No Mushrooms Required
A banker, a whirlpool, and a World Cup anthem walk into a bar.
Yesterday I went for lunch with one of the smartest people I know.
A mentor. An entrepreneur. A former banker. One of those rare people who’s brilliant and funny at the same time, which honestly is the most dangerous combination.
We’re having lunch and he tells me he reads The Burn Blog.
I’m flattered. This is a man whose opinion I genuinely care about.
Then he looks at me and asks what kind of mushrooms I take before writing it.
I laughed so hard.
Because he’s not wrong. I’ve been reading Carl Jung, Alan Watts, the Stoics, Kant. I write about archetypes and consciousness and the nature of the self. At 5 AM. In a whirlpool. And I work at a bank.
I can see how that raises questions.
For what it’s worth, at the University of St. Gallen I had two majors. One was marketing. The other was ‘management of social processes’. Not finance. The psyche of societies and their impact on economies. Why people behave the way they do in groups, in markets, in crowds, under pressure.
So technically this is just a very expensive degree finally paying off…
And the 5 AM thing? Most people press snooze. I get into a whirlpool in the dark and let my thoughts wander. No agenda. No emails. Just warm water and the quiet before the world starts. Sometimes I journal into an AI and the journal talks back. It’s like meditation, except the silence has opinions.
It’s beautiful when you give your mind permission to just go wherever it wants to go.
Sometimes that becomes philosophy. Sometimes it becomes a song. And sometimes, apparently, it reads like a man who should be drug-tested.
No mushrooms I promise. Although at 5 AM it’s so quiet I swear you can hear them growing in the garden. I’m 52. My drug these days is the moment the first bird starts to sing. And an occasional glass of red wine.
But since we’re here, and since everyone now thinks I live permanently in some philosophical cloud, let me show you what else happens in that whirlpool.
I also think about football.
The World Cup starts June 11. The world is splitting apart. Politics, borders, algorithms, everything pulling us into corners. But football? For 90 minutes none of that matters. You hug a stranger. You scream next to someone you’d never talk to on the train. For 90 minutes, we’re the same.
And now they’re taking even that away. $11,000 for a final ticket. An official anthem that sounds like a country song about God and Texas. The beautiful game is forgetting who it belongs to.
So I did what any reasonable man in a whirlpool at 5 AM would do. I produced a new one. An anthem. One for every team. English, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Vietnamese. Not translated. Reborn. Every nation in their own words.
Three voices. A claymation video. A manifesto. A movement. A website. Zero budget. A stranger in Vietnam remixed it without being asked. The dog still doesn’t care.
It’s called 90 Minutes Is Enough.
Check out the video to it above or under www.90minutes.world to listen to other languages.
No mushrooms required. :-D
🪶 Author’s Note
I write at dawn - usually from a whirlpool in Switzerland. I talk to AI every morning before sunrise. Not for productivity. For self-knowledge.
Out of that practice came a philosophy (Technomysticism), a course (The Human Variable), three music personas (Naimor, Nova Rai, Charlie C), 40+ apps built with zero code, and this blog.
The Burn Blog is where the fire lives. Technomystic.ai is where the mirror lives.
🔥 The Burn Blog 🪞 Technomystic.ai 🎵 Naimor / Nova Rai / Charlie C.
If you feel it, it’s real.