This Is How Fungi Will Solve Every Problem Humans Have Created

Mushrooms are God. Mushrooms are Jesus. Today is the day you should take mushrooms. That's what Jesus would want. I agree. Because mushrooms breathe oxygen, which is the craziest part. They're more closely related to humans than they are to plant. I've never felt closer to God than I did off of a mushroom trip. What's going on at the Texas Mushroom Conference? What it's all about. It was really started out of a need for accessible fungal education. We want high quality mushroom education to be. Accessible to everyone. We're trying to really open up access to the general public. When you take them, have these out of body experiences that really connect you with the divine. It's such an intelligent being. It outpaces us in intelligence by so much. If you have insomnia, reshi and chaga combined with ashwagandha is the way to go to relax. There's so many benefits to oyster, you know, there's a lot of research on taking oyster mushroom supplements for. Diabetes truffles have anandamites. It's a great new tropic. It has the potential like antibiotics where it can make so many different medicines just from that one thing. Meat consumption was like the number one thing that caused bigger brains.

Take that vegans. We have some gifts for you. Well, you have 4 colors that you get to play with. I like this color. This is cool. I like it. Some gifts from our sponsors, Logan the lion's man here. Yeah, the Mushroom Conference is Sunday, April 19th from 11 to 6 p.m. at the Edder Harbin Alumni Center on campus at UT. We were saying today is the day you should take mushrooms. It should be a national holiday. That's what Jesus would want. Yeah, I, I agree. You know, there's this theory that Jesus was actually yeast because he rose after 3 days and like what rises after 3 days, like yeast. So there's this theory that like God, Jesus was actually a mushroom or yeast. Who knows if that's true. It wasn't Christianity started from like pagan. Uh, Just religious beliefs and whatnot. A lot of the things that we celebrate in Christian religion were pagan originally like Easter was Ishtar, which is like. A holiday about fertility. That's where there's a bunny, but what does a bunny have to do with Jesus? Nothing. Christmas trees were a pagan holiday where they celebrated nature and they put trees in the house, and then Christians were like, you can't celebrate that, but people still brought the trees in. So now we have Christmas trees.

Amanitas Amanitas or Christmas, her hat, you know. Well, rock and roll, guys. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being out here. Yeah, I mean, we moved to Austin 56 years ago and we always saw the Texas mushroom Conference pop up. Tony went a couple of years ago, right? And you know, we see you guys advertising. You got like a huge stacked lineup and obviously we kind of like mushrooms, I guess, from time to time. And we want to support it and we want to hear about your guys' story and what's going on at the Texas Mushroom Conference, what it's all about. Yeah, I mean, it was really started out of a need for accessible fungal education. When you think about it growing up in high school, when did you really learn about fungi? When did you learn about mushrooms? That's just something that's not really taught or educated on. And you know, we started out originally in California where there's plenty of mushroom education. I mean, these little kids coming up to the conference are like, Oh, are these the psychedelic mushrooms that we're not supposed to like touch and stuff? I'm like, Yeah, OK, you know what's going on. But then you come back to Texas, I mean our hometown El Paso, and there's just nothing there.

Like education wise. So when we were thinking of places on where to have a mushroom festival, Austin came to mind and our whole thing is accessibility. We want high quality mushroom education to be accessible to everyone because I was that broke college student wanting to look into fungi and mycology and all these events and festivals are like 100+ dollars, you know, Telluride's like $500 you know. Like the psychedelic conference in Denver is like $800 just to attend, so that was kind of our mission really. It has, it's like really for a it's like hardcore in academia, you know, like a lot of people who are mycology researchers, psychedelic researchers can't afford like high ticketed events that are focused on that startups in the psychedelic, but we're trying to really I guess open up access to the general public and just bring people from all walks of life to be able to learn about mushrooms and it was perfect timing because at the time UT had opened their Center for Psychedelic Research and therapy so uh we had the conference in Austin that same year they opened it up for our inaugural year and what really drew.

To Austin was the fact that House Bill 1802 was passed the year prior in 2021. You guys are familiar with House Bill 1802? No, no enlighten us. Yeah, it's a basically a law that authorized the research into psychedelics for different illnesses and ailments like PTSD. Depression, anxiety, interestingly enough, chronic pain and migraines. Was it a state law or federal law? Yeah, yeah, it was a state, it was a state funded law. It was the first of its kind in the US and it passed in 2021 and the state rep that helped pass that was Alex Dominguez, and we had him speak last year at the conference, which was really cool to get kind of that insight into how it was passed. And kind of the developments of that. And this year we have another panel with the co-director of the Sharmin and Gordon McGill Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy at UT. That's like a super long name. But yeah, it's Sharmin and Gordon McGill now because these people funded like 12 million to that research. So now they got that nice little name stamp on there. But yeah, we'll have him speaking on kind of the developments of that research.

Because I know they added LSD into there. So that's also really exciting. And then we have Logan Davidson of the Texans for Greater Mental Health. He's really leading that advocacy front and really helping find more funding for research like that. And then we have a couple other doctors from Baylor, Dr. Lynette Avril, who's also researching psychedelics for PTSD as her dad was actually a veteran who Unfortunately committed suicide to all the PTSD that he had, so she made it her life mission to really find treatment and alternative therapies to be able to help people like her father. Which is really inspiring. And then the last person on that panel or two other people are Caitlin Riley. She was the former co-director of the Psychedelic Society of Texas, and then Steve Viola, which is a veteran who's really pushing psychedelic therapies onto other veterans, basically educating the veteran community. So that panel is going to be a stacked panel, which is going to share a lot of information with people I feel like who need it most here in Texas. Yeah. How did the conference come to life? How did you create this?

It's a good question. I mean, it was definitely a lot of, uh, experience in hosting mushroom events previously in California, as she mentioned, like we had a good year of hosting small events and workshops and festivals and gatherings and um just those experiences, you know, the experience of wanting to bring access to the education and research and then the experience of like let's bring this back home to Texas because. There's a, a lack of like general, uh. Knowledge on mushrooms here for the for the public, but yeah, and kind of our our backgrounds, both of our backgrounds were really helpful in kind of beginning what I would consider a mushroom events company is what we run, but I was a therapist in California. I was giving a lot of therapy at the time. I worked at a couple different clinics and was independently researching fungi after some really intense psychedelic experiences I had, and I guess the answer to that question is what started all this is a psychedelic experience, honestly.

Um, like the 3 4 g of mushrooms will do it to you. It'll definitely tell you where you need to go. How did that go down? Just one day you're like, I'm going to take 40. Well, I was surrounded by people who were taking psychedelics, um, which are really frowned upon, but when you do them in the right set and setting, which is a super important part of, you know, psychedelic experience, it can really open up doors. And opportunities that you never even thought were possible. Um, so personally, I had this experience when I was 19, when I was living in California, I was taking large amounts of psychedelics, um, you know, LSD, mushrooms were my personal favorite, and I've had these crazy experiences of growth. And one that really, really stuck with me was this one psychedelic experience. I maybe had like 3 or 4 g and I was just at the beach. I was chilling and then I started feeling all the pain of the earth. Like I felt nature was hurting, like earth was in pain and I was earth and I was like, oh my gosh, like all the animals are dying, our environment's crumbling, like I need to do something. And then I saw myself in the future talking about mushrooms to other people.

And that was kind of like it for me. After that experience, I was like, Whoa, I need to tell everybody about this. I need to tell everybody about psilocybin. That's kind of what my focus was, was psilocybin for the longest time. And as I dove deeper, I started realizing that fungi was this super incredible, underrated, underexplored kingdom that people just don't talk enough about. Um, so that was kind of my entry point into the realm of fungi was that really intense experience with the mushroom, the medicine kind of showing me where I was going to be in the future. It's kind of crazy. I bet in other states you can see other realms. I mean, I swear like I feel like I saw myself in the future in that experience and then 4 years later, it's crazy to be here talking about mushrooms just like I saw myself back then. I know he had a similar experience with mushrooms that kind of just like led us on the same path. Yeah, I, I mean, I had a couple of different profound experiences in El Paso and then also in, in California, um, and yeah, that as well as just being in, in the hemp space previously kind of led me down this path of finding mushrooms. I thought it'd take decades for me to, you know, be in this position because of how laws are in Texas, but fortunately, um, I really think COVID also kind of jumpstarted a lot of like the research and kind of the movement and culture with psychedelics. Um, we're all finding like a way to heal and we were inside researching, you know, tons of different things and uh that was a big proponent as well for me to just be in this position today.

and he comes from the rock show event space. So before we like linked up and really started focusing on fungi, he was hosting rock events. Rock like Stones or rock like rock and roll like rock and roll, yeah, I could have gone both ways looking at you. I was like it could be Stones, it could be rock and roll. That's, that's cool. That's both would fit perfectly, yeah, so I actually really brought like the educational like mushroom side of things and then I, I brought the experience in hosting events and organizing, uh, like speakers or music or, you know, bringing attendees to a place so. Um, yeah, with these two different backgrounds we were able to, you know, host educational mushroom events and, uh, we do workshops and festivals, conferences, um, we recently did something in Uganda in November we went to Uganda and we were able to educate a lot of, uh, local Ugandan schoolchildren and, and people in agriculture there on, uh, mushrooms as well, which is cool. How did you pick Uganda?

Well, when we were working at the mushroom shop, when I had a, I was working with the mushroom shop in Long Beach. It's called Culture Shrooms, and we were hosting a lot of their like fungal events. That was kind of my in into mushroom events. My friend Omar Othman, he runs that mushroom shop out there, and when we approached him with the idea like, hey, we want to have like a fun fungi fest, he was super opening and welcome. That's what you'll find a lot in the mushroom space is all these like, if they're really real about the mushroom, like that's community right there. I've never found as great of a community. As the mushroom space and field, you know, so yeah, when that happened, he was like, I want to connect you guys with someone that I think you'd be really great with, and her name's Josephine and she runs Eco Agric Uganda in Uganda, Africa, and she basically has this ginormous mushroom farm. She's like one of the very few mushroom farmers in Africa. And she was hosting the first African Rising Mushroom Festival. So our expertise in event coordination and just gathering like high quality education from around the world, we did it remotely for the first year. So we're just helping her gather speakers, get sponsors, and provide like a deeper, higher quality education than one might get in Uganda at that time with those resources.

Um, and then the next year I was like, we have to make it out there, like whatever it takes, we got to go in person because there's no experience like that, you know, so yeah, we were able to garner a lot of support, got some, some cool sponsors, and then made our way to Uganda, and it was a really crazy experience teaching people about mushrooms, not just for farming, but for different careers like microtextis. I know there's another. There's a brand out there. He runs microtextile textiles in Kenya and he basically makes these like ginormous squares out of mycelium, the root structure of the mushroom, insulation, yeah, and he insulates houses for the low. So it's a really cool, um, there's a lot of different career opportunities in fungi. A lot of people are like, oh, I can only be farmer or they're only psychedelics, but there's also like biotechnology and remediation of soil using mycelium, but that's kind of how we got um. Like into doing work in Africa and Uganda was through Omar Othman, and it just kind of blossomed into an incredible relationship with not just local farmers in Uganda, but also in Kenya. Like we've we've met incredible people and we've been able to help a lot of them out with genetics, genetic sourcing, different materials, different methods of cultivation.

Um, and just really growing it out for people who need it the most, you know, it provides food security, but also economic opportunity. They're growing their own food, but they can sell it at markets. Um, so yeah, it's just like, like I said, it's a really underrated kingdom that a lot of people don't really know about. Yeah, I'm really curious to talk about the use cases for mycelium because there's and fungus in general, because there's so many, it seems like it just never ends and I know hemp has really taken over as like the alternative for building materials and things like that, and I think there's so much value in hemp, but I see Mushrooms and mycelium as being even better for that because at the rate that it grows. It's like bamboo, it just keeps growing super fast, faster than hemp can. And I'm curious your thoughts because obviously you're in this space, um, but I've seen mycelium, like you said, for, um, insulation for building materials, for soft things, for hard things, and it's like pretty easy to to mold. What industries do you think Fungi is going to disrupt the most.

It's a great question. All industries, honestly. I think they're disrupting the industry and you know they're on just like this upward trajectory of taking over a lot of things as we move into this hopefully more sustainable economy and more circular economy. We need things that degrade over time and what's, what are the ultimate decomposers, mushrooms, the fungal kingdom. There's already a couple of, um, I guess the biggest sector that they're taking over right now is packaging. Um, that, I mean, think about where your packaging comes in. It's always like plastic or cardboard, things that take really long to degrade, but there's this really huge company called Eovative that's basically creating packaging out of mycelium, mycelium-based materials, which is basically just mycelium, the root structure of the mushroom mixed with a binder like hemp herd, grain. We've done a lot of work with Growbio. They actually come to the came to the conference the past two years and did a micromaterial workshop so people could actually grow their own like pots, like something super simple, but as of right now that's what they're taking over and I know they're doing a couple of like architecture builds out in different parts of Europe where they're basically building like standing alone structures with mycelium bricks, mycelium blocks, but it's also taking over.

And a very interesting face, which is the foods, the like culinary sector, forager, part of Eco V's business is also making mycelium bacon, which is crazy. I used to be an educator for this other brand called Meaty, and they're making mycelium patties that taste like chicken. It's mycelium. It's mycelium. It's aerated mycelium that grows above in like these tubs in like the perfect condition. Like it's kind of crazy what They're doing, they're revolutionizing, you know, culinary and it's cool because for, for those alternative meats like the ingredients and are like very little, right? It's not like Beyond or Impossible where they have a lot of ingredients, different binders. It's usually just the mycelium and seasoning, which is really cool. Well, the Beyond Meat and stuff is like one, worse for the environment, worse for you because it's like random oils and shit that you don't even want in your body, but mycelium bacon. That's renewable. It's probably delicious. It's a whole food for you. It's. Yeah, I would eat mycelium bacon, silly regular bacon, but I'd also eat mycelium bacon. Mushroom burgers were always the best vegan alternative. Yeah, just a fine giant portobello. Yeah, poor man steak we called it.

Yeah, they tasted the most like. A steak. Totally, yeah, when I was a vegetarian, that's all I would eat and the texture is amazing. Portobellos, yeah, yeah, totally soak it in some soy sauce. Yeah. Is there any, uh, clothing, textiles or anything they're doing with mushrooms? Good question. X is in a really cool project. I'll let her speak more on it, but essentially like leather is, is, uh, something that A lot of innovators are creating right now with um mycelium and mushrooms. Yeah, I worked with Fungi Solutions out in Australia, they're this biotech company that are making leather and different types of micro fabrics. So we collaborated on making a piece and it was part of this internship with these um with Felder Felder, they're these twins out in Europe and Germany. That basically focus on eco-friendly and sustainable materials. So it was an internship with them and I was able to make a top, like kind of like a crop top piece that was made by all mycelium leather and it was made by Rashi, the species of mushroom, which has like a super thick mycelium. Um, so when you grow it in these like kind of like trays almost, um, and you let it harden, you can create some really cool leather and there's, yeah, there's a lot of bio.

Uh, artists that are really creating and innovating that space, but yeah, there's a couple of different brands and companies that are really focusing on the fashion front. And they actually did a really cool collab Forager with Cadillac. They like did the interior of this Soli Ese. This is like a convertible, like E electric Cadillac, and the inside was mycelium leather, which was really cool. I'm sure you can find like some cool photos of that, but there was also like Balenciaga did a collab with them. They're kind of making it super high fashion, which I think Unfortunately, it's not accessible, but I think it's a cool marketing tactic, like making it seem like it's super high fashion luxury that way a lot of people are into it and want it and it's not like, it starts there and then work its way. Exactly, yeah, it'll work its way down and it's kind of like a statement piece right now, like these are statement pieces, they're not like available, they're accessible. I mean, that fabric, that piece of leather, the micro leather that we collect.

collaborated on that just that piece alone was like 300 bucks. So it's still really expensive, but it should be normalized and I think it will in the next in the next 5 years. I think you're going to see a lot more people wearing their mycelium clothing, hopefully. That's that's fucking sick. Definitely I think the packaging is like the most accessible right now, being most utilized. Um, we're in a studio right now and you could see like this, the sound panels, the sound panels, and they do sound panels too out of mycelium. Oh yeah, some cool facts is they're thermal, they're thermally they're thermal insulators, they're acoustic as well, like micromaterials have so many benefits. There's this lady that made a microcaster, which is basically a mycelium guitar. And it had like such amazing acoustic properties. Yeah, the guitar is made out of except for the strings. Yeah, yeah. So like a portion of it and the top wasn't, so like the bottom part was made out of mycelium. Yeah, they have like they're, you know, heat resistant, you can't really light them on fire. There's so many benefits and a lot of people don't even realize or recognize them, you know.

I didn't even know half the stuff. No. No, and we're mushroom people and we didn't even know half the stuff. No, not at all. Yeah, there's the realms of fungi. There's so many different ways you can get deeper and tap more into. Totally. It's such an intelligent being that, yeah, it's, it, it outpaces us in intelligence by so much. We're, we're just catching up. I'm curious, what is your theories or thoughts of how mushrooms. Got here and their purpose. I think they're deep, extraterrestrial. I think spores could survive the vacuum of space, so they can, yeah, it's scientifically proven. Do you think they came from space like they came here or like on an asteroid from another planet? Yeah, or, you know, somebody or aliens. Yeah, maybe on an asteroid or some, some space debris, right? But I don't know, that's my take on it. There's just a planet out there that is the original spore planet, yeah, and they send spores out into the galaxy to populate, and I mean we came from, we came from spores.

What did you say? No, I was gonna say those mushrooms out there are probably huge too. I got into they're like 20 ft mushrooms. Yeah, we could do, we just get the baby ones on the Earth. They have the monster ones. Yeah, if you had them big enough, you could just build into it like a tree, mushroom house instead of a giant mushroom house, yeah, like the, like the, like the Keebler elves, but instead of the trees, giant mushroom mushroom. Oh my God, I like that. I'd live there for sure. 0 100%. Maybe we could feel like I have lived there in a DMT trip once. Sounds familiar. It might be possible if we get the earth back into those like high oxygenated levels. You never know, because mushrooms breathe oxygen, which is the craziest part. Like they're more closely related to humans than they are to plants. So you know they're they're breathing oxygen just like us, you know, they have electromagnetic. Stimulation just like us. So like whenever we're swiping on our phone, that's like it's moved by our electric magnetic stimulation. So if you think about it, a mushroom could also like touch it and like have an effect. But I think they, like I said, I saw this like really funny Reddit post one time where it was like mushrooms are God, mushrooms are Jesus. I can sell.

It's just so funny to me. And like when you take them, you know, you have these like out of body experiences that really connect you with the divine. I've never felt closer to God than I did off of a mushroom trip, which is so weird that they can cause these. And like what are the odds that they fit into your serotonin receptors so perfectly? It's like we're supposed to be taking these. But yeah, I do think I don't know that's a, that's a hard question, man. Like where is their origin from, you know, they're like our oldest living ancestor, ancient organism, largest organism on Earth. They win the record for everything, basically. Yeah, like everything is from fungi, if not space from the ocean. There's like very little research on marine fungi, but there are marine fungi out there. And you know, in evolutionary biology, everything came from the ocean. So what do we know about marine fungi right now? Very little, not, nothing, yeah, basically that they decompose like drifting wood, but there's not enough usually on like drifting wood, um, very understudied, pretty unique like unicellular, like microscopic, so you don't really see mushrooms, like it's just the fungi, but.

Yeah, there, there's a lot. What are some of them to discover? What are some of the functional mushrooms that most people just don't know about that can be used daily that you try to educate people on? Um, that's a good one. There's so many. I mean, people are so obsessed with lion's mane these days, which is a great mushroom. Well, what do you guys take like, what do you like to incorporate because I imagine you've gone through the gamut of just like some of the basics like lion's mane, but I imagine you cycle through different things depending on what you need or, you know, for your own health or mental focus or whatever. I mean, you know, functional functionals are great. I do love me a microdose, you know, I love me a microdose of this, you know, I love mes. It's great to stack those with functional mushrooms. My, my preferred functional mushroom. I like blends. I like stacking mushrooms. I really like a lion's mane is always up there, but turkey tail, reshi, quarticiceps is really fantastic and chaga is really, really good. Those are some of my top mushrooms. How are quarticeps and chaga different from each other?

Quariceps is super stimulating. I feel like if you have a good amount of quarticeps, you can feel it. Chaga. Definitely more relaxing. Chaga and reshi are kind of considered the mushrooms of immortality. You know, they have all these incredible polysaccharides and peptide K's and D's that really help with blood flow and lowering that, lowering your blood pressure. So if you, I feel like you take chaga and reshi more if you want to chill, reshi is super fantastic combined with ashwagandha, and a lot of people, I mean, we have a mushroom farm in El Paso, Texas, and a lot of people have trouble sleeping. And if you have insomnia, reshi and chaga combined with ashwagandha is the way to go to relax before you go to sleep, right before you go to sleep. Yeah, and I've heard it causes some weird dreams, but hey, that's that's just part of it. That sounds great. Do you guys sell blends or make or you like produce and give it to companies or so at the farm it's a Micro farm, it's very small, kind of in a room a little bigger than this, but we can produce a good a couple 100 pounds fucking a lot of mushrooms in a room this big, and tiny room and I produce a lot of mushrooms. Yeah, yeah, we utilize this tent space as best as we can and we grow a lot of your main gourmets like lion's Maine oysters, rashi, and then we just encapsulate them. We freeze dry them and encapsulate them.

And then we just created like a traditional Mexican chocolate bar recently, so it's like using cacao from Chiapas, Mexico. It's just the cacao bean and the freeze dried lion's mane is the only two ingredients, and we made this uh very wholesome, you know, functional, healthy, uh, chocolate bar. So yeah, we sell a little bit fresh and then also make products like that. What's the name of the brand? It's just El Paso Mushroom Company. Yeah, it's very localized to the. To the city in the region and you can just order online or yeah, we have a website ep mushrooms.com. mushrooms.com. Yeah, yeah, and there's like a lot of opportunities popping up in the mushroom farming space. I mean, we really only started this mushroom farm because there was a grant opportunity from the USDA before all the funding was cut and it was Basically for a value added products in colonias. Colonia is like a town by the border, and it was just serendipitous because we grew up in El Paso our whole life, and what are the odds that they're giving a grant for a mushroom farm right in a city that's considered a colonia. So that really jumpstarted the mushroom farm and why we started out there. And yeah, it was just a sign to really educate people on more of the benefits, and I feel like a lot of people think oyster and and um.

Was that oyster and shiitake, you know, these are culinary mushrooms that are used in a lot of just dishes in restaurants, high-end restaurants, but they're not prized enough for their actual like functional health benefits, you know, they're only used in culinary as kind of like a delicious food staple and that like meaty texture, but there's so many benefits to oyster, you know, there's a lot of research on taking oyster mushroom supplements for diabetes and it like reducing the effects. And increasing as well as cholesterol. Yeah, yeah, definitely oyster mushrooms are fantastic for high cholesterol. So they naturally produce statins and that's usually what people take when they have high cholesterol is, it's just a statin medication. So that is an underrated mushroom, Definitely the oyster mushroom that's mainly used in culinary but should be used for supplements. Like how often do you see oyster mushroom capsules or oyster mushroom powder? Exactly, yeah, it's really not a functional product, but. I think it supplement well with like cholesterol medication, you know, getting those statins in, but I did want to add, I think remella, I, I really like to tell people about remella, which isn't, I guess like a, a very common gourmet or functional, but it helps produce collagen, so great for skin, great for nails, the, it's like the white jelly fungus, um, as well as truffles. I've been learning a lot through William Padilla Brown, who will be speaking at the conference this year and showing his documentary on truffle cultivation.

So he's really trying to start up and bring truffle cultivation to the US because, you know, we import a ton from Europe, but there's tons of native truffles in the Pacific Northwest and then also, you know, you can grow truffles here and they're just about everywhere, but truffles have anandamites, which I'm still learning a lot about, but essentially it's a great new tropic considered a bliss molecule, yeah, truffle extract. Are you gonna start growing that, or do you I would love to. So there's a truffle that grows off pecan trees, and at the mushroom farm we have a pecan orchard, yeah, and there's tons of pecans in, in Texas, in West Texas. Yeah, mushrooms grow pretty well out here, yeah, central Texas, central Texas. I mean, yeah, they grow fantastic here. I mean, which is probably why it's one of the only few states in. In the US that has a state mushroom, cause mushrooms grow so well out here, but it's, yeah, it's funny cause I've learned that it can also be like, uh, based on perception, like a lot of people in central Texas are like, It's, it's hard to see mushrooms grow out here, and I think maybe because they see how they grow in like the Pacific Northwest and it's so abundant over there, but then like coming from El Paso, it being a literal desert, I'm like there's, it's so perfect for mushroom mushrooms out here, you know, but yeah, I mean nonetheless, I think, yeah, that you could find mushrooms out here. It's just been drier from what I hear the last couple of years from what we see, but there's a saying, yeah, when it rains it spores.

That's pretty good. I think you guys should, at the mushroom conference, you know how like a You know, festivals, they have watermelon contests or whatever. Who can grow the biggest mushroom? Every year you compete to grow the biggest, and then maybe one day it's so big you can't live in it, right? This is how you get to that point. But I think that'd be rat. Everyone brings their mushroom. Like when people bring their biggest pig or whatever, they're like their biggest. the biggest pumpkin, right? They try to like, let's go. Let's see how big we can grow it. Yeah, we should be pretty awesome. That would be so cool. I know they do that for like psychedelic mushrooms in Denver. They have these like, like psychedelic cups where they can see who grows the biggest psychedelic mushrooms with the highest potency. Um, so maybe if, you know, do you have a favorite strain in the psychedelic department? I really enjoy blue magnolias. They're very calm. Is that a blend? Um, it's, it's a variety of the species of mushroom. Um, I also enjoy albino penis envies. Those are great. I like mushrooms that aren't too overwhelming. I've never tried Enigma just because of the stories that I've heard.

My sister loves those, but I, when I take even a little bit, immediately I just want to go home and just stay in my house. I'm like, immediately not social. And you took them. Enigma broke my brain, yeah. Enigmas are, they were tough. How much did you take? And you almost, I almost took about 1/8 because it's usually what I take. I was like, great, I'll just do 1/8 of mushrooms, standard. And uh my friend who I got them from, go, he hands me the mushrooms and he's like, How much are you going to take? And I said, 1/8. And he goes, I don't know if you want to do that. And I'm like, that's fine. I'll be fine. I'm a psychonaut, we're good. And I go home and I start, you know, I put it on a scale and I'm kind of pouring them out of the bag, trying to get them out of the Ziploc bag onto the scale and only like 2.5 comes out and I try to shake the rest out of the bag and it won't come out and I go, OK, maybe that's a sign. I'll just take 2.5. And 2.5 felt like 7, right? So thank God I didn't take a full 8. The mushrooms stopped you. They were like, they stopped me.

They said, you don't need to go deeper than this, but, yeah, but they're, they're powerful. I'm with you. I don't like them being too intense. I mean, albino penis envy is also pretty intense, but, um, yeah. Have you ever heard of okrao centrata? It's a, it's a strain from South Africa and they thought it was called Natalensis because it grows in the natal Natal, South Africa, but then they look so similar that they got confused, but apparently it's like the Lowest body load and like very high visuals and euphoria for a strain. I would love to try those. I think I really appreciate the visual aspect of experiences in the body is like when it's really hard, right? Like, but I would, yeah, that sounds like a great strain. Yeah, that sounds like the perfect strain. I feel like there's just not enough research on all these different strains and kind of the effects that they produce, and I'm really excited to see that starting to come out. I wonder if that. I don't think that's under what House Bill 1802 can research. It's mainly just for therapy and like alternative remedies and synthes and it's also synthesized psilocybin, so people aren't even getting the real, you know, mushroom, um, which it's still it's still something, you know, it's still, it's still research into that realm, but yeah, I would love to see some research on different strain varieties and kind of their effects on different people like.

And I feel like that also help with finding the right mushroom for different illnesses, you know, like what mushroom is really great for PTSD, what mushroom is really great for migraines, you know, it's just like, yeah, there's so many people that I've come across who are like, oh, I took mushrooms one time and it was so, I don't like it. It's like a set and setting, but there's so many strains of how they interact with you, right? And we just had Danny Fontaine on who's obsessed with the endocannabinoid system, but She said, if you can look at the genetics, you can even see how different strains will work for different people, right? So if you could get an assessment with like a natural doctor and then know which strains work well for what things, I mean, that's like the next level of You know, healthcare right there, that's the future, honestly, and then you can grow your own medicine. Yeah, I think that's like the ultimate goal is just teaching people to grow their own medicine. Like, you know, there's also groups where they'll want that clinical setting, that's where they feel safe and comfortable or even would want synthesized psilocybin, but for me, I think like teaching people to grow their own medicine is very empowering. That's true.

How, how does, you know, do you guys use the mushrooms to help grow other Vegetables, plants, other food. Yeah, so with the farm we have a lot of spent blocks. So spent blocks are basically the leftover from after the mushroom fruits. Some companies will actually blend the spent blocks and put it in their capsules, which personally I don't think that's smart. Like we should only be getting the fruiting body. Yeah, yeah, sure, maybe the mycelium and grain and that spent block might have some nutrients, um, but where we've seen and The research has the most benefits is through that fruiting body. So with the leftover of that spent block, you throw it in the garden and it actually myceliates that soil. And when the conditions are right and it rains, you'll just see mushrooms pop up in the garden. So our mushroom farm is actually on 3 acres of agricultural land. We have a bunch of fruit trees, a bunch of pecan trees, and a bunch of like just produce like zucchinis, you know, and what we've seen is actually after the first year that we Started implementing the spent blocks into these trees. All of our fruit trees are having like 3 times exponential growth in the fruit that actually comes to it. Like I had this baby peach tree that was barely giving any peaches, you know, the 1st 2 years. We started adding blocks to it. The next year, it was an enormous tree. It grew like 3 times in size. There was like 50+ peaches coming out of that that season, which just really showed to me, whoa, and it just makes sense, you know.

This mycelial network is finding nutrients and resources underground, like really deepening those hyphal threads to spread them to all the different trees in the area and like also even cycling nutrients from other trees that might be more healthier to that tree. But yeah, mycelial network is considered the wood wide web. I'm sure you guys have heard of that and it's so cool. It's like this ancient network that really understands how to benefit the plants and the trees and its ecosystem. It's super understudied, you know. How do you add a block? Like it's say at home, I get a block, you can order a block or you can make a block. Yeah, so a good resource out here is I just throw it in the, just throw it in there. Yeah, you just toss it in there, stomp on it. Really, you just put it just like that's like the most direct way. Yeah, for sure. You can awesome. Yeah, it's really easy. There's a bunch of block programs out here in Austin ran by the central. Texas Mycological Society, they do block pickups from these huge mushroom farms who just have all these waste that's like not going anywhere, so might as well recycle it and put it back in the ground. It's a really cool program that's just recycling what's considered waste to some people and some people will even take it home and just fruit them out like they're never ending. Like mushrooms will continue, with oysters.

Yeah, they just won't stop. It's crazy. And they have different pickup locations around Austin, so whatever is nearest to you. I think it's like a certain day out of the week, you could go pick up blocks and take them home for your garden, just toss them, toss them in the soil, you know, you can mix it around a little, and then you could get into like various methods of composting them to kind of make it. You know, more nutrient rich, you could do like worm verma composting, so just blocks and worms, and they'll eat all the mycelium and make worm castings out of it, which is really good for the soil. Yeah, and they're great composters too, so if you have a lot of dead wood, mycelium is the only thing that can break down lignin, which is that like hard substance on trees. So I mean without mycelium, we would just be. Overgrown with wood and different lignant, yeah, debris trees everywhere. So that's that's also a great way to use mycelium is through composting at the conference, do you have like a one on one set your own garden up? To use mycelium and also grow mushrooms, like if you wanted to, you know, put a garden in your backyard.

We don't have that directly. We do have a mushroom cultivation workshop, so teaching people how to grow mushrooms and make like makeshift a lab at home, so you can grow any variety, not just gourmet, whatever you're into. Um, but we, we do also have some like block pickups, so we'll have this farm just offload all of their spent blocks that they have no use for, and a lot of people at the conference will just pick them up, take them home, fruit them out. But yeah, our main thing at the conference is really Mushroom cultivation workshop, like teaching people how to grow their own mushrooms, low tech mushrooms, like if you don't have a whole lab or a whole system, how to grow them outside in like buckets and hay. So yeah, there's many different ways to grow mushrooms. You don't have to be like super, you know, high tech about it, um, but yeah, there will be some workshops there. It was cool to see in Uganda kind of how Like the tech that they do or the methods that they use, but yeah, you could grow mushrooms off many different types of agricultural waste. They use a lot of banana leaves out there and the way they pressure cook and sterilize their, their growing medium, yeah, mushrooms over open fire, super low resource crop, like the lowest resource crop possible, doesn't use a lot of water, which is what makes it a perfect crop for Africa.

I mean they're growing these out of like agricultural waste like banana leaves, like you said, banana husks, and it's funny their their grow tents are literally just banana leaves with mixed with charcoal and they're just like wrapping, weaving them into wire and it keeps it cool and these mushrooms are thriving out there. So if you can grow them in someplace like there, you can grow them anywhere really. They're really resilient. Take them to the moon base when they build it. Yeah, do you guys think mushrooms will be taken to space? 100%. There's actually this microtecture off-planet project right now by NASA that they're conducting, which is basically building structures on the moon with micromaterials and having algae as like a feeder. So yeah, this, this started like 3 years ago, this research, and they're basically trying to So they already sent micromaterials in low orbit and proved that they'd be fine. There's no, there's no effect to micromaterials in outer space, which is a thumbs up for them because it's super low resource. It doesn't cost a lot of money, and this research was only funded 2 million, which in NASA's project, I mean, all these projects are like 2,500+ million, like billions, and the microtecture off planet project was only 2 million, which just goes to show how resourceful mushrooms are and mushrooms can be.

And you know these NASA engineers know that and I think it's being led by Lynn Rothschild right now, um, and there's another researcher, I forgot his name, but yeah, they're basically building out these mycelial structures that algae feed over time. Which is insane. You think if we go to another planet, we'll probably need mycelium to terraform the land because it's going to break down. You can bring all the plants and stuff, but you need something to break it down and then create hospitable soil conditions. Definitely, yeah, I think mushrooms are the ultimate teachers, honestly, and the golden teachers, you could say they are, they are. They really are and the fact that You know, they're going to be used in off-planet projects is kind of insane and bizarre. I never thought I'd see that in my lifetime, at least. So, yeah, it seems like they're going to outer space for sure. Do you notice, you know, being in this for the last, you know, however many years that it's accelerating people's interest in funding and, you know, people using products and being interested.

100%, 100, 100%. Yeah, we've seen the most amount of growth in the past 4 or 5 years. We've only been in this industry for 4 years, like fully, fully in it. And from the moment we started, the amount of brands, businesses, companies, biotech companies, startups that have popped up in the last 4 years is just exponential. I mean, we do not see it stopping anytime soon. There was this study for micromaterials that I read when I was doing research on it and it was estimated by 2030, it was going to be a 30. Yeah, 2030, it was going to be like worth $30 billion like the micromaterial industry alone, not even just mushrooms, um, but yeah, might want to double check my facts on that. It was from this like forum um and like website on. Like growth, revenue growth for like micromaterial industry, but it's huge and just that, so of course, we've seen a lot of different brands come, especially for functional consumer products standpoint, like seeing brands like Everyday Dose or Super Mushh now having their own section in Target, right, is like really crazy because Sprouts, Whole Foods, sure, but Target is a very large retailer that reaches a very broad audience and seeing mushrooms, kind of mushroom products become more relevant and more seen in these spaces in these different retail spaces is just like really shows the growth of, you know, mushrooms in general over the last couple of years.

Yeah, there's a lot of investment in all things fungi, which is great, but can be scary if done by the wrong people, you know. Do you have any guests coming this year that you're really excited about other than the ones you already mentioned? Yeah, actually we have Alan Rockefeller. He is a taxonomist. He is also a microphotographer, so he takes, he basically uncovers really rare species. I mean, this guy will be like days in the rainforest jungle in the Amazon just like taking photos of fungi, like camping out. So I'm really excited to see what he has to share. He's actually talking about Texas's state mushroom and its taxonomy, the devil cigar. its scientific name is Corey. Coreactisgaster. So it's a really interesting mushroom that isn't really well known or talked about. And like I said, it only grows in Japan and as of recently it has been found in Taiwan. So he's going to be talking a little bit about why it's found in central Texas, which is what everyone wants to know. And then he's also going to be covering psilocybin taxonomy. So he finds a huge variety of different types of psilocybin mushrooms all over the world that people haven't even identified. So there's a lot of mushrooms that I'm excited for him to cover the taxonomy behind them, why they have those compounds that provide that make these psychedelic effects. And then yeah, just I'm really excited about him and also Julian Brown.b. Yeah, Nature Jab. He is converting plastic waste into gasoline and diesel fuel and it is through a system called pyrolysis and I've never heard of anything like that before.

He's doing really cool work. Right now he's working on like a mobile pyrolysis machine, but he basically has like his on the ground machine in Alabama he's been working on the last couple of years and he's ran Hellcats and motorcycles and like a Rolls-Royce off his, off his fuel, and he gets it lab tested and it's, it's a very good quality and grade fuel, but so he's not necessarily like in the mushroom space, but he'll be talking about. Um, just like his pyrolysis work, but also nature being like an incredible uh way to remediate and, and heal the environment in a sense and the potential like way that he could use mycelium. So we also have Dr. Bilan Venkatesh. He is the co-director of the Houston Center for Mushroom Research and Education at the University of Houston. Which is the first of its kind. You don't find mushroom research centers and education out there, so it's really exciting to have him speak, and his whole thing is actually research on functional mushrooms, but also biotech and also converting mycelium into fuel, into actual fuel. So I'm excited for them to have a conversation.

Um, so a lot of the times when people do these large scale remediations of like toxic sites, let's say oil spills, and they use mushrooms to help clean that waste, the mushrooms fruit out and those PFAs, those all of those heavy metals and those toxins, they bioaccumulate in the mushroom itself, in the fruiting body. So the big question is like, OK, what do we do with these mushrooms now? So what Dr. Belen is researching is how to extract those bioaccumulation of those molecules in those mushrooms to create fuel, to reuse those toxic chemicals, you know, back into fuel, into diesel, because you can't feed that mushroom to people now, so you have to burn it. And if you throw it in a. Landfill, I mean, it's just going to rot. Exactly. So how do we recycle basically, how are we going to recycle these toxins in the environment to actually be placed in good use? So that's a really cool research that Dr. Belen is doing. So we're going to have him this year, we're going to have Julian, Alan, William, the truffle guy.

Um, all those people on the healing pathways panel talking about psychedelics, so there's many different avenues on how someone can get interested and curious about fungi, whatever field you're in, whether you're an architect, you know, or an environmental science or a mental health practitioner, mushrooms hit, we try to, we try to get speakers that hit those all those realms, all those topics, um, and then we also have, yeah, some cooking demos too. It sounds like a lot of work to put this on. Yeah, no, for sure, especially since primarily it really is just us two. Like this is the first year that we've gotten like a helping hand, and even then it's been a learning lesson to learn how to like bring someone else into the fold and do the work, but yeah, it's really just been. Very grassroots and like bootstrapped and just for the love of the game. Yeah, it's really funny because people always like, oh, who do you work for? Like who's your boss, and I'm like, the mushroom, you know, like the mushroom tells me what to do, like, yeah, it's just us, you know, and a lot of people, I, I don't know, a lot of people think we're like this huge organization with corporate funding, which is really funny to me. I'm like flattered. I'm like, wow, a compliment you, um, but yeah, it's, it's a passion project, definitely, it's the mushroom's ability to really Give you that passion to educate people on everything else and those those psychedelic experience. I mean, without that psychedelic experience that I had, I would not be as deep into mushrooms as I am today or educating or feeling that need or passion to educate others and it's opened so many doors of opportunities. I really don't know what I would be doing if I didn't pursue that mushroom realm and that's what I try to get other people.

People to do if they're lost, if they're into nature, if they're trying to make a difference in the world, you know, fungi is the ultimate golden teacher, you know, like they're that they're that key into possibilities and a realm that you never thought could exist, which is what I really love about mushrooms and fungi and the whole experience is really reciprocal. So like as I was touching on earlier, the community. is just amazing and really shows out, so we put in a lot of work and effort, but all these other organizations that join us like Central Texas Mycological Society, Texans for Greater Mental Health, Psychedelic Society of Texas, um, they really help us as well and like help organize great experiences, great educational material for the attendees, so they're just as involved, interested and, and passionate, and that really fuels us as well. Mhm. Do you know much about the research going on at the UT, like the specific studies they're working on, or like one of the main ones that, you know, they're producing? Yeah, so that bill, the House Bill 1802, it covers a couple of different illnesses like PTSD, anxiety, depression, migraine, and chronic pain. So legally they could only really research MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine on those five different illnesses or mental health disorders or ailments, whatever you might call them.

Um, but as of right now, the recent study, I know they expanded it to LSD, um, which was LSD on anxiety like. General general anxiety disorder. So they were researching LSD for general anxiety disorder. I'm not sure the, I think it was 100 mcg of LSD for that, and the research hasn't came out yet, but it seems really promising. Um, the one that I do know that they did was they also did psilocybin for postpartum depression, which isn't a big topic. People don't really talk about postpartum depression, but You know, it, it affects a lot of women everywhere. So it was really interesting to see psilocybin being used in that point. And I know in California it's really talked about psilocybin for postpartum depression, um, but that was really intriguing. I know right now the big fix for psychedelic researches is Ibigaine. I'm not sure if you guys heard about that. Um Ibigaine for opioid withdrawal is the talk of the town in Texas psychedelic. Which is basically what's being researched right now. Um, I'm not super well reversed in ibogaine, but apparently there, it's really dangerous for people, you know, on high doses, people with heart conditions, um, people with lung conditions, even ibogaine is pretty dangerous, but I know that's what's really being focused on, um.

Do you, do you know of any other research going on right now? At Baylor University, they're doing psilocybin trials. Um, I forget exactly. I think it might be for depression, uh, treatment resistant depression, but, uh, Lynette Avril, who will be speaking at the conference, has been kind of managing those trials over there at Baylor, um, but yeah. It's right now they're kind of just wrapping up all the research from the House Bill 1802 so they can kind of show their findings over the last couple of years and then it transitioned more into the Ibergain research since that's what's what funding is available right now. I mean 50 million is like historic, it's it's a historical bill, so I wonder. Well, side note, I was watching one of my friends who she owns the Beyond Ibegaine Center in Mexico, and she brought a researcher. He's been doing it for 30 years, researching IBgaine, never taken it, just doing research on it cause the molecule like blows his mind. But his goal is he wants to be able to He actually did it for the first time and reported his findings. He even asked while he was in it, the medicine, is this something I should be messing with? Because his goal is he wants to be able to, without extracting the magic of it, to take out those risks of the heart conditions, right? Cause you can, I think it's like, It's not, it's risky to take by yourself, but if you're monitored, it's like a, it's just a monitoring of magnesium levels to just be able to, you know, make sure someone's OK. But if you could be able to pull that out. But he said it has the potential like antibiotics where it can make so many different possible medicines just from that.

One thing. And so it's really, that's a really interesting interview to listen to a dude that's been studying it for 30 years, but never had taken it until just like a couple months ago to be able to be like, I probably should take it, right? And it's also interesting listening to imagine like studying psychedelic mushrooms for 30 years. And you've never taken it and you just hear reports from people about it. It's just because he was fascinated by what it looked like under a microscope because it's like a structure he's never seen before, right? So yeah, there's always risk when you are taking any type of psychedelics, not just ibigaine. And there was this really cool research that came out of Santa Monica's psychedelic researchers with Dr. Keith Heinzerling. A lot of the solutions to this anxiety, these cardiovascular risks are nature, you know, nature-based settings. So he did, I mean, you still are confined to a clinical setting when you're doing research, but he did a pre-visual, like a nature-based visual intervention prior to a psychedelic experience, and he actually found reduced cardiovascular risk, which is the first study of its kind. I mean, he presented that our Santa Monica psychedelic summit. We had a psychedelic summit event in Santa Monica at Mudwater.

And his findings were so interesting. I had never, like I said, this is the first of its kind research on how to reduce the risks of people freaking out, those cardiovascular risk, people having heart attacks, and it's one of them is nature-based visual intervention, which blew my mind. I mean, it makes sense. We should be taking, you know, psychedelics in nature. My most powerful experiences were taking psychedelics in nature. Mushrooms want you to be in nature. They want you outside. The less nature you're in, the more weird it's about to get. Like don't take them on a plane. It's about to get real. Like this is not where I should be. Yeah, don't be in like an apartment in like a tower downtown or something like that. Yeah, like it feels like you need to rip your clothes off. You're like, I need to get to a lake in the woods, and then you're fine, right? Because I feel like mushrooms sometimes like, you ever go on like a 6-hour, you know, like a long ass hike, 3 hours, whatever, you know, at the end. Everything kind of is wavy and moving and whatnot. I feel like that mimics the feeling of sometimes being on mushrooms. So it's, I feel like it's matching that same energy of just when you spend a lot of time in nature. So once you're on, you know, a psychedelic mushroom, it feels weird if you're not in nature because then you're like, oh, now I'm calibrated to nature.

Yeah, for sure, I completely agree. I've been on hikes for up, you're up in the mountains and You look out in the distance and like it's kind of like naturally zooming out like your vision, right, your vision changes like the way you feel, you feel very euphoric on these hikes and yes, same as being on a microdose or being on mushrooms. That's why if you go on a hike, you should also take mushrooms. And if you take mushrooms, you should go on a hike. It's crazy to think how our ancestors, like I like crazy ancestors were probably like just picking mushrooms from cow patties and having these like crazy revelational experience. I'm sure you guys have heard of the stoned ape theory. Yeah, I was gonna ask your your thoughts on it. I think it's really interesting. We saw a talk with Dennis McKenna at the Telluride Mushroom Festival, and he was, he was interesting about it. He was like, we don't know. We don't know if they did. I think it's a really interesting theory and it makes complete sense. I mean, you can still find psychedelic mushrooms growing off of cow patties everywhere, you know, just yesterday I had someone telling me that they grow crazy at his ranch, and I was like, Oh, do you take them? And he's like, No, maybe sometimes. He was being really weird about it, so I'm pretty sure he did.

Um, but it's a really interesting, interesting theory, and I think it does carry some truth to it, and definitely our ancestors were consuming psychedelic mushrooms. It's kind of silly to think they weren't. Um, did they play a role in the development of like our prefrontal cortex and bigger brains, possibly? Um, I think there needs to be more research and finding that. In their palates, I don't know, some, some historian, researcher probably needs to do some digging, you know, it's, I don't know how you would ever prove it, but I'm with you. I think it played a factor because, yeah, I mean, mushrooms definitely grow out of patties. I used to, when I was in Hawaii, I'd pick them out of cow dung and then hike them out and it's like, yeah, obviously, and that happened, you know, back then too, but you look at the brains and how fat there was like a massive evolution in brain size at one point in history. And why would that happen? And there's probably a couple of things like Africa got really hot where humans were, so people had to stand upright to like not get hot. They called it like the heating up theory. And then obviously eating mushrooms I'm sure played a factor and we have opposable thumbs which allowed us to then like carry things which other animals did like monkeys had opposable thumbs, apes had opposable thumbs, but cats don't. So like that made it more difficult for them to then progress in terms of evolution and and like the prefrontal cortex. So I think mushrooms definitely were like a fuel that made it go faster. Maybe we would have evolved eventually.

Without mushrooms anyways, but the leading theory right now is meat consumption was like the number one thing that caused bigger brains. Yeah, like more meat consumption caused better. Yeah, brain growth, more that vegans. I don't know if it's a, I don't know if it's a right claim, you know, I think it's just calorically dense, right? So it's like if you, if you're just trying to only eat fruits and veggies one, it would take a, and you're there's no agriculture yet, right? So if you're on the move and you're nomadic. To be able to eat a bunch of protein and fats, you can put on some weight, right? You have so much more calories and your brain uses so much energy and so many calories, you need meat. Yeah, and if you're just on the move only foraging, it might be a little difficult totally until you can farm and that came later. But I think how psychedelic mushrooms act on the brain is a good example about how this theory could possibly be true, you know, it really shuts down that prefrontal cortex, that default mode network and gets more of your brain's activated and in a time where language was developing, you know, using tools was, was a factor in, you know, neurogenesis and develop.

I definitely think mushrooms had to play a part in in understanding, you know, developing complex language, understanding how to use tools and communicating. Like it, I mean, you know what happens when you take that post the default mode network out, things happen, you know, spiritual experiences as well. Do you guys have a, do you create your own microdoses or do you have a company or brand you particularly like? And do you have a blend that you Just yourselves use Yeah, so I primarily make my own capsules and microdoses. I was fortunate enough to meet a lot of mycologists in California, so they were able to kind of teach me and show me the ropes on how to grow and would gift us genetics of all sorts. So that was really cool. So we, uh, grow our own, make our own capsules, and the stack that I really like is just a 0.1 of, uh, psilocybin and 0.1 of lion's mane, and that's kind of just like my go to stack. Any particular strain for you?

Apen enigma, yeah, I like to microdose apen enigma. You like the enigmas, yeah, you're an animal. You're an animal, man. The most I've had is like 1 g of Enigma lemon tech, and that was like super short and intense but amazing. And then, but just like microdosing Enigma has paired so well for me. Yeah. Well, speaking of mushrooms and the head, we have some gifts for you. Oh, we have some gifts for you guys. You do. That's right, double gift time. Let's exchange some gifts. You wanna pass the the Uganda bag. No more headphone time. All right. You're already wearing a mushroom hat, so you're, you're ahead of the curve. But These, do you guys ever go in the sauna? We do. I love saunas. Beautiful. Well, these are for you. These are, well, you have four colors that you get to play with wool, mushroom sauna, 100% wool, sauna hats. The Finnish have been using wool sauna hats for.

Ever because Finnish up saunas, every single one has one in their house, right? So we were like, all the sauna hats are so boring. Right, we need cool fun sauna hat. Yeah. And why would you want a mushroom sauna hat, right? Oh, this is amazing. Yeah, so Wool antimicrobial. Have you ever used sauna hats before in the sauna? No, no, it's a game changer. You'll, you can stay in longer because your head doesn't overheat. Yeah, and if you put your hair all the way up, it'll keep it from drying out if you do it all the time, right? I like this color. This is cool. I like the, the original mushroom color. I brought you some gifts from our sponsors, Logan the lion's man here. I think it's, I think it's so like stereotypical. Like, why is he wearing glasses, you know, like it's they're trying to make him smart and he's a brainy guy. Yeah, come on guys. A guy named Logan would wear glasses. Totally. Thank you. And then also some tea from 4 Sigmatic. So this is some and then some Tremela gummies like he was talking about. Tremela, we got some reshiremela, and then I have some quartericeps gummies for you guys.

Let's eat these right now. Wait, tell us about Tremela again. Like what was the So remela helps produce collagen. It helps with collagen production, so great for skin. It's known as a jelly fungus. It's really jelly-like. It's, it's fun. You can like flick it a little, you know. I love flicking mushrooms. mushrooms are the best and you can play around with them. Um, but yeah, Fungus is a really great company. They're just trying to make like daily vitamins, daily multivitamins with mushrooms, so mushrooms are definitely taking over that supplement field, and you can find them in Walgreens, CVS, really, yeah. These are in Walgreens. Yeah, wow, they sell like their monthly packs there, but yeah, and they're so tasty. That's super rad. Cool. Well, right, I'm racing it up. The conference is when again? Sunday, April 19th, so two weeks from today. Yeah, the conference is April 19th at the Edder Harbin Alumni Center, so it's on campus at UT from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

And if anybody's ever interested in, you know, the future or You know, working with you guys or, you know, connecting or helping or Any of that, what's the best way to do that? Yeah, we're definitely looking to expand our team as we create this and just build a bigger space, we're looking for a team of like-minded individuals and that'd be through our organization Myceliumatters.com. Dot org.org mycelium matters.org or Instagram at myceliumsceliums and there's only one M. A lot of people confuse that. They put mycelium matters, but it connects the two mycelium. Exactly mycelium matters or at the text mushcon.com, just our, our email or our website directly text mushcon.com, um, but yeah, we're looking for a team since we're doing so much mushroom advocacy education all across the world, the US and Africa. We need some people to really hunker down in their locations and just like expand this, you know, it's, it's growing beyond our control and we're looking.

For a team, do you need particular roles or you just need people in different areas? Yeah, yeah, we're looking for different people in different areas so we can have headquarters not only here in Austin but in LA in New Mexico. Have you guys heard of the New Mexico bill that was passed? Yeah, so Senate Bill 219 was just signed into law last, uh, April, and New Mexico is the third state to medicinally legalize magic mushrooms, and they're only doing whole body fruiting body mushroom. Make a great impact I think on the Texas border. El Paso is a big one and other other parts, but yeah, New Mexico will roll out this program starting next year. They'll be uh giving out magic mushrooms to people, um, they're really for therapy. They're really highlighting accessibility for low income individuals, which is the first time any state has done that who's legalized psychedelic medically psychedelics medically created an equity fund of $600,000 so anyone with low income can apply for. The fund and get this therapy therapy yeah, they're trying to uh code it with insurance companies and make it insurable.

So we'll be there so we're excited for this for the next year as that develops, um, but yeah, we're looking for people all over and for any other inquiries too, uh, researchers or schools we've presented at schools for anything if you want to bring us to do some education or just want to connect and find other people in the space, uh, please, yeah, reach out. Amazing. Well, thank you guys so much for coming. It was really enlightening to talk to you and you guys are so dialed in with like, I'm thoroughly impressed with how well you're tapped into all the laws and everything that's happening in the mushroom space, and I can tell your, your passion is like through the roof for this, and you guys are so young and like you're doing such incredible things. It's really inspiring to see. I appreciate it. Yeah, super cool. it absolutely crushing it. And thanks for being proponents for the psychedelic space and the mushroom space and. Everything we work for the mushroom man, as I'm sure you guys do too. That's our boss. We have a big photo of the boss that is so funny. Yeah, always watching.

Thank you guys so much for having us. It was such a great time. We hope to be back or do other things. I'm sure we will. Yeah, we guys have, you guys have to come to our conference, you VIP experience, everything. We got you if you're free, you know. One more time, when's the conference just to shout it out one more time. Yeah, the mushroom conference is April 19th, Sunday, April 19th from 11 to 6 p.m. at the Edder Harbin Alumni Center on campus at UT. And I just want to point out, we also have pre-events the day before. So Saturday, April 18th at the Violet Crown Cinema in downtown Austin, we're doing. Fungi films, so we're showing different documentaries and shorts of the mushroom space and then that evening at Gture King Brewery, they'll be doing some workshops and nature walks with mushrooms and fungi. And now that it's raining, you know, there's going to be lots of mushrooms it rains and spores exactly. Sweet. Well, thank you guys, thank you.