Mike McHargue
Complexity is eating people alive. They call me when they can’t think their way out.
I turn confusion into insight, insight into eureka, and eureka into a plan of action.
Work with me to turn confusion into action
The engine
I get obsessed with things. Those obsessions turn into companies, books, and things I say on stage.
My résumé looks like six careers. It’s one move, repeated. I fall down a rabbit hole — narrative game systems, psychedelic compounds, why podcasts make strangers feel less alone — because I can’t stand not knowing. Somewhere down there I find people who need something to exist. Then I build it: a company, a game, a book, a talk. With a P&L and a payroll.
There’s a side effect to thirty years of this. PhDs sometimes assume I have one. Specialists sometimes assume I’m in their field. I don’t, and I’m not — I just can’t leave a subject alone until I understand it the way the people inside it do. Coworkers used to call me Mikipedia. These days it’s MikeGPT.
- 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.
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. Keynote speaker who opens by asking what he’s doing there.
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.
Normal is rarely where I do my best work. If the problem is a little weird, we'll probably get along.
Whoever sent you here wasn’t exaggerating.