Mike McHargue
The question you can’t ask anyone else. The answer no one else can give.
I work with founders, creative leaders, and the brilliant misfits carrying things too big to put down.
Two ways we can work together
The engine
My whole life is answering questions — first for myself, then for everyone else.
The moment I find out there’s something I don’t know, I drop everything to learn it. Sometimes the learning becomes an obsession, and the obsession becomes something I build — a company, a book, a stage. Once, in the case of a particular brunette, it became twenty-five years of marriage.
The rest becomes me. I don’t just learn things — I metabolize them into a new map of reality. And the map includes people: what they believe, what they’re afraid of, what they’ll do next.
So when it’s time to answer — to build the thing, or to say it out loud — I’m not guessing at the audience. I can model the room, their boss, and their customer at the same time. Eight people at a table or eight million strangers: I know how to shape an answer so the right people pay attention, give a damn, and take action.
What do we do with computers? The internet? Email? Google? Twitter? Deconstruction? Loneliness? TTRPGs? The MCU? Psychedelics? Peptides? AI? Burnout?
Every era of my résumé is one of those questions, answered — and the answers helped shape markets, and sometimes started new ones. It looks like six careers. It’s one reflex, aimed at whatever’s newest.
- A curiosity about mushrooms became a research chemicals manufacturer I helped scale from three people to multiple factories, with distribution worldwide.
- A lockdown D&D campaign with dozens of dozens of players in one shared continuity became a funded game studio and an original world.
- The biggest questions about being human became two bestselling books and a podcast that reached millions.
There’s a side effect to thirty years of this: coworkers used to call me Mikipedia. These days it’s MikeGPT.
Half the things I'm proudest of, I can't name — not the work, and sometimes not even the company. That's what comes with being called in early, or quietly, or both. Every so often enough time passes that I'm allowed to say one out loud.
Google. Marvel. Netflix.
If you want the whole story
Community college dropout. Accidental COO. Bestselling author. The résumé only makes sense backwards.
The whole path
I started in IT in the nineties, doing digital transformation before we called it that. Pioneered search and digital marketing inside a TBWA agency. Started a record label to figure out what music meant when it stopped being physical. Built venues in Second Life for major brands and hosted Sundance in the metaverse before “metaverse” was a word anyone said out loud.
Then, for a chapter, I was “Science Mike” — an author and podcaster helping millions of people navigate the biggest questions about faith, science, and being human. I'm proud of that work. I still get letters from people who are alive because of it.
Yes, Mike is a smart dude, but it isn't just his brain,
Rob Bellfrom the foreword to Finding God in the Waves
it's his heart.
And it isn't just his heart, it's his refusal to let his life pass him by without giving it everything he's got.
Whatever he does, he throws himself into it.
All of himself.
Since then: COO of Wohler Chemical. Co-founder of Quantum Spin Studios and the World of Vesser. Science consulting, script advising, and media strategy for Marvel, Netflix, and other film and television companies.
These days I’m Chief Evangelist at Applied Wonder, which builds rooms that help a nervous system stand down — spatial sound, light, scent, and haptics, made by neuroscientists and artists working in the same room. Mount Sinai measured a 60% drop in stress per session. It’s the closest thing I have to a working answer to the question I keynoted at Google about: what if work increased human capacity instead of extracting it?
I’m also co-founder of and advisor to Protixa, a major American manufacturer of research-use-only peptides, and Cell Wellness, which is building the next generation of supplements and nutraceuticals on a genuinely new delivery system.
The rest of my time goes to consulting and keynotes — and whatever the next obsession requires.
Whoever sent you here wasn’t exaggerating.