Michael Walker: Yeah, alright. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Justin Boreta. So Justin, let me give you a quick introduction. Justin was one of the founding members of The Glitch Mob, and now he's focused on a new project — a new release, a new album specifically for his project, Boreta.

A little bit about him: he's a groundbreaking electronic artist with hundreds of millions of streams and sold-out global tours. He's collaborated with spiritual luminaries like Ram Dass and projects like Wavepaths, blending music with mindfulness and healing. Yes, that is awesome. He's also an advisor and creator at the frontier of music and tech.

He's the world's premier NFT expert—just kidding, we were joking about that backstage. But he is at the convergence of music and tech, including immersive audio experiences and AI-driven art. So, Justin, thank you for coming on the podcast today.

Justin Boreta: Thanks for having me, Michael. Great to be here.

Michael: Absolutely. I couldn’t have resisted.

Justin: It was too good.

Michael: Well, Justin, to kick things off, I would love to hear a little bit more about your story and how you started out, and eventually went on to reach hundreds of millions of streams and sold-out shows worldwide.

Justin: Sure, yeah. I ended up in a band by accident. I wasn’t someone who played in bands in high school. I was a computer nerd. I was into tinkering. I had Fruity Loops and turntables. For me, it was very much rave culture that started me into this whole process.

I’m more of a technologist than a music person, but ultimately they all blend together. Later in time, I came into music and joined and founded The Glitch Mob with two other guys—sort of accidentally. I never intended that, and then went on this crazy 15-year journey around the world. We had tons of remixes, albums, and tours.

A lot of things like that always start sort of accidentally, or at least emerge from a love of music and performance. Recently, I decided to leave so I could focus fully on my solo music. I’ve been exploring that for the past couple of years.

As of today—May 16—we’re in the middle of the album release cycle. The full album comes out June 5, and we had a single come out last week.

One other piece to this: in 2018, I became obsessed with ambient music. I had my own spiritual journey and a side project with a friend called Superposition. We released a bunch of albums, went deep into making music for psychedelic therapy, and now my new album is a convergence of all those things—my time making dance music and being on stage, creating custom instruments, and my time in the depths of the ambient world.

Michael: Wow, that is super cool. All of that sounds right up my alley. I’m looking forward to being a part of the album release and listening to the songs.

Could you share a little bit more? There are a lot of different parts of the onion we could unpeel here, but one of the things that stuck out to me was the convergence of psychedelic therapy with music. I’d love to hear you talk about that part specifically, especially as it’s still a bit of a taboo part of culture right now.

It also seems like there are some major developments in terms of breakthrough therapy status and a new wave that’s happening right now. So I’d love to hear more about that, and why you feel it’s an important part of the movement.

Justin: It’s a great question, and it’s changing all the time because of what’s happening around legalization and research. It was a completely taboo topic in the eighties and nineties, but recently there’s been so much research on the effectiveness of these medicines to help with certain ailments.

For me, it was more of a self-exploration tool that informed my relationship with music and the way I think about music and life in general. I wanted to explore the intersection of music and psychedelics in a very intentional way.

Music and psychedelics have gone together for the entirety of human history. In one sense, it’s the oldest story. Growing up, I remember movies like The Doors—where they go out to the desert, take peyote, have spiritual experiences, and put it into music—or Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. That was my number one album growing up. I probably listened to it a hundred thousand times.

Recently, with the advent of ketamine therapy, which has been legal in the States for quite a while, there’s a need for specific, functional music that takes people on a journey. Wavepaths is a really cool technology from the UK.

What they do is create a system for therapists guiding psychedelic sessions—right now with ketamine, but it works with other medicines too. If someone is feeling a certain way, the therapist might sense they need more joy, or maybe they’re too elevated and need grounding. The music system can nudge them in that direction. It’s very similar to DJing, except for therapists rather than DJs.

I worked with Wavepaths to create soundscapes for particular emotions, then tested the protocols myself. I had a prescription for ketamine and went through the process to see what it was like. Many people doing this—veterans, people with depression, others facing life challenges—experience it in a very intentional setting.

When you release music to the public, you might see how it affects people in concerts—people dancing, smiling. But for this, it’s such a different lens for me to appreciate the power of music. Experiencing it myself in these states ultimately informed my creative process and the way I think about music production. I can’t decouple those things now. Without the music, there is no psychedelic therapy—the music takes you through the whole journey.

Michael: Wow, that is so cool. It sounds like what you’re saying is that it’s given you an intentional lens on music and its role in taking people on journeys—creating music specifically designed for healing, for someone using these medicines to unblock or process trauma.

It’s also given you a deeper appreciation for music’s timeless role in guiding people through different types of journeys.

Justin: Absolutely.

Michael: I don’t talk about this often because of the taboo nature, but for the past seven years, once a year, I’ve attended an ayahuasca ceremony. When you talk about music’s role in these journeys, it’s such an important part of the ritual and ceremony—the facilitators, the music, and the breakthroughs people have through these events are remarkable.

It’s wild to me that it’s not more out in the open. I guess it feels like it’s starting to become more appreciated and recognized as a healing tool.

I’m curious from your perspective—because these are very powerful tools and there’s still a large stigma around them—why is that? And how would you speak to someone listening right now who, upon hearing about this, might immediately be extremely concerned?

Justin: It is such a cool time to have access to so many incredible teachers, and obviously the power of YouTube and the internet. When I first got into this stuff, the only information I could find was a site called Erowid, which is still up. It’s basically this old-school news board that looks like Craigslist, and it has trip reports from people.

I remember reading everything on there before my first mushroom trip—trying to understand if it was dangerous or not. Now, there’s so much good information out there. Just last month, Michael Pollan was on Oprah talking about this. I think his book is a great starting point for someone coming in as a skeptic, wondering, “Is this for me? Is this safe?” I’ve recommended it to a lot of people who’ve come out the other side thinking, “Maybe this is for me, maybe I’ll have an experience,” or maybe not. Either way, it’s a really good place to start.

At the same time, the reason I love music so much is that it can take you on a journey without any of these substances. They’re not for everybody. It’s easy to look at this and feel like it’s a silver bullet that might fix everything, and there’s so much hype around it. I have been changed by it, and I know so many people who’ve had their lives changed in positive ways. But it’s important to take a healthy dose of reality and skepticism—it doesn’t work for everyone.

Recently, I’ve been exploring breathwork more and more, which is great because there’s a “ripcord.” You can go really deep and have profound, psychedelic-like experiences, and if you want to stop, you just stop. You can get up and walk away. That’s the difference compared to medicines that can last for five, ten, even fourteen hours.

Breathwork is a great place to start. It’s free. Everyone can breathe. There’s content on YouTube you can listen to and immediately experiment with. I feel like if you have a breathwork experience, go deep into it, and think, “Okay, I see why this is powerful. I like the sense of altering and changing consciousness, and I want to go deeper,” there are some incredible resources out there.

There’s a site— I think it’s called Retreat Finder, though I might be getting the name wrong— that’s almost like a Yelp for retreats, with ratings to help you find a good one. There are a couple in Jamaica, where it’s legal, so if people are interested, they can learn more and go to those retreat centers.

There’s also a magazine called DoubleBlind that has excellent, vetted information, plus a lot of 101 Q&A-style blog posts. I’ve sent it to quite a few people who wanted to know best practices, harm reduction strategies, and similar things. DoubleBlind is a really powerful resource.

Michael: Hmm. Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing those resources and places for people to explore—whether it’s right for them or not.

Knowing your background in mindfulness, music, and healing, I’d love to hear your perspective on the state of where the world’s at right now and where it’s heading with technology.

It feels like right now is a unique time in history where we have a new form of intelligence—AI—that’s rapidly emerging, almost on an exponential curve. There’s this theoretical “singularity event” on the horizon.

I’m curious to hear your perspective as someone at the intersection of music, tech, and healing. It feels like we’re at a point where we’re capable of potentially destroying ourselves and the world if we don’t handle things well. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the role of music and these tools in helping humanity.

Justin: I’m so glad you’re asking this question and thinking about it, because you spend so much time talking to artists. I feel very strongly that art and music have a powerful role to play in shaping the way things go.

These tools are so powerful, and it depends on who’s controlling them—who has the models, who’s doling them out—because the tool itself is agnostic. But then you have a company like OpenAI that puts it in a product, sells it, and directs it toward certain things. Their agenda determines the way the road winds toward the singularity.

I have friends on both sides, and I’m sure you’ve heard this too—some people are so inspired by this moment, and others are scared and want nothing to do with it. It can feel divisive. I empathize with both sides, and honestly, I go back and forth.

I’ve chosen to understand and learn how to use these tools. I’ve always been like that. When I started, it wasn’t with a guitar—it was with software like Sound Forge. For me, tinkering with the tool informs the way I create. Without Ableton, I wouldn’t be making the music I make now. My relationship with technology is my relationship with music.

Before we started recording, we were talking about my current project, which is an interesting example. My latest single, Back to Life, has a vocal created with Imogen Heap’s vocal model. She ethically trained it using her own vocals, which she controls, and grants access to.

She’s an absolute legend, and I’m grateful to have worked on this with her. This is a form of performance art for me. I didn’t need to do it, but I wanted to explore it. People often conflate “AI” with tools trained on copyrighted material, but that’s not necessarily true. In this case, Imogen took all her vocals from her career and made a model. She can say, “This is Mogen”—her vocal model—and Mogen performed on my song.

Here’s how it happened: I found a vocal sample on Splice that had a chopped phrase—“bring me back to li-i-i-ife.” I didn’t like the way it was chopped, and it was at a different tempo. I reached out to the sample creator, who kindly sent me the original. I had a friend re-sing it with different harmonies, then sent that to Imogen.

She’s extremely busy and didn’t have time to do a session with me, but she had her team run it through her model. The next morning, I woke up to a massive Dropbox folder full of vocal takes for me to play with—something that would’ve taken her six months to get to in person. I resampled it and put it into the song.

This is a long way of saying: I think artists tinkering and experimenting with new ways to use these tools is important. For artists who are curious, I encourage getting involved. If you hate it, I get that too. But after this exponential AI wave comes, I think things like folk music, drum machines, or performances where you see human hands at work will become even more valuable—not for financial reasons, but because we’ll crave that humanity in a world full of AI-generated latency.

I’m interested in finding ways to bring humanness into the technological process.

Michael: Hmm.

Justin: Awesome.

Michael: Yeah, so it sounds like with the rise of AI and these different tools, it also creates a tension—or maybe a need—for humanness. By bringing that into your art while still using the tools that are available, you’re able to do things like shorten a six-month timeframe down to hours. But there’s still a piece that can’t be replaced—the soul or the heart of it—that you can continue to focus on, while using these tools as a way to extend that.

Justin: Absolutely. I love what you said about the thing that can’t be replaced. That’s a subtle but important piece of this. There’s a lot of talk about people’s jobs being replaced—maybe artists being replaced—and certainly some of that is true.

If you’re a company making ads, and in the past you hired someone to create a track, but now you can do something with AI that saves you thousands of dollars, I can see how that might happen.

At the same time, I believe we can tell when there’s a human-to-human connection in music. You might be touched by an AI song—maybe the lyrics speak to you, maybe you hum along—and that will happen. But what it’s really about is the humanness being transferred through the song. There’s something special in music that AI can’t replicate.

For example, I was just listening to Tyler, the Creator’s new album, then hearing him talk about it and watching the show. The songs are incredible, but for me, it’s not just about the recorded music—it’s about him, how he communicates across different mediums.

If anything, this is a time for us to use these tools to communicate at scale, and I think that’s the exciting invitation with these new practices.

Michael: Cool. I dig it. This reminds me—we had Nolan Arbaugh on our podcast a few months ago. Nolan is the first human to have a Neuralink installed.

Justin: Wow.

Michael: He’s a quadriplegic and really didn’t have a way to make music aside from having a Neuralink installed, which allows him to control things essentially telepathically with his thoughts. On the podcast, he created a song telepathically using his Neuralink and AI music generation.

Justin: Incredible.

Michael: It gave me a glimpse of what you talked about—the thing that can’t be replaced. Maybe it’s the spark, the creative thought, the essence of where it comes from.

I’d be curious to hear your perspective, as someone involved in mindfulness, healing, music, and future technology—what’s at the root of the self? And how does that play out when we talk about global conflicts or potentially catastrophic things? What do you think is at the root of this dysfunction or dis-ease in the world, and how can we help heal that as artists?

Justin: That’s a big question. I have no idea what’s at the root of all this. But I do know that, for me and from what I see, music is an incredibly powerful tool to connect and heal.

The process of making music has changed so much that I’m really excited more people can get involved in it right now. I was just talking to someone about the metaphor of music as a paper plane—sending healing, creating connectivity between people.

It might feel cliché, like a “We Are the World” moment, but I really believe it. The power of music—especially live music—is huge. As people become more isolated and more absorbed into their devices, when else do you come into a room of hundreds or thousands of people to connect over something you love?

That’s why I love live music—it plays a crucial role in society. There’s a quote by Oliver Sacks about music being “social cement.” His book Musicophilia changed my life many times over, but that idea in particular made me realize how music connects us, even one-to-one.

Even with all the recommendation algorithms, I still love sharing music word of mouth. If a friend who’s into music tells me, “Hey, you’ve got to listen to this,” I’ll sit down and listen to the whole album.

Michael: Hmm, absolutely. It’s like the root of music is the root of community. Community is about relationships—like we’re all neurons in one brain, sending action potentials back and forth. Music sharing is one of those connections that strengthens the “cement” between those neurons.

What’s the phrase? “Neurons that wire together, fire together.” That’s how communities form—music is a layer that bonds us and brings us together.

Justin: Absolutely. And the way it connects to psychedelics is interesting. These tools have been available in cultures all over the world for thousands of years.

You’ve had ayahuasca experiences—you know the songs in those sessions, the icaros, are so beautiful and ancient. They feel like part of us. It’s easy to want to monetize or productize them, but music is in our DNA.

It’s deeply woven into rhythm, language, and connectivity. I believe in the power of combining these medicines with the ubiquity of music to help heal many of modernity’s problems.

I’m a cautious optimist. It’s easy to get sucked into fear, but fear puts us in fight-flight-freeze mode. The phone can pull you into a limbic freeze instantly—open Apple News and you’re gone.

Music helps me come out of that. When I need to come down from a difficult day, I have playlists and songs I can take outside to reset. I hear the same from people who listen to my music.

Sometimes being an artist can feel frivolous—my sister’s a doctor, and what she does at the hospital is very different from what I do. But when she comes home from work, she wants to put on her music to unwind. On her way to work, she needs her jams to fire up for the day.

I feel like music is the substrate of the whole healing process.

Michael: Absolutely. I really like how you’ve articulated music as the glue, the cement, the substrate.

One thing I’d love your perspective on—as an artist, whether intentional or not, you’ve built an incredible community and made an impact. Many listeners here want to make music that connects with people and do it as a career.

What advice would you give someone earlier in their journey—passionate about music but on the fence about going all in, questioning whether they can really do it?

Justin: I’ve had some incredible mentors, and I’ve learned so much from them. Right now is both a very easy and a very difficult time to start.

One of the most powerful things is betting on yourself over and over again. There are so many times I’ve felt like, “This next project can’t possibly work.” Fear, uncertainty, and doubt always show up.

Having a vision of where you want to go, then working backward from there, is key. Early on, I was given the advice to talk to an older version of myself—like 80-year-old Justin, who’s released 20 albums, played Red Rocks, touched lives, and taught others. I “talk” to him daily. It helps me break through obstacles.

On the functional side, there’s a lot of noise right now, but you are not late. There aren’t too many artists or too many podcasts—that’s nonsense. The real trap is getting stuck in an endless loop of tutorials and advice.

Bias toward action. Make things. You don’t need another tutorial or masterclass—just do the thing. Most successful people I know started by moving toward doing, rather than overthinking.

Michael: Super helpful. So it sounds like, especially with all the information we have now, the priority is taking action—trying something, seeing what happens, and self-correcting.

That exercise of connecting with a future version of yourself is really interesting. It reminds me of something in quantum physics. One of its roots is that when something is observed, it collapses into a definite state. Until it’s observed, it exists in multiple potential states.

The act of measuring or observing something literally changes it. I don’t know exactly how it ties in, but I get the sense that your exercise of connecting with your future self taps into something similar—just the act of observing it creates a kind of quantum entanglement with that future version.

Justin: You’re tapping into the quantum field—yes. I’ll get a little “woo-woo” with it, but there’s this video that’s gone a bit viral. Have you seen the one of the Blue Angels pilots doing visioning practice?

Michael: Vaguely ringing a bell, but you’ll have to remind me.

Justin: There’s a video of the Blue Angels pilots, all sitting around a table. You know when they do those crazy aerial theatrics—the planes are so precisely coordinated. In this video, you see them with their eyes closed, moving their hands as if on the controls, flipping switches, calling out maneuvers. Because if they make one little mistake, they all die.

It’s beautiful to watch—the way they use the power of vision to entrain what’s going to happen next. They run through it over and over, so that when they’re in the sky, boom—it’s autopilot.

From what we were talking about before, with vision practice and connecting with a future self, I think it’s a version of that. Let’s say I want to be a musician, living my life creating music and getting paid for it. I might think, First, I have to do this… I have to have that piece of gear… after I get all this, then I can do it.

The power is in flipping that around—feeling what it’s like to already be that version of yourself right now, then operating from there. I make totally different decisions from that place. Yes, it’s tapping into the quantum version of yourself.

Right now, I can be the scared version of me who feels paralyzed, or I can tap into the version that already has the tools and knows how to use them. That ties back to the “tutorial trap”—it’s so easy to buy another plugin, another synth, or watch another tutorial. But most of the time, we already have everything we need.

A friend of mine just recorded a beautiful album—guitar on his iPhone, Ableton Lite. That’s it. It’s not the most hi-fi recording you’ve ever heard, but the vibe and the intention are all in the music.

Michael: That’s so powerful. It reminds me of a study looking at people’s brainwaves when they thought about their future selves versus their current selves. They found that “high achievers,” or people who objectively had a higher standard of life in the future, had brain activity in the same area when thinking about their future self as when thinking about their present self.

For people who struggled to stick with habits, the part of their brain that lit up when thinking about their future self was the same area that lights up when thinking about another person—like they didn’t identify with that future self.

So maybe the takeaway, connected to what we’re talking about, is that there’s a scientific basis for bringing that future self into the present and identifying with it. Like Gandhi said: Be the change you want to see in the world.

Justin: Absolutely—be the thing. That’s why music is so powerful. When I get into the studio to create, I’m trusting the mystery—why any of this works. I’m time traveling, knowing that what I’m making will outlast me, and whatever I put into it needs to be a real transmission from this moment.

Ultimately, it’s not really about me. I feel part of a lineage—just like you, and everyone else making music. We’re not siloed individuals; we’re all connected through the web of music.

Music is time travel. I love listening to music from all over the world. Recently, I was working with a harp sample from an old Indian record on Tracklib. You could hear someone in the room in that recording, and I thought about the place and moment it was captured. It felt like I was traveling through the ether to bring it into my production.

AI doesn’t really do that. When you generate something with AI, it’s not from a real, physical time and place. It can sound cool, but it doesn’t carry that charge of a person in a room, playing an instrument at a specific moment. Technology isn’t inherently good or bad—it’s simply complex.

Michael: Super interesting. I’m no expert in quantum physics or the roots of how AI models are built, but from what I understand, part of how they work is by predicting the next “token” based on a huge dataset. Some say it’s not truly creative—it’s just prediction.

But I have a gut feeling there’s something magical there that mirrors how our brains work—how we predict the next thought or word without knowing exactly where it comes from. Right now, in this conversation, I don’t actually know what I’m going to say next—it just comes out. Where is that coming from?

Justin: Yes—that’s such an interesting way to look at it: these technologies mirror us. People say, “AI has listened to every song, so now it can make something that sounds like the Beatles.” Well, I’m the same. I’ve listened to The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Kendrick Lamar. The next day in the studio, those influences are still in there.

There’s something familiar about using these tools, because they’ve “listened” to the same things. You can prompt an AI to make something like the Beatles—same, but different—just like I might play a chord progression inspired by old psychedelic rock.

Where it gets tricky is when companies in Silicon Valley profit from it—owning the models, reaping the rewards. That’s where copyright becomes interesting.

But on a spiritual level, I agree with you. Maybe we’ll look back and laugh that we thought AI couldn’t create anything “real.” Kids growing up now will interact with LLMs from the start, making music with them. It might become part of all electronic music creation.

And it’s worth noting—if I’d shown Ableton to someone in the ’70s, they might have said, “You’re cheating.” These tools have always been advancing.

Michael: So true. I like to think of influence and originality like this: we’re all the “children” of our musical parents—our favorite artists. If you take your top five, you’re like the baby of all of them combined. You can recognize elements of the parents, but something new emerges.

Maybe AI is similar—though with humans, no one’s going to charge you for listening to The Beatles for ten minutes.

Justin: Laughs Not yet—those days might be coming.

Michael: Have you gotten your new LIC installed yet?

Justin: Laughs Yes.

Michael: Well, Justin, this has been a really fun conversation. I’m looking forward to digging into more of your music. If someone listening wants to join the journey and check out your releases, where should they go?

Justin: Thanks for having me, Michael. You can find me on socials at Boreta—B-O-R-E-T-A—or on my website at boreta.net.

Michael: Awesome. We’ll put the links in the show notes for easy access. Justin, thanks again for coming on the podcast.

Justin: Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.