Mike Brancatelli (Mikeadelic) | Psychedelic Self Discovery & Realizing Cognitive Liberty
Mike Brancatelli is the host of Mikeadelic, a podcast about the many uses and philosophies connecting psychedelic plant medicine traditions throughout our realm. In this episode, we get trippy and talk about what a healthy relationship with plant medicine looks like, as opposed to the drug-culture created by the toxic modern pharmacopeia. It's a real face-melter, so tuck that ego into bed and kiss it goodnight as we explore the forbidden reaches of our selves.
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In this episode
Core themes
A Healthy Relationship With Psychedelics
Mike answers Chance's question about substance use by comparing a good relationship with psychedelics to a good relationship with food or with people: it should leave you nourished, clear, and inspired. He urges weighing risk against reward, checking your intention, treating the substances as tools rather than crutches, and meeting them with respect and reverence, then widens the frame by noting that everyone interacts with drugs daily through tea, coffee, and media. Chance adds that reverence is simply paying attention, and that attention is our spiritual currency.
From Stand-Up Comedy to Mikeadelic
Mike traces his path from a restless kid who kept asking why and resented being told what to do, to a quest for truth through comedy heroes such as Bill Hicks and George Carlin. He did stand-up in New York, met Dave Smith, co-hosted a libertarian podcast for a few years, then left in 2016 to focus on Mikeadelic, drinking ayahuasca and traveling to Peru along the way. Chance responds that once the gates open, every answer yields more questions, an infinite expansion where everything becomes part of one path.
Cognitive Liberty and Decriminalization
Chance opens by calling cognitive liberty the foundation of every other liberty and urging listeners to sharpen their rhetoric in 2020. Mike describes joining the Denver mushroom decriminalization push, passing out flyers and speaking out, and calls sovereignty over body, mind, and spirit an innate birthright, citing Graham Hancock's War on Consciousness talk and his own claim that psychedelics quiet the default mode network. Chance adds a riff on cannabis, from sativas and indicas to the upside of legalization.
Compartmentalization, Language, and Scaffolding
Chance recalls brain scans in which walled-off regions began talking to each other under a psychedelic, then compares that with the corporate compartmentalization he sees in society and calls language the real matrix. Mike stresses that lasting change needs mental scaffolding, with preparation mattering as much as integration, and likens it to researching a trip abroad. Chance links this to the trivium of preparation, experience, and integration, and shares a DMT mandala whose message, in his telling, was to go with the flow.
Shipibo Reciprocity and the Masks of Language
Mike recounts going to Peru in 2016, where Shipibo healers introduced him to a cosmology of interconnected life and a way of living with balance and reciprocity. Chance contrasts the indigenous sense of being part of nature with the colonial mind, argues that evil merely inverts what is natural, and plays on words: live spelled backward is evil, a persona is a mask, and no noun captures a self that is a process of becoming. His solo closing names letting go as psychedelics' lesson and flow as the goal.
Quotes
“Cognitive liberty is the foundation of all other forms of liberty.”
“I think balance and health, respect, reverence, and compassionate curiosity for yourself and anyone else that you might bring into that sphere is probably the way to go.”
“Bringing reverence is just like paying attention. Your spiritual currency is your attention.”
“We interact with drugs all day, every day. Everyone does, whether you drink tea or coffee or whether you watch media, television.”
“For me, "The Matrix," what I've come to realize, the real matrix is language.”
“When you step into the room where God lives, can you handle that? Are you going to get your face blown off?”
“Every type of noun that we apply to ourself, or even adjectives for that matter, is never actually true because all that you are is what you are, and that's a process of becoming.”
“A lot of people talk about integration, but it's really about the preparation, too, to make sure that you are ready to embark on a journey.”
“Returning to the flow state is what everything is all about, in my opinion.”
“It's really cool to see that people support someone who's just kind of losing their mind on a microphone, and talking about the things that affect our world and our reality.”
Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
