It took over a decade but I finally got the chance to sit down with Eliah Thanhauser of North Spore and discuss our long and interwoven histories in the Maine mushroom industry. North Spore has excelled in so many things through their explosive growth in the myco-sphere. Co-evolving alongside of them has been an amazing ride full of insight and challenges and tales for days! While Eliah and I just scratch the surface on a variety of topics, we had an audience to keep in mind as we sat among the most amazing fungal-fanatics at this years Mycology Outside, an annual event North Spore hosts at the Ecology School is southern Maine. Eliah has a heart of gold and the genuine curiosity and kindness that lights up a room and keeps this industry growing in the right direction. Persisting and expanding in the retail environment of the still burgeoning "Mush-Boom" is fraught will insane challenges but the dedication to continually educate the consumer remains at the forefront of the three founder's minds eye. Jon, Matt and Eliah are a rare breed of co-owners who have been sticking it out through thick and thin to see how far they can expand into the fungal feeding frenzy. While Jon and Matt were in the audience and pop in with comments from time to time, keep an ear out for their individual MycoWizard's episodes in the months to come! (That's right fella's, I'm coming for ya, mic's in hand!)

You can find more info out on North Spore by visiting
www.northspore.com

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Shane Schoolman and Michael Heim are going wild in the game of mushroom-extracts. Dual Extraction What???? Soxhlet Who???? They had me at Cordy-Crystals and Gnar-Tar, never-mind their in depth exploration of ultrasonically extracted myco-molecules suspended in cavitation bubbles. A few weeks after recording this weeks MycoWizards episode I hobbled into Cap N Stem's HQ groggy, redeyed and destined for the endless drip of black coffee, but much to my surprise a nice array of alcohol and glycerin based MyCoLove extracts were sitting on a rolling rack in front of me, along with a second box for the "Shulgin-ites", blue dropper bottles decked with a dash of masking tape and labeled "CM Gnar-Tar", "HE Gnar-Tar", GL Gnar-Tar, ETC...In a flash, our conversation came back to me and with almost automatic action I slugged down a syringe full of the goopy brown CM Gnar-Tar...within 3 minutes we had lift off...what kind of insanity have these wild MycoWizards of Colorado origin created? If you're unsure of the mystical medicinal mushroom extracts out there, look no further than these super saturated dropper bottles packed with flavorful rocket-fuel, as they hold the power to break the skeptics spell. All in all this episode is about much more than just some extracts, it's about actually farming the mushrooms used in the extracts. MyCoLove Farm is a small collective of wildly intelligent folks dedicated to their craft with a history that's worth reading about and paying attention to!

You can find more info out on MyCoLove by visiting
https://www.mycolove.farm/

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The age old tale, or so it seems in these fast moving times seems to be Mycelium vs. Fruitbodies ... but what if you simple added both into your products, built out and followed through with scientific studies for publication and actually collected data after proceeding to test, test and test again. Steve and Sam of OM Mushrooms have been doing just that and growing fast into the myco-obsessed market over the last 5 years. But their stories didn't begin just half a decade ago. Steve Farrar and Sam Andrasko (aka: Lipa of The Shroomery) sat down with us at their last location prior to their big expansion in Carlsbad California to talk everything from their early days cultivating to the modern myco-debacles. In a world now briming with big players, nutraceuticals have exploded onto the market but OM's inception was perfectly timed and primed for the very start of the pandemic. 2020 caused many things to happen all at once, but one of the unexpected occurrences was the sudden awareness, concern and some might even say obsession with healthy living through super foods and supplements.  Mushrooms are getting their long overdue limelight in the west and OM is seeing a direct beneficial impact from such a monumental shift in the western ways of eating for a better life! 

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Round about two years ago the entire Cap N’ Stem crew hosted a massive bonfire at our newly acquired property in Lewiston. Many joined in the insanity, many bailed, motorcycles broke down, did burnouts or wrecked into dark Maine gullies, but the fire raged on and the partying continued through to the next morning! One of the most mysterious characters to show, arrived in a feathered bowler hat with a grin soaked in mycological-stoke…you know the kind of smile, paired with those slightly sunken in eyes that say, “I’ve been up for 5 days straight knocking in front of the flow-hood and I still managed to make it to the bonfire!” Gabe DeCicco of Traveling Cap is one driven dude. He has been bitten hard by the cultivation bug and is currently dead set on building out his operation. Give Gabe a follow and support this radical dudes undertaking as he floods the streets of Beantown and beyond with his gourmet delights! 

You can find more info out on Traveling Cap at https://www.travelingcapmushrooms.com/

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Julian Mattucci, also know as @dedikaryotizationdaddy is a dedicated researcher and a talented mycologist. He has been in the throws of some of the more nerdy but important breeding work in the wild word of mushrooms. I came across his Dedikaryotization Protocol via a shroomery post offered up by the one and only @alan_rockefeller a few months back. Julian's work is focused on the development of a haploid culture bank for the purpose of getting folks into breeding his collection of isolates. From Dedikaryotization to DNA Sequencing and 3D Printing, Julian is a myco-engineer through and through ... If you are interested in genetics and breeding this episode is dedicated to you ... A large majority of cultivators start out with that star-struck-stoke on the fungal networks that begin emerging from their stainless steel work surfaces in front of their trusty home-built laminar flowhoods. After months and sometimes years of refining carefully crafted techniques aimed on expanding phenotypes, obsession takes over the majority of their free time. If the hobby develops into a mushroom based business, the origin energy that is hunting, discovering and breeding genetics never fully fades. Until now, not many folks could image being able to run a culture bank or even purchase proven strains from a culture bank with worthwhile genetics. Prior to the early 2000's, all we had was Mycelia, Aloha and a handful of small distributors of alleged commercial cultures. What Julian is building is a major step towards growing and stabilizing the emerging cultural hyperfocus on mushrooms with scalable cultivation-centric systems and precursors. So keep your eyes peeled for his work and get restoked to reenter the flowhood fuzzzzzzzz!     

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Welcome back the mighty Neil Brent of Columbia Mushrooms! There are a million and one hilarious things that can be said about Neil, but this batshit hero to the cultivation crowd knows how to grow gourmet mushrooms like the best of them. What I appreciate most about Neil is his split dedication to the stoke and the stone cold assessments of any given situation, object or attempt to avoid a phone call, delicately entwined with all the dark humor one might hope to muster in a lifetime. Japan, as a country, knows who Neil is and so should you! He lives according to the madness we all have simply learned wrestle with as we grow our fungal kingdoms. Neil has mastered his craft and doesn't seek the same fame or fortune as most. His satisfactions are in the mechanical bits that keep his operation lean and focused. Mike Vance and I caught him after a wine bender but he none the less entertained our road weary souls for an afternoon of beer, food and of course, Mushrooms. So sit back and enjoy this episode among your Friday Hepa Hummmmmm!   

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Mike and I ripped up the coast of California towards the never-ending boarder-lands between the sandy dunes of the hot as hell desert and the perfectly temperate pacific blue until we came to the land of Mighty Cap Mushrooms in Paso Robles.  Chris and Branden emerged from the first expansion of Mighty Cap, a super clean and well organized grow, to give us a tour around. There are two personalities that can compliment one another in an extremely beneficial way in this industry and Chris and Branden are a perfect example of this. Chris can sell, talk and engage with an audience stoked beyond belief about mushrooms. Branden can grow, organize, focus and outperform many people with his long developed mycology skills. These two cultivators with their specialized skill sets, when brought together, stand a chance of building big things. Mighty Cap Mushrooms is now closing in on their next big expansion which is sure to rock Paso Robles and the surrounding towns with some of the freshest mushroom products in the state. So keep an eye on these folks as they grow and take over California with their stoke, drive and honed mycological minds!

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Shortly before deciding to take the leap into commercial gourmet mushroom cultivation, I stumbled across a video of a young Hamilton Morris reporting on Magic Truffles in Amsterdam for Vice News.  In this video Hamilton visits a farm that had to quickly pivot away from fruit body production and into sclerotia forming p. tampanensis cultivation sometime around 2008 due to the prohibition of magic mushrooms by the Dutch government. Years before the ban on the actual fruitbodies, my childhood friend Ken and I entered the Netherlands as naive American stoners and exited through a one way portal into another dimension. Life, for me, was never the same.

Hamilton has written, reported on and recorded an endless amount of fascinating conversations with chemists, anthropologists, mycologists, historians, ethnobotanist and psychonauts from around the world. He has brought out some of the most fringe characters of the psychedelic age and has given hope through his films, series, podcasts and publications to an endless group of us living similar lifestyles. Of the many things he has done and continues to do, Hamilton never ceases to amaze his supporters, a group of devout humans tuning in, forever appreciative of his drive and efforts to report on the stuff we simply cannot get enough of.

This episode, as mentioned in the intro, is a sort of attempt to bridge a gap in my own work. The hope is to combine and interweave the cast of cultivators on either side of a severely stratified industry. As @mushroommundo pointed out to me, its the mainstream vs. the marginalized that is keeping the boxers in their corners. We have a lot to learn from one another and if you don't believe that, I encourage you to look a little harder at the folks just over the river. Collaborative efforts are in our future MycoWizards of the world, so keep an open mind and keep a sane state of stoke to feed the fire and stay driven!

- @shroomodoom

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Some of our favorite mushroom cultivators are of old punk origins. You know the ones, strapped and packed with an array of patches, CDs, books and leftover dinner all in that high resting backpack rippin’ uphill on a fixed gear or in deteriorating ox-blood doc martens hopping rails and riding free atop the boxcars dead set on the western sunsets. They stand for experience and true freedom in this land of insanity. Their Ginsberg-ian will to be weird projects outward in the most endearing way as does their smile and their outspoken nature when it’s most needed. The archetype of the zen lunatic punk turned cultivator always makes it clear as hell where they stand and Amanda of KM Mushrooms is as true blue punk as they get. I can’t remember when Mike and I decided to stop in on her farm along our west coast MycoWizards tour but we are damn stoked we did because we found a true homie to fold into the anarchist-myco-hive. If you don’t know KM, you clearly are in the wrong crowd, so listen in and enjoy this week’s episode recorded on sight with the one and only Amanda Janney! Don’t forget to catch @km_mushrooms and @shroomsodoom in the flesh this summer giving a talk on scaling a mushroom farm at the @farwestfungi Santa Cruz Mushroom Festival!

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Try to get Kyle Garrone to talk about anything but growing mushrooms and the emerging world of contemporary cultivators and it will ultimately snap back to mushrooms like an elastic band to itself. The draw and intrigue is too intense for the majority of us to stray far from. We stay up late into the dark hours contemplating pneumatic movements for saving time and speeding up a means to grow more and it is ultimately only exhaustion that blankets the intense obsession to allow for a semblance of slumber. It’s a gift and a curse to be generational in this industry but Kyle has brought Far West Fungi out of the labor intensive dark ages of the early 80’s and 90’s where the industry consisted of brute force and an underpaid labor force to get gourmets into the market. Kyle’s global perspective feeds into the important narrative that if we want a mushroom industry to persist and stabilize in the states we need to start building the institutions, the labs, the farms and the networks to empower the youth of now and tomorrow to take the fungal forces into our own domestic hands. Globalization of food crops is a tricky dichotomy to be on the fence about. Build the schools, build the farms, decentralize the fresh food sources and stabilize the myco-world instead of attempting to dominate it and if successful we will have made momentous strides in the direction of my least favorite word due its misuse and abuse, sustainability.      

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