

Analytical potency testing is another big angle because with the gray market, we see scary headlines of adulterated products. Even dosing is so far off the map now. Some strains like AT-118 found under a tamarind tree in the British Virgin Islands are fifty times more potent than others.

Whatever you do, being an ethical operator is very important. It's tempting to cash in, but the most successful people I see are also the most generous. They play the long game and treat their customers and community with respect. That breeds loyalty.

Want more from Dennis?

Watch his satire videos on Instagram, grab some Mycoday chocolate (10% off with code TRICYCLE10), get tickets for Global Psychedelic Week (10% off with code TD_GPW), or join his next Mycopreneur Incubator.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.