Welcome to Why Not Me the World Podcast, hosted by Tony Mantor.

Broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee.

Join us as our guests tell us their stories.

Some will make you laugh, some will make you cry.

Real life people who will inspire and show that you are not alone in this world.

Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance, and a better understanding

for autism around the world.

Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World. I'm joined today with East Forest. He's a trailblazer in meditation and inner resilience. He offers guided meditations, retreats, and a podcast, Ten Laws with East Forest. He's collaborated with institutions across social justice, mental health,

science, music, and creative fields including Google, Johns Hopkins, UCSF, New Earth, and Ted.

His work has appeared on Bright Antenna, Domino, 1631 recordings, Aquillo Records, as well as

tender-loving empire and universal Deca.

He's here to talk about his music and his new feature-length film Music for Mushrooms.

So thanks for coming on.

Thank you, man.

So if you would, give us a little information on how your music started, then once you started getting into it, how it expanded

to become what has become today. With the East Force project, you know, it started because I was

feeling a lot of anxiety and depression. I have my whole life. I was living in New York as in my 20s, you know,

things were falling apart. I think when things fall apart, there's often some kind of doors

opening too, or maybe it's clearing the rubble or I don't know, burns the fields,

however you want to look at it. Sure, I think we all can understand that. I started making

music for me to actually like journey to and my interest

was or I had some experiences with psilocybin mushrooms, magic mushrooms that were really

...