From Astral Projection to Building a New Internet From Scratch W/Mike Winner

Episode Summary

Oto sits down with longtime friend DJ Mike Winner — co-founder of the decentralized network Qortal — for a deep dive into consciousness, sovereignty, and building outside the centralized internet. Mike traces his path from an early astral projection experience at 12, through a "germ theory" awakening from Dr. Bear Lando, to co-founding Qortal as a fully open-source, node-to-node alternative to the World Wide Web. He and Oto unpack the philosophy behind "sovereignty taxes," the difference between legal and possession-based ownership, and why cognitive sovereignty matters as AI use grows. Mike then walks through how Qortal actually works — minting, QDN, the CORT coin, the app ecosystem (QTube, Qmail, QShare, and more) — before showing how he used AI agents (including his own trained assistant, Merlin) to build Terrain TV, a free, AI-curated health-freedom video platform with 46,000+ videos.

Chapters / Timestamps

(Shifted +59s to account for the new intro at the top of the episode)

00:00 – Trailer

00:59 – Intro & Catching Up with DJ Mike Winner

02:59 – The Red Pill Moment: Astral Projection & "The Creature from Jekyll Island"

05:59 – Germ Theory, Chronic Illness & the Allopathic Debt System

07:59 – From Hollywood to Alpha Vedic: Finding His Path

09:59 – The Art of Inquiry: Trusting Truth Within & Daily Meditation

11:59 – Dependency, the Sovereignty Tax & the Entrepreneur's Dilemma

13:59 – AI as an Ancient Technology & the Convergence Point