Understory - An InoculateTheWorld Podcast

We’re joined this week by the legendary Joey Santore, the man behind the viral YouTube channel Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t. Joey is an authority on all things plant-life, and this conversation is an expansive dive into his fascinating mind. We talk native habitat conservation, deep desert lore, and strategies for staying sane in a world bent on self-destruction. There’s truly something for everyone in this episode, and we’re grateful that Joey was down to chat.

Dr. Pamela Kryskow is a preeminent researcher and practitioner working at the intersection of frontline medicine and psychedelic care. She is a chair of the Psychedelic Association of Canada, and a lead study therapist on the microdose.me citizen science study. Having spent 8 years fighting fires in the Canadian wilderness, Dr. Kryskow is intimately acquainted with the unique challenges that face first responders: daily traumas, exposure to extreme environments, and less attention to their pain from the general public. We go deep in this week’s episode, exploring themes of memory, resilience, and the many promises of psychedelic medicines.

Rookie Mycologist is a dominant content creator in both the mushroom and the 420 space. He has single-handedly built a massive educational platform and continues to inspire millions of people to explore the world of home cultivation. Rookie joins us this week for a deep-dive into mycology, economic self-determination through content creation, and the politics of online censorship. Stick around to learn how you, too, can build an empire by doing what you love.

Dimitri Mugianis is an underground psychedelic legend and one of the most celebrated figures in the ibogaine movement. A former addict himself, Dimitri traveled extensively through Holland and West Africa in search of an answer to the pain that led him to heroin and crack. After being initiated into Bwiti, the indigenous African tradition that uses ibogaine as a sacrament, Dimitri became a traveling medicine man and an evangelist of sorts, serving ibogaine to bohemians and artists and activists in his native New York City. This conversation is a searingly honest journey through Dimitri’s life—the joy, the triumph, and the many ways in which he got things wrong.

Visionary mycologist and citizen science extraordinaire William Padilla Brown joins us for a deep dive into everything from truffle biochemistry to cordyceps cultivation to the history of world religions. This is an epic conversation with one of the brightest thinkers in the field. Learn the secrets behind William’s DIY approach to building a mushroom business, and discover the hidden story of his success. You can find more of Williams work on his website: https://mycosymbiotics.com/

Soren Shade is a producer of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, co-founder of a kratom tea company, and an inveterate drug policy expert. He discovered kratom in his dorm at Columbia in 2017, leaning on it to get through a workload he wasn't prepared for after growing up in an underfunded school system in West Virginia. What started as a study aid quickly transformed into a passion, leading him to a deep education in how the drug war actually operates, from regulatory backroom deals to international treaty politics to the strange economics of a substance that keeps almost getting banned and keeps surviving anyway. We dive deep in this episode as Soren recounts the many disastrous failures of the drug war and regales us with stories of an old mentor who carried decades of secrets.

Alan Rockefeller has spent twenty five years teaching himself everything there is to know about mushrooms, entirely outside any university or institution. This episode is a myth-busting session: a look at how the stories we tell about fungi, which ones are dangerous, which are native, which names actually mean what we think they mean, get built, repeated, and rarely questioned. It's worth listening to with your assumptions in hand, because most of them won't survive the hour.

Keeper Trout is a peyote conservationist and a legendary figure in the American psychedelic movement. This conversation is about what real stewardship demands, what reverence looks like once you've seen a sacred plant in crisis with your own eyes, and what it means to spend a life in service to something that can't ask for help directly. It's also a conversation with one of the last people alive who spent real time with Sasha Shulgin, still sorting through the incredible archive he left behind. Keeper shares remarkable and occasionally shocking stories from his colorful life on the frontlines of psychedelic advocacy.

Colin Wells is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, a devoted father, and a man who has transformed his pain into service. This conversation moves through the ravages of addiction, the promises of psychedelics, and the specific loneliness that follows a uniform. There’s one question that motivates Colin to keep showing up for his nature-based psychedelic peer support group, Veterans Walk and Talk. Stick around ‘til the end to find out what it is.

Stephen Kinzer spent years reconstructing the mysterious life of a man the CIA worked hard to keep invisible: Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist behind MK-Ultra and the man responsible for some of the most extreme experiments the US government ever ran on its own citizens. This conversation is an investigation into the specific kind of person capable of doing that work, what he told himself to make it possible, and how much of what he pioneered around the manipulation of personality and the re-structuring of belief still persists today.