Inside Earth Angel Mushrooms | MycoWizards S1E10

0:19 earth angel earth angel that's right t.r davis of earth angel mushrooms i bet you thought we didn't talk being competitors in the block industry well you guessed wrong so here he is for our tenth episode to wrap up season one of the mico wizards power cast like what what do you mean like the um like with the delay yeah man it's just in the the audio comes out up everything comes out up so at the end of the day i just i'm like man i should just go back to doing it this way so i got the beginning of that but yeah i do want the whole story you know this is like sort of one of those long-winded escapade shows and i think uh yeah one of the coolest responses that i get from people who actually listen to it are they like every friday man i just put on micah wizards and go into the lab and i feel far less alone you know and i i don't mean it from like a crazy ass self-help standpoint but you know like we were just talking about yeah it's like people are they're terrified to keep going but they're terrified to stop so it turns into this like uh thing that really is a support system for them and i think a lot of people don't even know that you and i talk you know they just assume they're like competitors and that's good that's good though yeah until now yeah until now i thought we should talk about it hey hey are we are you gonna publish this let everybody know we talk yeah we talk we let we let every we all those guys that don't want to pay yeah everybody knows you're on the list all right i know but that's like yeah for a while i was like man i can never have tr on this because we really do have this back and forth which you know uh is just out of respect it's like dude don't get bunked by these who really don't want to pay yeah man but here's here's the thing people you gotta realize or if they think that we don't talk or that we don't know each other they don't they're not familiar with the industry yet because the industry is so small the industry's so small that like you can't go around screwing people because it's so small of course what we talk of course we know each other you know yeah i think it's the people who jump into it hot like uh you know buy out another farm or or right now especially with the cubenzes thing they're just going wild and they don't see the whole industry already here doing exactly yeah i keep getting calls from uh people who are gonna buy sue boilers and it's all cubensis growers and i'm like what the it's like that is yeah it's it's the wild wild west yeah and uh i don't you know the all of the those people that are jumping in yeah or sidebar on psilocybin mushrooms all those people that are jumping in yeah what they don't realize is that there won't be a small of or very big of a small scale or i don't think uh psilocybin mushroom industry even when it takes place considering that one agaricus farm could convert one room of their let's say that they have um 50 rooms you know which would be a medium scale agaricus farm they convert one of their rooms to one run of cubensis and they generate 50 000 pounds basically in you know a couple weeks that i mean that and like they're not going to do it of course they're going to do it they're going to supply the whole country for months or a year or whatever 50 000 pounds would be so um these guys that are just jumping in thinking they're going to conquer the the the mushroom world because you know right now the prices are ill the black market prices are what they are yeah you know it's it's it when it becomes when it enters the capitalistic society you know then then the capitalists come out yeah so i i it will change well you and i have seen the perspective and the pivot of like kenneth with the chinese shiitake locks you know like oh yeah fast they react and go this you know so they will when it becomes a sort of legal uh thing why not you know and then all of the smallers are kind of like whoa you know that's the thing is it's very similar to agaricus in that manner whereas like we i think got away with it for so long and still have because of the wide amount of varieties the differences yeah yeah quite frankly the infrastructure just wasn't here for it so all these small little like

5:20 rats like us were able to come up and really make a dent yeah yeah and i think that uh and you've probably seen this as well starting from where you and i started even the small scale world is completely different now it's completely changed it's com and especially since covet hit that it doesn't even it doesn't look the same it doesn't feel the same there's different people it's crazy how fast it has changed because you think about it when did when did we meet like on cmg five or six years ago it was probably more than that you know that was like 2013 probably i don't know how it's been a long time still i was still eating still eating with my hand basically you know what i'm saying yeah but in that room in that zone like we couldn't sell nobody was selling blocks nobody even knew what kss was yet you know as small yeah blocks and the the amount of small growers was so small yeah and now there's just and i think uh the market for local mushrooms has gone astronomically more yeah more there's way more demand um than what there was even a couple years ago and then covet hit and that changed a large portion of people to want to buy more local whether it be um i know some people that do cattle they started just it was off the chain selling direct to the public that wanted local stuff and that applies to mushrooms as well which was which is good for everybody which is good for everybody because you know me you've probably heard me say this multiple times is that i i always thought if you don't get to be big scale you're done yeah whereas i've you know especially after covid like well i was wrong because there's a lot of people that are being successful with a small uh like a business model that is selling locally um especially you know and well it's a valid perspective to admit to change and like oh no i i this can actually work because it's the only reason like you and i are in business when it comes down to blocks or spawn it's because there's so many farms and so many people who want to do this and and it really is like getting bit by a bug you know i had a dude in here today who came in for like an hour consultation just a small main farm but like he's going from the tent to garage to so on and so forth yeah and it's a fantastic perspective for me to have because very quickly i can change their uh like perspective around fruiting um to make it far more efficient and then they can get successful very fast to be comfortable yeah to be able to be like okay i can sink more into this you know because it's yeah and think about this like what you said so when you and i started and we'll talk about how like we're old salty veterans i'm not saying that but like it feels a difference yeah the difference there was some youtube there was some youtube stuff out there but the amount of knowledge that is given to you now is so much more so much more now you have just everything at your fingertips and it's yours to lose whereas you know we're starting off at least me just botching everything up just trying to fumble my way through stuff you know you just fail and fail and fail and there's no one to talk to but um and there's still as an industry you know once you get to a certain level it's hard to find in for like in-depth information but hopefully by then you have the fundamental stuff down pat um which is easy to come by online youtube whatever yeah and there's so many channels now like i'd still always reference uh michael uh from southwest because like he's killing it on the channel thing like who the just thought i'll just film my day and still work you know like genius man and it really has inspired a different level of grower to look at these things yeah and not in a predominantly like forward integrated way like what's new what can i innovate but in a way in which it gives them the baseline to understand what other people are doing which before like yeah like you know you and i on the cmg inside and even before that with the shroomery thing it was like yeah you just had to through it and and really screw it up and waste a ton of money you know a ton of money a ton of time a ton of heartache um all of the above whereas now there's a lot more information yeah it's very true man okay so going back to that that like early sort of earth angel stage i just get that song stuck in my head every time i say your goddamn phone

10:21 i know it's probably a long story and you can you can choose to tell however you want but i never heard it so yeah so let's see i'll tell the life story where it began so i grew up you know outdoors loved the i always loved the outdoors so part of it at least in the midwest morel mushroom hunting in the springtime is pretty huge yeah um and so i grew up you know i'm real mushroom hunted loved mushrooms there's always something kind of fascinating about mushrooms you know what i mean yeah you know fast forward through life with the same fascination of mushrooms and morel hunting of course i did other things when i graduated high school went to the marine corps got out of the marine corps and then um went to flight school and flight school mushroom experience so the very first time i ever saw magic flight school was in florida so i grew up in illinois grew up in illinois and illinois there's no magic mushrooms but i was down in flight school running on a trail um and this trail went by a cow pasture and now keep in mind i've always been fascinated with mushrooms and uh so of course that intrigued me that there's a mushroom that has uh you know a psychoactive ingredient yeah and so i'm running running i'm like you know across my mind i'm like i wonder if those mushrooms are out there you know and so i i still remember stopping and walking and i'm you know hovering over the fence i'm still on the trail looking over the fence at these cow patties and it just happened to be happened to be that there's all these mushrooms out there on these cow patties well this this was 2010 so the internet is just a fledgling thing at that point you know there's not it's the internet was not what it was yeah no you know so it's like it's not like you can i don't know if google was around then there's all the search engines anyway so i grabbed yeah so i grabbed a bunch of these you know i'm doing researching online researching online about um you know what is there poisonous look-alikes is there this is there that i found you they bruised blue and uh so i you know squeezed one with my fingers and i'm like holy these are magic mushrooms and they're everywhere it just happened to be that they must rain before or something or fate fate led me to get like stumble upon these like hundreds and hundreds of magic mushrooms anyway so that just fast that fascinated me more you know what i mean i'm like i actually found i found magic mushrooms and uh so of course of course life is still taking place and i i couldn't be like eating magic mushrooms while i'm in flight school and then from flight school from flight school of course i was flying for a living yeah and of course i can't eat magic mushrooms then but but i had a lot of time off when i was flying for a living and with all of that time off i started mushroom hunting more and getting more fascinated with the whole mushroom thing wild edible mushrooms and so i um would go out morel hunting in the spring and then i started learning more about the other wild edible mushrooms and you know chanterelles black trumpets lions maine maitake chicken all lions man all of those mushrooms and so i ended up spending it starting to spend a bunch of time foraging um and then i'm like you know what look i started reading about growing oyster mushrooms and so i grew some oyster mushrooms and you know just became sort of a hobby and fast forward i got out of aviation it's weird to talk about because it was it's like the only thing i can say is it wasn't what i wanted to do when i grew up right you know a lot of a lot of guys in aviation are um as passionate about aviation as the mushroom people are passionate about mushrooms it's like in your blood and flying was never like that for me it was a job yeah it's a great job the people are amazing but it wasn't something that i wanted to do when i grew up and so i left aviation went back to school for a little while but in this whole time i'm growing as a hobby and i sort of got got to the point where i'm like you know i want to i love to grow stuff i like the hands-on um you know the growing and the mushrooms are just completely different it's not like growing a plant and you know i've said this a million times mushroom cultivation is the art between

15:22 or the the marriage between art and science yeah and i'm very i love sciencey stuff love the data statistics all of that stuff and i love the artist i love like the artistic brain in the mushroom world on how um you pick up on nuances that other people don't see you know and and different growers are way more artistic than others and how they can look at something and they can they have these gut feelings and that's what i call the art behind it and then as you keep going you get better artistry as you do it but uh so from there i went back to school for a little while and then um i had uh i was doing some aquaponics stuff for just a little little while but i was growing mushrooms on the side this whole time well anyway we had this meeting to sell uh lettuce that we were growing aquaponically um with a buyer of a grocery chain here in saint louis was this like a business part of from the beginning or just working for yeah okay yep yep it was we started this aquaponics thing which is a horrible disaster but i was still growing mushrooms yeah yeah and uh so anyway the night before this meeting with the buyer i had all of these oyster mushrooms that i needed to be harvest harvested so i picked some and i'm like i'm gonna bring these to the meeting and i brought them to the meeting for the to the produce buyer and he ended up being way more interested in mushrooms than he was the lettuce so and i'm like huh i'm gonna start growing these to sell and that's when you really start botching stuff up or at least i did because you know you think you you think you got it under control and you don't have anything under control and uh no and uh so then i uh from there still with the other the business i got a little bit of warehouse space 300 square feet and started trying to grow them at that scale yeah and then it wasn't long before the aquaponics thing was just it was it was a disaster from the get-go but um how did you get all these aquaponics so were they just like friends of yours or was it how did you stumble into i met i met the guy and his wife at a aquaponics like learning seminar okay and they happen to happen to be close um but when that fell through i knew like mushrooms did it for me you know what i mean there is i in my life i have to have some amount of challenge yeah and that art that art and science thing together and the challenge every day there's something new every day um in mushrooms which i need that um and i need a little bit of a struggle you know what i mean and there there's always that yeah it's never the same thing twice and so much more of the artistic side because that is the struggle and it sounds ridiculous but i've had a number of people on this podcast and recordings i've done so far who come from the same background as i do of ultra creative like you know had sensory issues as a kid like couldn't stop blinking or tapping their toes because they were just going nuts like with so much energy you know and like i still yeah in that way like i'll just lie some nights and i've got so much energy that i just go out for a motorcycle ride come back right yeah do what i need to do and then i'm like oh my god i can finally go to bed you know yeah so that's that artistic thing where you're you're just gear grinding it's not a blessing yeah i don't think so anyways yeah yeah yeah yep i'm with you so you just kept so and this is like uh so from there from there then i sort of thought you know what this mushroom thing this mushroom thing is something i want to do i know that i'm capable i know that if i can sell them that i can uh make it a business so i was a couple months later is when i officially formed earth angel mushrooms okay and then was there like a push there like after you got out of like flight land that you were like i need to start my own business was there some sort of entrepreneurial thing from the get-go or like i've always i've always been around entrepreneurs my whole life like my my parents had a business my grandparents had a business so it was always yeah i was always i was surround i was immersed in that you know what i mean it was always something that i was around it was the same

20:22 like i grew up doing all the that you know like gets tossed on a kid of entrepreneurs you know so you're just using yeah you're like you work for yourself right that's life yeah yeah yeah exactly so i i knew that i didn't you know want to the corporate ladder thing of working for somebody else especially like i'll reference aviation once you get to a certain level yeah you know people think that it's all it's all awesome and yeah it there is an awesomeness about flying but it it's literally you're just there you don't once you're in the cockpit of a jet they all it's all kind of the same the airports don't change yeah the experience is when you're somewhere change but at work you know you don't if you're flying a seven triple seven or if you're flying a little regional jet like that's what i was flying a 50 passenger regional jet yeah it doesn't change it's the same thing there's no difference up there and you're going to the same airports there's no challenge there's no like i mean you're just in a you're you're in the waiting line to get seniority and then you know you go to another airline and make more money or blah blah blah but that yeah the the i'm not a financially driven entrepreneur that's not i've never i've always thought that money is the byproduct not the main goal because let's be honest if money was the goal we wouldn't be in mushrooms we would be committing all of this we would be committing all of this energy to something that is way more profitable yeah this way is well that i would think of is way easier but here we are and it's it's something about the struggle and the challenge and the ever-changing and the art the artistry behind you know seeing those blocks grow out and seeing them fruit and seeing you know when they do good you're like yes i think culmination yeah there's an end like uh thing but it's it's there's an end product but the end product isn't the end goal because it's it's such a wide reaching industry and directive and specialization territory that like yeah it really it's a rabbit hole and it's the number one thing that you just said that i i bring up every time i have a consultation it's part of the reason why i think people really enjoy this podcast who are on the same level of us when it uh as us when it comes to the financial side not being the driver is because if it is you're done you know or you're a beast and you know you're going to start a great giant farm but you're not going to matter to the smaller people and that's sort of that like that odd balance to keep in check when you know you're new and in this industry is just like if money is your goal from the get-go you have so much to learn that you were going to hate yourself yeah you get to the end of the rainbow because there ain't no money yeah yeah and it's the there is some amount of politics in the industry and it's this laid-back um everybody kind of knows each other everybody's for the most part everybody's cool with each other not very many you know and there's a kind of like politics involved that when you enter them enter the mushroom industry once you get to a certain level you just kind of act and treat other people in a certain fashion you know what i mean yeah that uh so if you're just in it for the money you won't fit and when you don't fit you don't do well because other people don't help you out and let's be honest every business owner in the whole world knows that most of it is relationship based everything's relationship-based yeah you a vendor over especially for something as simple as a raw material you're like yeah so there's there's that stance but then also the customer relations side also the like the tightness of this industry is the tr calls eric herr calls tr hey this person didn't pay for x amount of days yeah buyer beware yeah it's like yeah buy everywhere yeah because it that that smallness you know you you don't really even though like on paper you and i are competitors yeah on paperwork competitors that's what we are by definition yes you sell blocks i sell blocks but here's the thing in this industry it's like i look at it like this i want to be the best tr i can be and that doesn't involve making eric less of a less of a business person than me so if i want to sell blocks yeah i do want to sell lots of blocks but i'm not going to go out of my way to like um do it in a in a fashion that is not uh fitting of the industry you know what i mean or fitting of what i feel like i should act or whatever no so it's like this um yeah so that's the industry man cmgn sort of proved that in this interesting way because it's cmg for me is not a uh and for anybody listening just know what the that is this is you know tr's uh sort of now

25:22 adopted uh brainchild of a commercial mushroom growing network group on facebook and it's like when everybody started peeling into that world in a very like unorderly way but almost like cult like when joey was like interviewing people yeah yeah it was as if you felt like you were part of something but at the same time even looking at it now like i don't beyond some spawn in some like raw material pellet substrate i don't really sell anything to anybody on cmg into a mass scale it's more just like yeah it is this this group in which you can sort of riff off of one another business-wise uh concept-wise conversation-wise whatever but we're very independent and also like supportive of one another you know and that's there are some people i'm sure in that group who are not in that category but it's just because it's grown you know and i think the ogs in that land of joey and john holiday uh sort of they've stuck it out you know it's funny to see how few people have dropped off the face of that it's that that was that was encouraging to me you know i was like holy even before i got kicked off facebook for being the known terrorist that i am like uh you know it was like it was like a cool thing i was like damn none of these people are going anywhere yeah they're here which is cool yeah i mean there's been there's been some there's been some that have uh yeah but not not near as many i mean you look at the statistics of a small business um you know that uh what is it 80 in the first five years yeah now look at our batting average on the cmgn it's it's just it's yeah it's way better than 20 i can tell you that it's probably uh opposite it's probably there's 80 percent of the people that are still on there yeah and 20 have failed there's been some people that failed or maybe not failed but just decided they didn't want to do it yeah so the most interesting ones too i think it's the same people who like like you just exiting the flight territory they realize like this ain't my thing you know and like it's better you realize that early before you sink too much fundage into it and you're you know yeah money and energy and you're just like yeah cause this industry gobbles it up like a so yeah it does well i remember those like early cmg days but i i remember like posting some long like ridiculous you know uh power to the mushroom grower shenanigans but what was your entrance into that cmgn world because all i remember from my own was just joey schlegel reaching out and being like don't you own this and i was like yeah he's like you should be on this and i was like okay yeah yeah yeah i didn't know i didn't know what it was you know what i mean yeah and yeah so so for everybody listening joey schlegel who he started it all um and he's no longer in mushrooms he's in the he does vape vape cartridge fillers and all this stuff out in california so he ended up getting out yeah yeah morning he's he's being successful doing something else oh man uh yeah he's doing really good so he started it all and there was another guy who i knew on facebook that was growing on a small scale who he's no longer growing okay um i don't even i don't even remember his name and he messaged me as like you should be part of this group you should be part of this group and i'm like well what group is that yeah and he's like it's called cmgn yada yada yada and you know just a bunch of mushroom growers and so i became part of cmgn and then uh ended up meeting joey and we end up me and joey is he's like my brother um yeah what so did you guys just meet in the hyperspace that is facebook or did you did you just you know ring him up and be like oh we got to meet in person no so that happened whenever my um operation flooded in 2015. i think you were off of no yeah um so to that i knew joey from online we had messaged each other back and forth a few times and i think i'd talk to him on the phone yeah once or twice well anyway 2015 my old op was in like a hundred year flood plane and so three days or so before that they're like we're going to have 100 year floods and i'm like oh that's not good but in the meantime my current op was already in the works it wasn't built but it was it was in the process you know what i mean none of the ground had been broke no no ground have been broken no nothing and so my whole place flooded out and i had the choice to either spend all of the money time and energy

30:22 to get my old place back up and going because there was six feet of water in there damn so it basically it would have made me start completely over yeah and so i said do i want to spend the money to do it here you know get this place back up and going or do i just want to wait for my new place yeah and uh and i'm like what am i gonna do if i wait well in the meantime joey was uh going to be heading up that farm in wyoming oh yeah so post mana mushrooms he was going to do windy yeah right yeah wind river mushrooms so i had i had talked to him and i said hey uh you need help out there and uh he's like yeah i can use the help and so i ended up i never met joey but um he hooked me up with a job a house free free of rent to live in while i was out there in wyoming and then um when we started working together you know we hit it off and we became close he's literally like my brother yeah um so and then i was out there for a year came back to missouri um and and realistically that was one of the very best things that ever happened to me is my place flooding and gaining the knowledge of going to a large farm meeting the people meeting lots of people in the agaricus industry and other uh you know mushroom farms mushroom suppliers type stuff yeah so it was the best thing that ever happened to my my mushroom career for sure that's amazing man well because i so the place that flooded if i remember correctly was the same place where you were growing like in the black and yellow like straw bins right like the home depot yeah yeah so that was the place that was underwater okay yep yeah yeah remember those days those were the early days of uh trichoderma davis doesn't give a because you're quite literally like putting stem butts in sterile grain or some and you're like it's fun oh but that's all good you know you want to hear a story and all the listeners will get a kick out of this story now i just want to preface this story with i would never in a million years recommend doing this nor would i be able to get away with it today like the mushrooms know that i know better now they know that i know better yeah so um yeah so that i was growing on straw unchopped straw and uh in in yellow and black home depot bins with holes and yeah it worked it worked okay but uh anyway i was i was making my own spawn i say making i have a quotation around the making part because i was doing it in a closet and i had a whole routine that i would spray like a whole bottle of lysol no hepa filters no nothing but i would spray a whole bottle of lysol in the closet and i would go in there i would go in there with a mask on and i would do my spawn and you know i i i wasn't good um but uh so anyway i had this i had this bag of spawn and um like looking back it was contaminated well i was i was so broke in those days you can't i couldn't even think about well i thought i couldn't afford spawn when in reality i couldn't afford to be making my own which is where so many p so many people uh get in that trap of oh it'd be so cheap if i made my own but then you end up screwing everything up anyway so i'm making spawn i'm i i don't have spawn right because i contaminated every thing and i had one bag that was the least contaminated of all of them right had to ask had aspergillus all over it all over it like you know not like heart it wasn't like a huge section but it had little spots you know like every third grain had little piece of aspergillus on it and you could see it and i and so i'm like well let's throw it against the wall and see if it sticks because you know that i know it's like well there's oyster mycelium in there there's oyster mycelium in there so hopefully it you know can it can overrun this and yada yada and i you i used all of that i used all of i use that spawn and you know what none of those bins contaminated so that the mushroom the mushrooms they felt sorry for me on how how stupid i was how ignorant and how broke and how miserable and they let me get away with it yeah you get away with it like once in a blue moon and you're like how did that happen you just don't you like knock on wood and walk away yeah they're setting they're lu they're luring you in because they're like okay we're gonna let him get away with it this time and then he'll he'll do it

35:22 again on a bigger scale next time and then we're really gonna yeah that's what they do it's crazy i had this conversation again today with somebody i was just doing a brief consultation with and i said something along the lines of you know everybody's getting into this mightake thing and i was like i said something about sporeload and and i was like you know if you're trying to go down this realm of like fruiting multiple species in one room you really have to be aware that an abundance of spores will decimate slower growing species and as if like yeah that's new knowledge he was like amused by it and i was like no quite literally like these things are sentient to the point at which they just react like because hey they're being smothered but b it's a signal you know it's like it's like pollen you know like it's anything so it's a very uh it's a very intriguing thing what you can get away with at what stage isn't growing and then finally it catches up to you and you're like jesus yeah you know that's true that's that's absolutely true what you you know if i could go back in time to some of my version of myself 2015 2014 yeah i would literally punch myself in the face 150 times because what i would be hard stood on and you you know man you're hard-headed yeah yeah hard-headed i'll fight anything if i believe that it's true i'm gonna be like no that's the stupidest thing i've ever heard you know and if i could talk to myself then i 2015 tr would be talking to 2021 tr and telling him how stupid he is but in reality you know you you go through this thing and you're like oh my gosh i can't believe some of the stuff that i did how stupid how stupid right but you you know and the scale that's the thing and that's like the part that is different now you have if you've got the balls you can reach out to somebody in this industry and everybody knows who we are now like for the most part and i don't mean that like a mini famous way i just mean it's a business presence that's perpetuated on the growth of other small farms you know so it's a option now it's not just like signing a waiver to buy a spawn from stamets and being like oh gosh i can't propagate this or whatever the paperwork says it's much different now so like it's uh we busted the gates wide open in that early sort of 2015 area but at the same time it was a small group that decided to waste that much money to get this far ahead you know and nobody is going to help us so it dude yeah it's just it's uh you know michael nail mile high phone jack yeah he he he so he uh he came out here and visited one time when he was driving through him and his wife and that the saying is he said something to the effect of failing forward and that is the best phrase ever to represent how we all got to where we are right now is we didn't stop we just continually failed forward until sooner or later you can afford to pay your bills kind of totally what i mean totally no i remember like the first steam box set up that we had in our bright idea of like let's just cool this inside of the steam box right so we hook up like a hepa filtered uh shop vac and just like plow it into there and out you know i was like this is gonna be a great idea you know i feel like i shouldn't even cop this in live air right you know but i heard the same concept from somebody else and i was like i just couldn't stop laughing i was like please don't do it yeah i was like please yeah and uh it's it's like it's hard you're not all brad coons with his thermodynamic math so you know that's true though but like at the same time you had a great quote back then that it definitely stuck with me something on cmg and it was like as you started to figure it out i think this is like before windy river maybe or wind river but maybe it's right after it was just like if i paid attention to all the stuff that was going on bad around me like the spent blocks and the bad spawn and the contaminated spots or the trash or the whatever i wouldn't still be going because you do at some point in that growth period have to just shed all the and just keep going you know and and the piles just build up yeah the cares because the product goes out and it gets old and the money comes back in and then you keep going and then you find time you're like we got a sunday afternoon let's clean you know yeah yeah that's i remember that yeah yeah i don't remember if it was yeah i mean it was but yeah i remember i remembered that my old place when i was doing everything pretty much on my own yeah i remember my grow room would have shiitake junk on the ground and i would i would not clean that until i couldn't stand the smell like i

40:24 could not to like till i couldn't get till i couldn't go in there until i absolutely had i walked around the trash until i had time you know sooner or later it builds up so big that you have to deal with it but if it didn't involve making some type of money to pay rent or electricity yeah i didn't i didn't do it you know what i mean yeah oh my gosh well you see all these like you know i i keep telling these stories because i was part of that early uh not early i wasn't part of anything i was stuck out there but i was in the early mountain uh murder mountain mushroom or murder mountain uh cannabis scene out in california without knowing it was murder mountain and the farms out there amazing because they're exactly that they're just trash piles that are just chasing cash and crops hidden in different corners and by the time the season's over it just looks like a hoarder of a gnarly human lived there and it's like swimming pools full of dead floats dead animals dead everything tarps people were like half dead and living under maybe bodies you know but it didn't matter because you got the crop you got it cured you sold it you made your dough you went home or you kept going or you killed somebody or yeah yeah yeah or in my case you're off the mountain because you're terrified but yeah but yeah it's there's something to that and i now see it somebody showed me like the the murder mountain documentary it totally gave me terrible flashbacks to like the worst times in my life but but i was like oh my god there's the trash files like this is the tr thing this is the so many so many people don't understand like you just have to keep going who cares about that people yeah yeah and i think that if i could go there is something to be said now that i'm here yeah you know what i mean i'm a lot cleaner now because some of that stuff ends up some of the stuff ends up backfiring to where it like you get blot more blotch flies everywhere you know it's like so no no yeah i'm referencing just in the beginning you know it's like yeah after a certain scale you have a cleaning crew or you have people who just you know dedicate time to organization and to to really just making our lives as owners easier and less hectic and anxiety-ridden you know because it really yeah yeah exactly so it's yup well what so you you transitioned by i remember getting a call from you because i really don't think i was uh i don't think i was on facebook at the time maybe mark was and you were at wind river and you were gonna you wanted to buy in like an obscene amount of stockies but i i can't remember if you were making shitakes before that or if you started making them after that or what was that transition from these like strawberries to all of a sudden you're making blocks that was the same time that i started trialing soybean holes okay so i had um use straw and then i used cotton seed holes yeah and then i the cottonseed holes in missouri were you can't get them all the time yeah so um hey man i got a delivery driver here what do you think can we pause and then yeah yeah just just call you back yeah let your phone keep going if you don't mind just because i don't know okay yeah uh give me it might take ten minutes i gotta load this pallet okay cool no worries hold on a second okay

45:40 ah beer uh all right you there all right man no shoveling some rice okay how was that it was delightful i got to crack another beer while you were doing that so i feel better that's that's good oh man so you were here you're basically wait what's that beer i need to know i need a beer are you a drinker so i'm not like i used to be yeah i'm too busy yeah i feel you ma'am the hangovers get harder i like yeah i do that's why i switched to just bud light or miller light i like really yeah at night i drank too much whiskey and i think i woke up still drunk oh gosh dude i was like it was you know not that much bourbon right but once you get going at least once i get going i can't stop and uh yeah and i yeah i don't i don't do i don't do things in moderation you know if i'm gonna go out and party i'm gonna i'm gonna tear it up yep yeah and that's where cheap beer it's like you just get too full to like get too up you know and you're like yeah ma'am i'm just gonna go to bed so yeah yeah i hear you yeah man well i wish i was closer i'd just hand you a beer but yeah i'd take one of you so you were so you're saying you were at this sort of state where you were you discovered the soybean hall you're playing around with that but you made this transition to blocks in some manner and then the shiitake thing sort of came in line with it now i was growing shiitakes prior to that i was growing shiitake blocks not a lot like i was doing like 200 a week or something like that like while you were doing the black and yellow bins but right yeah yeah okay yep yep but not oysters just shiitake yeah um food then jesus yep yep um and i uh then switched to all blocks okay and i had only done all blocks on oh everything's flooded out oh one sec sorry i got you back okay so you've done a few blocks until everything up got flooded yeah a couple couple months a couple months of all blocks and then bought it out and then came back and all blocks ever since that's crazy and that was way before windy river so you finally made it out to wind river and i ended up working with joey and uh what brooks out there and a bunch of other people yep and then you came back and had the next basically the next iteration of your farm right yeah that's exactly how it took place yeah next iteration and then it's been several iterations since you know it's always changing always changing yeah yeah i think brian simpson was the first person i remember like uh i don't think it was necessarily him but he was growing 37.82 on like those small blocks yeah yeah then sparta was like the first time i had seen blocks like make sense but i was like all right this is it you know yeah we made that full transition over 100 and nobody around us did like north sport was doing

50:40 straw melson was doing straw at the time eric milligan was the only one in new hampshire doing doing blocks so it was a weird renaissance to be able to find that even in like the old growing gourmet medicinal mushroom book where you're like there is a little thing about blocks in here in supplemented blocks you know yeah well you look at the the space i mean if you're a small grower like we all started off you look at the space savings yeah and how many mushroom mushrooms you get for giving uh square foot of growth space you have it's just it blows if your hand doing straw blows it away now if you have compressed bales and all equipment and all that stuff it's a different story you can probably get good enough yields to to to uh make it work financially but but when you're doing a lot of the stuff by hand like we all were yeah and you you ha you have one little grow room and there's there's only one option really yeah um yeah it's less and less effort to convince people to actually like do the blocking now because that was a move for a while people are like this man i'll just make straw logs and i was like i don't see that being okay yeah no it's oh man straw yeah i don't like straw or dealing with it by hand but yeah it was miserable i can imagine it man so what was your what was your transition at this point from the cmgn world as joey sort of like peeled out like did you was that like an understood or like assumed thing that you just sort of take over cmg kind of i mean kind of because i was heavily involved on there you know what i mean and one of the other things like i i know a lot of the guys in person on there too yeah um as i'm sure you do too but it seemed like i had i'd got to know some of them and all i just it's kind of my kind of a click you know what i mean kind of my group of people yeah um and just when joey left i mean hey i don't remember what the exact wording was but you know you want to do this sure yeah i'll take charge but it's not like it's not like i mean i think that there was a lot more information type sharing back then than there is now yeah there's still a lot of i think the end in the cmgn is the biggest part you know it's a network of people that when you do have something go wrong you have somebody to you have someone to talk to because you look at the our industry is so small and mushrooms is a 1.3 billion dollar industry in the in the entire united states so just to put that into perspective i mean let's look at any other industry and i have a point to all this um but you know in the united states uh innovation and all of this stuff is driven by money knowledge knowledge in that innovation or knowledge in that industry is driven by money so when you have a tiny industry there's not a lot of information there's not a lot of people you can turn to to answer questions so the people that are close to you in the industry it goes back to the small industry thing that's who helps you out when you don't know something you call eric or you call tr or you call whoever to help you out because it's not like let's look at the corn industry you know i'm in the midwest so corn and beans are huge if you have something go wrong in one of your corn fields all you do is pick up the phone and contact your seed dealer there they have i you know what i mean because it be behooves the seed dealers and the seed people or the fertilizer people or the amendment people to know lots and lots of information and there's this whole there's sub industries you know it's not just farming corn it's seed it's seed hybrids it's fertilizer it's pesticide herbicide all of this stuff we don't have any of that support the only support that we have is us it's not like there is endless data like there is for corn or cows or any other type of farming so when it comes to having a group of people and referencing cmgn it helps because you're like have you ever seen this have you ever done this you know what can i do to help this you got to be able to turn to somebody because there's not this wealth of you know there's not billions and billions and billions of dollars that have supported these sub industries within an industry that can help us out so we're reliant on each other yeah which is really why i think it's fantastic is like you know andrew cullery pointed out to me a while back like that we can all sort of start specializing now because of that and i do it all the time yeah like man i don't know call so and so you know i

55:41 don't do the choroplast heat exchanger i don't do the meyers bagger i don't know you know call them yeah and i think that's a beautiful part to that network that you know you're sort of in charge of you know it's like they they're on there and they might not be like 100 active but they can be called on because i remember a point at which yeah i think it was when joey was in charge he started to try to bring in these like novel not novel like uh you know old sort of old gate you know keepers and i i don't know if they ever posted on there i think they were just like invited and then it was like the are all these little hooligans doing like nobody gives a yeah yeah but they were just they're beyond us i guess you know yeah yeah not now you know what i mean yeah that's true man i i it's amazing so tyler goes over to belgium uh he learns a bunch of this from magda and casper and we started doing spawn and while he was over there they were like blown away at the um at the the like high level of nutrient in the majority of like america's master mix if you will yeah yeah even like the shiitake mixes and stuff they were like what the so like the predominant um sort of move over there is to have multiple flushes less you know like input whereas yeah you don't really look at it that way and i think a lot of that is due to the just the the like real estate's a premium here i think it is there it's the same token but we just look at it differently perhaps you know yeah yeah it's sort of bleeding and you know let's go for it yeah we are if you've looked at other industries throughout the world yeah um the amer american mushroom industry it kind of it kind of is like the american style we want fast we want lots we want bigger stronger faster as soon as we can possibly have it and that applies to our mushrooms because if you look let's be honest if you go to japan and look at their shiitakes compared to 99 of shiitake growers in the united states they'll laugh they'll laugh because because ours are well i mean when you look at the two any american shiitake grower can look at a picture of an american shiitake and look at a picture of a japanese time and the japanese shiitake looks a hundred times better you know what i mean but if you put our if you put our yields up against theirs or the time frame or anything that you have these uh like these set parameters like we want yield we want time we want all of this stuff we'll blow them away what yeah we want it right now and we'll just we're going to destroy a lot of people in those aspects yeah granted they're not going to look as good but hey you know we're not getting paid on looks all the time you know what i mean so we'll we'll we've sacrificed um some stuff like the quality in the united states the quality of the mushrooms yeah um or the looks maybe not quality but the looks of the mushroom for higher yield for quicker turnaround time for i want lots of mushrooms right now yeah so i think that's a the an american in the industry thing over so yeah so we have high supplementation for things and you know like that strain that you guys grow of oysters yeah you know the first flush is monstrous yeah and it's ultra fast that's very very that that signifies yeah that's american yeah that's american that's bigger stronger faster yeah you're right yeah you know so that that uh well that's one first some of the art quality or the artisanal nature of this stuff for the you know the viability and the money and it's yeah it's a it's a swift double-edged sword because yeah like the quality of the shiitakes you know in the far east are far superior but they are dry like 98 of them so there's a different sort of like conceptual nature and reconstitution and edibility there is yeah that's true their their culture is way more or from my understanding the culture is way more mushroom friendly yeah whereas ours we have to twist people's arm to eat mushrooms you know what i mean they're like vegan crab cakes no it's just lions man cook it and eat it and but you know what if we're comparing the industries there a lot of the labor in the far far east um in a lot of industries the labor is

1:00:42 cheaper so whenever we're talking about you know we're already paying for air conditioning and heat and the facility and everything else that's involved and our labor our labor is really high so if we can sacrifice time if we can get the blocks to grow faster if we can get better yields so we we as a culture i guess have chosen to grow shittier looking mushrooms but we get killer yields yeah and we we can run really really fast you know what i mean so it's all the strong man show here it really is yeah it's yeah that was a news flash to me that you know europe has adopted this sort of uh different version of things and i think that's where like yeah you know welter stands out in regards to his connection to the american side that i'm sure 90 of it is just like he enjoys the drama and like poking fun at it yeah being a dick but but at the same time he's getting his kicks he's also definitely absorbing like the different facets that we're exploiting you know and projecting on these sort of uh social media platforms yeah and i'm sure you'd be sure to take stuff away from him too so it's oh yeah very interesting exchange that you know that network has has maintained its uh notoriety and you know it's i feel like a weird part of being in it because it's it's interesting like i don't know any of the farms that are really active on there anymore i'm like man who are these people not only do i just not have time to like look at my phone most days i just like i i get on there and i'm like who is asking this question and why yeah but yeah never wanted to be a dick about it i'm just like what yeah me either yeah no um yeah it's it's changed over time you know what i mean i see that there is like the newer here i'm gonna i'm gonna sound like an old the old crusty man but it's dead that the the mentality the mentality of people now coming into it um i think it's a little bit different i think it's a little bit different yeah and not necessarily bad but um i don't know i don't know maybe i'm maybe i've just been around i'm getting crusty and old and no but it's like it's hard to have perspective dude that's like half of the reason is starting this podcast is like to rebuild my perspective keep a thumb on the pulse and just conversation and just rationalize like still being in this you know and yeah and start it for me but at the same time i was like damn i'm benefiting from this in a in a way in which well absolutely yeah it just it makes you aware that whoever you've been running with you know the whole time in this industry they're still there like cranking away and we still have the same level of vulnerabilities and finally made it through pandemic which is pretty epic you know to say for like an industry and i'm sure any industry can say that but we all have the same exact story of like losing everything and then gaining it back pretty quick only some farms just faltered to like the non-returnable state you know yeah yep so we lucked the out but yeah we did i don't know what that says for like the future of cmgn or any of these social media networks how many members are on cmg now um i think there's like 120 members but i mean of those it's like it's probably 50 or so that are active you know what i mean yeah and then there's people that are 150 000 on the mushroom growing one so it's this yeah very odd comparison of like two different demographics yeah and i mean the whole yeah the whole cmgn thing when when joey started it you know it was it was not made for um growing mushrooms it was made as a network of people that are attempting to be commercial you know what i'm saying yeah so there is definite like the mushroom groups out there there's a wealth of knowledge but what i've said a million times is that of of that knowledge that's on the regular mushroom groups yeah you know there's so much horrible information given by anybody behind a computer that's like no that's wrong or no that's right or this is what you should do that you can't even weed through what's right and what's wrong because people are just talking so with a certain amount of and granted our our uh limitations or whatever are to get in yeah to be able to get in to be to be vetted the people that are in the cmgn have a little bit more well knowledge background can think critically you know what i mean as opposed to um the mush the regular mushroom groups

1:05:43 that you don't even know what's right and what's wrong because there's so many people giving you information and you know some of these people that are giving you information are growing two pounds every 10 weeks and you're like what not that that person that person might be the best grower in the world literally some people that don't grow very much they know it can be really good yeah but but then there's 80 other people that are giving information that don't know what they're talking about they want to sound smarter than they are yeah and you're just like oh my gosh yeah no it's amazing man to see like kelsey who manages our substrate uh sort of crew and and sales and stuff she'll dip on it from time to time and i'll like see your comment and it's faded over time i'm like yeah you're sick of it too yeah yeah it's aggravating man because you do you try to offer a perspective and like you know especially the the wealth of people uh number wise they don't give a so it'd be really interesting to like take the you know like screenshot entire conversations from cmgn and just post them on the mushroom growing network you know yeah yeah i don't know i don't i don't know i don't know i don't want to do that i don't know man i'd be scared people would be like he said what jr said what that's true there's some pretty in there that's very true i've like stayed away from so much of it but yeah you guys get ready that one post josh made of uh of the like nearby naturals lady was a riot oh my god which i don't even remember that one like the lady there's there's a table and she was like complaining about getting this kit and uh oh i don't know why she's under the table she's like peeling all that so you said like i have a youtube channel you have the podcast and you're putting yourself out there in the public and you get you get destroyed by people man you get absolutely destroyed from some 15 year old behind a computer at his house and he's like tr said this and it's completely wrong because paul stamet's book says this and i'm like you don't even know what you're talking about you read this and you're writing it verbatim out of a book yeah and oh my god yeah so you have to have a you know there's a little bit of having a uh uh calloused skin going on there because you get every everybody has something to say everybody has something to say yeah um it just makes it tough and it's also the stamis thing is just interesting it's it's fascinating i know i've told the story maybe once on this podcast but you know it blew my mind when um christopher and i decided to take our entire crew at the time which is probably 12 13 people to go see yeah maybe more um to go see that uh whatever the the louis schwartz and uh fantastic fun driver yeah we were like you know most of these people don't really understand the world we're coming from and this will be very interesting to stick them into this realm and see what happens and none of them expected what what they saw which was obviously the show yeah that was with like a few minutes like oh man look some actual like cultivators in there oh that's over back to the psychedelic land but the most interesting perspective was that it was a we went on a tuesday night and it was during a straight out blizzard and it was packed to the gills and it was sold out for i don't know how many weeks in a row so it moved to the point that like that mushroom growing sort of social media side is exploding because of the excitement for it so everybody in the background doesn't mean it's going to like grow the industry as a whole but it's definitely going to grow the interest which you know bulks up everybody who's in the cmgn world you know yeah yeah helps helps everybody yeah the more interest there is and that and like we said earlier i've seen the change yeah over time you know if i could enter the market now knowing what i know it'd be so much easier so much easier because it's because there's more interest in mushrooms just more interesting mushrooms across the board yeah it's far less difficult to sell the things you know and it's it's yeah to watch the farms that get so big that they just go direct to distributorship or you know yeah like you know retail whole food stuff and they forget everything that's in their path that they sort of left behind and they don't realize all the small mushroom farms like scrambling to pick up their you know like spent you know uh restaurant accounts whatever yeah yeah and there's violent businesses within that so it's it's really crazy to have that perspective we have wait yeah way more now than what there was yeah you know like i had said earlier that thinking that you have to be big whereas you know i've been proven wrong proven straight up wrong because there's multiple businesses that are their

1:10:43 business model is farmers markets and restaurants and it's big enough now to where people are being successful doing it yeah yeah it's very true man yeah they they are and and it's exciting to watch like when we started when we came up to gardner and just we're like you know we're just gonna do the block thing i guess even though we had all the plans to build all the fruit rooms we we we did not expect any of these block customers to stick around and they just kept ordering and we're like what the yep you really didn't see that coming you know and it just proves that it was the right time right place right model and pivot to push into that world so it's yeah it's very exciting to see but it's also uh yeah see the whole block thing you look at the the worldwide industry and buying like a garrick is compost buying blocks is way more common outside of the united states the united states is the one that people were still attempting to do it and it hadn't split into multiple you know the sub industries whereas europe lots of people buy blocks in europe lots of people buy compost in europe and you have the substrate companies you have the growers you have the substrate companies you have the spawn yep and it's all split up and i am a firm believer that you are way better at doing something when you do a few things now i see and one thing that i do disagree with that i see in a lot of the small growers is they try to grow 10 different strains or 10 different varieties yeah and they're trying to grow pink and gold and and all these varieties and uh you can never get good at something if you don't do something you can't do everything and the longer you're in this the more you realize that uh you you make what you do smaller and you get better and better at that and you take on one one thing or two things and you're better at them than most people um because you know the the ten different varieties you can't grow 10 different varieties to the to their best um and you can't be your best as a grower or a person doing that if you're splitting yourself between all of these things so then back to the substrate spawn and all this stuff in the other countries that i i do i see it going more that direction here it's swiftly happening like in you know you and i have had this conversation when it comes down to like you know uh it's the hardest thing to want to propel the industry forward and have the same network and support system and brand space but the reality kicks in when you've been over a couple times financially and you realize what a hard hit it is yeah and that's why i think you and i prevent that from happening to one another as best we can but at the same time it's it's interesting that we've all sort of like coalesced a little less heavy than the lambert blocks boxes that just say you know like a you know disclaimer of 300 words that basically say yourself um yeah quite there but it's the next step is really like making farms aware that like look we put all of this money effort infrastructure and everything in here to meet you halfway pay for the thing yeah and then you get payment after you put all in the effort the fruit of this yeah you know it really is meeting in the middle and i think that is something that has to be established and understood instead of like just you know harped on is like you guys you give me terms i'm like you are nobody you are not getting turkeys nobody knows who you are you know yeah and they might people might be we're going on a rant here yeah i'll keep it go i'll keep it i'll keep it going okay okay so you know you start off and people that are listening to this should listen to what we're saying because you start off and it's all sunshine and rainbows and unicorns jumping around and everything is great and you know you you you have this for for us like someone places an order for blocks and they say you know i want 50 pink and 75 gold and you're like sweet yeah sweet sweet i'm gonna sell them all these pinks they're really easy and then when reality hits your this person who wants these blocks and they're like well now i can't sell all of them so what do they do they call and say i don't want them i can't sell them and i'm like well what do you want me to do do you want me to sell the blocks that you had me do for you this is not how this works so you do s stupid stupid stupid business things when you start off yeah and usually they can either listen to you and me or people that have more experience or hopefully there's a mentor in their life that can can teach them this yeah

1:15:44 before it happens but usually at least for me is someone stiffs you initially and and then you're like oh that sucked and you do it again because you think well that's just a fluke but it's sort of you can make good decisions and prevent you can prevent a lot of being stiff now you are going to get stiffed you are going to get screwed over its business yeah but if you there yeah it happens you're going to piss people off i'm going to piss people off and people are going to piss us off so and that's just how it goes but if you can keep all of those things to a minimum you know a lot of that can be circumnavigated by making good decisions and one of the good decisions like you were just saying is hey you either pay me upfront or i'm not doing blocks period i'm not i'm not in the business you know hugs not drugs but hugs don't pay the bills you know my election my electric hugs you know when i go to my electric company and and i say hey um this guy he couldn't sell these pink pink oyster mushrooms that he wanted me to make um could i just pay you can i pay this electric bill in pink oyster blocks no they don't give a they don't give a about mushrooms they just want their money yeah and it's so i don't know why that there's this difference in i i don't need them anymore well you change yeah there's this like draw to the i won't name names here because i respected him but i have this like real like laughability when it comes to the alternative commerce cats who are like dude we can trade everything bro we can trade light for hearts and fresh mushrooms for electricity and like okay you know it doesn't work that way man you know and the rest of the world doesn't give a about your sentiment so you really your job is to keep people employed or keep the bills paid you know and like you with it you're in the game and it's and it's hard and man but you set yourself a lot of it and over time like you were saying um you learned how being hard stu hard stood on things like um you know you referenced lambert spawn you know it is a if we send spawn if we send spawn it doesn't matter and they're straight up i mean straight to the point you know that this is not we don't cover it if we ship at ups if something happens why because ups has a bunch of gorillas throwing around boxes so they already know that right yeah so and but they already made the spawn they already had their you know all of these people they've employed it's when something ships it's not on them yeah and so it's not on it's not on us you know what i'm saying yeah totally and that's the thing that i've gotten a little lenient about like in in you know recent years i guess or recent months i guess maybe but it's it's really like new customers just making them abundantly aware that like where's my palette if i know you know like what do you mean call the company like and it's not to be a dick it's just like what do you think i don't own the shipping company like that is the one thing i cannot control and like we're trying to create alternative products and options and forward integrated you know sort of systems to be able to give you a little bit more onus and control but at the same time yeah there's always the cars you know it's always the outlet yep but you know you look at the alternative and you reference europe and like look at cnc exotics they plan out six to 12 months if not longer in advance with their customers they don't around with anything like we around with at all yeah you say you want blocks give us 12 months of production pay us we'll send it to you they don't give a and they plan years out in advance whereas we all plan like a couple months out in advance so it's kind of enlightening and exciting to know that like the alternative is out there and the specialization sector that makes it a little more like flying you know might be a boring sort of alternative but you know we have the perspective that like wilder has that you know this is kind of what europe has become this like fragmented version of uh specialization which that's sustainable in terms of a financial model especially by sussing out the people who are just gonna it up anyways yeah yep and that's definitely worth it and this totally doesn't talk trash on customers at all it's quite literally just no like don't get into this if you're unaware what the responsibility is you know and my thing is you know if people are listening to this that are getting into the business because they're obviously listening to listen to uh more experienced people in the industry the thing my whole thing is if i can help them

1:20:44 not get screwed over or learn from my all of the meat-headed things i've done over time and one of them is not or is being too lenient in how you go about you know money collections and i've set myself up in the past for complete failure and when you get screwed over my my landlord the guy who bankrolled my whole operation here he's very he and you know how i've spoken over the years i'm very direct to the point yada but he he's he's he's very much like that and the first time i got screwed over it was for like 5 500 bucks and i'm i'm i'm complaining yeah to him he's a he is a business owner he's been in business for like 40 years and he's like he's like what'd you expect he's like what'd you expect that's called the dummy tax you just you're having to pay the dummy tax because you made a stupid decision why would you offer them credit and you know so it goes back to hopefully these people listening um it's it's cool to be nice and all of this stuff and i try to have a decent relationship with customers i'm not talking smack about customers but some of them some of them are going to screw you over others will screw you over but it's not intentional some very few people will intentionally screw you over but you still have to watch you still have to watch out for both because you still have to pay the bill you still have to pay the electric bill yeah you and i have seen it both man and it kills me now and this is where you know you and i have gone back and forth on this concept of like a blacklist because it doesn't feel good to want to put these things together but it it sucks and it really does like hurt at the end of the day and i lose sleep over it when somebody reaches out and say hey man i sold you know blocks to these people they feel weird reaching out like they feel like they're a competitor of some sort and i'm like i don't dude you make money how you make money that's great and they're like have you ever dealt with this customer and i say yeah you shouldn't have and they say well i'm and i say yeah you're you know yeah you're yeah it sucks man so but at the same time you you know heavy lies the crown for the person who wants to say so and so do not sell to them on a public platform you know it's it's almost not within our nature you know yeah it's hard that's that's the thing you know i go back and forth like we had talked about before on you know do you make a list public um of people that you should be that have screwed over multiple people that have have a track record of making poor decisions and i'll go back to saying that most people don't intentionally screw people over i i don't know if anyone has ever got blocks from me and said you know what i have no intention of ever paying for those blocks initially yeah you know whereas uh you still get screwed either way but those people you know is there any like redemption will they end up paying will they end up making better decisions down the road and would that making that person public would that jeopardize that in the future maybe i'm just being too nice and naive or whatever but it's self-preservation like at some level too and this is this goes back to business in general and like saying yeah you're a dummy five fifty five hundred bucks you move on yeah submitted small claims court no you don't you wipe your ass with it and you use it right off taxes yeah yeah because it comes from me over it's just saying that's what you do you know yeah and and people think like they say people that are not in business they'll use the small claims court thing you're like small news flash small claims court doesn't miraculously get you money it doesn't get you money it's it says the same thing it says the same thing that the invoice does it says that joe schmoe owes tr davis money it's a judgment the j the judge said yep he owes tr money and it says the same thing to end boys yeah it doesn't mean you're going to get it they're not going to send the police to go get it that still means that that person has to give you money that's the same thing the invoice says yeah it doesn't it doesn't mean they're going to pay you small claims get the out of here with that small clamshell you know what i'm saying you give me get me fired up now man that's good whenever i hear people talk about small claims i'm like you know what you don't know what the is going on in the business world because that doesn't mean anything it just means that you have to yeah you have to you have to lose more sleep about it you have to leave work and go to court and listen to the judgment that already says the same thing that the invoice says is that they

1:25:44 owe you money it doesn't mean you're not gonna walk out of there with a check and be like oh look at this we're going to get staked tonight no you've lost more sleep you've lost more sleep over this that's all it says that's all it means it's true man i mean that's where you just hold the fear right it's like it's that's your that's the tact you either get prepayments or you hold the fear and it's like you gotta have the enforcer or just the personality and like it's we hired this uh uh this great girl that um she kind of floats now so she goes from spawn to substrate to packing to retail whatever uh and we hired her particularly because you know past this many employees you end up with people who call out and you're like we need somebody who has a little bit of everything but she started uh next door at this uh whoopie pie factory that she'll remember nameless and uh everybody can figure it out but i i you know kelsey and i always joke that we have like a straight up war with them that they don't even know about and no they straight up hate us but they're terrified of us because there's about 20 motorcycles in here and people with badass bodies and big-ass beards riding in and out all day long on sketchy ass choppers they're terrified they're terrified so they won't do except kind of just like covet our mail until we ask for it you know so yeah you have to maintain some level of like this integrity you know of your your front because otherwise you will get screwed and it's awesome to hear that you haven't had that but man we've we've had a couple slip by where people clearly had zero intentions on paying and uh really oh yeah yeah yeah one was a dude down in jersey jersey by the way kidding casey uh two river you're a fantastic human but uh no yeah it's it's this weird thing where you pick areas and and you don't trust them for me it's like minnesota and jersey i've had two people screw me over from minnesota two people that's minnesota dude i don't trust anybody anybody for listening to this podcast from minnesota don't call up Cap N Stem or earth angel mushrooms for blocks all right i'm kidding i'm completely kidding oh totally no but we had we had this dude from jersey who like we ended up doing a little research on to try and figure out who he was and like oh man he had this great story you know and like uh he was posting online that we had already found and i called him to finally get a hold of him and say hey look i you know we need to like collect on this stuff you have never paid for these blocks and it was a full pallet or two and it was just one of those things it was like a one-off sale that we really thought nothing about and just didn't happen to get paid beforehand and i finally get ahold of the guy and he is i you not faking a stroke like he fakes having had a stroke and i was like you're joking me right he's like he was like moving really slow he was doing it effortlessly like but almost too perfect you know like nobody would let this man on the phone let's put it that way and yeah he's like you know explaining how he's in a car accident and you know had these tremors and as soon as he can he will pay us and so on and so forth and i was like okay and i just hung up but you know like days later he's like posting photos he didn't know he knew who he was online a totally different name and he's like posting photos and blocks you know asking people you know if they need this that and the other and i was like with a stroke huh all right let's deliver those psychopaths but they're the ones you're just right you know what are you gonna do yeah yeah you don't you get that's another uh good point is you get to a point that you've done this long enough to where you don't even lose sleep now because you know that you're batting average for getting screwed over per year or per every quarter you no it's not bad and you're like well i lost three thousand dollars i'm not gonna lose a wink of sleep because i know that i'm not gonna take him to small claims court because it's a waste of time two if i fret over this non-stop the only person who's going to be up is me yeah so you just don't even you don't and you try to make better decisions to how you can not do that in the future totally but yeah no it's true it's hard it's hard man that's the strange part about business that you and i have been in it long enough and i have some conversations with people who are you know they're just green and they're they're getting into it but they haven't had that level of vulnerability uh tested yet and you're like god damn yeah you realize you're a pretty good person when you just put up with it and like move on but sometimes it's really what hurts me is like the other people who like reach out and they don't want to reach out and they just are like i'm aren't i and i'm like yep it really sucks somebody hey you should tell them hey maybe you should take it to small small claims court maybe that'll help maybe that's not that'd be the worst videos ever

1:30:45 oh my goodness dude well what's what's next for uh for you i mean you we can talk as little or as much as you want about this but like you know you had this sort of venture and move into these brazilian blocks and working with this farm yeah in south america and like what transcended because of covid was nobody's you know prediction necessarily but uh you you at one time were like balls to the wall trying to compete with chinese logs or is your head yeah and i think if if well they're still screwed up down there in brazil yeah so um the back story i guess is uh the guy down there he's a american who owns a handful of businesses in brazil one of them happened to be a substrate company well the industry i could talk for a long time about brazil but the industry down there is very i mean we would look at it as almost archaic compared to north america or uh europe even asia you know like they're growing it's like you step back to the 1970s yeah um and so i went down there to help them out with shiitakes um and you know in doing the console there and going down there multiple times i'm like the cost of things labor you know you can compete with even chinese blocks um and i'm like we should sell these things and so yeah and then you know covet took place and it's it's all kind of on hold right now yeah but um yeah so that's where that's at that's good to know it's still kind of in line but yeah i mean they still they're one of the biggest uh substrate suppliers i think probably the biggest i mean it's like uh i don't know 20 000 a week thirty thousand a week or something like that of shiitake blocks just it's huge and did they have no intention of sort of breaching into the american market until you had touched base with them no not at all that's no they didn't realize didn't realize what was taking place you know the whole for people listening to the podcast they don't know like all of the large shiitake farms in the country are growing on the chinese blocks yeah there's no domestic shiitake production in terms of bulk production yeah not really there's a couple farms far west top hat they're still doing their own but as far those that's it if you get any bigger than those guys any bigger monterey south mill all phillips all of the monsters in the country are growing on chinese blocks yeah it's uh it's crazy so they're able to ship in blocks um for cheaper and regardless what anybody says i've i've literally seen tens of thousands of them fruiting oh yeah at the same time they're legit they're legitimate blocks yeah so you i i you know i've said to people before you can talk trash about the way another country does business you can talk trash about how they do things yadda yadda yadda but at the end of the day when you look at the kaihi blocks yeah they are legit legit awesome shiitake blocks so you're competing on price and you're competing on quality so it's a multi-faceted thing and they're so huge kai he's doing like millions of blocks so it it makes it hard to compete but i you know on another note i think that you know our our culture the american culture we do well historically when our feet are put to the fire and to compete and i think that they're we need to compete i think that we need to compete we need to innovate which is what we do as a culture we have google you know we have all of these things we yeah i mean when you talk about innovation we are innovators yeah you know and i think um why is it that the mushroom industry has decided to roll over you know these why are we not doing it this is that we do things good yeah why are we not coming up with it and um i don't know yeah mechanistic it's really interesting and it's got so much to do with labor but so much to do with this automation you know specifically for the different manufacturers of those logs over there it's like it has very

1:35:47 few people to produce those logs it's amazing yeah and they're making so many of them and uh and the real issue that i see with them is just exactly what we deal with on the daily when you ship out blocks you know a reefer goes down or something freezes instead of refrigerates or something ebbs and flows thaws whatever and the blocks are still purchased so there's still a loss to some degree and then there's the like snake shady side of pa you know mobster land trying to sling things that will not fruit to the wrong people so there i've seen both sides of it too they're legitimate products but mishandled they're going to be sold as those great products that don't do at the same time yeah i've seen it burn farms too so no matter how cheap they are it's still a vulnerability and a risk and i think a lot of people come back to you know people like us and you for that because they're they're like this man it doesn't actually matter you know like i just grow less shiitakes you know yeah and yeah there's there's more of other varieties coming over but shiitakes are definitely the ones yeah they hit the big ones by a storm you know yep yep and the west coast and everywhere else yeah you know it's it's crazy um one thing that i do know is that the one thing that you and i have Cap N Stem earth angel mushrooms um the customers that we deal with there's a relationship and like a genuine sincere like i want them to do good yeah and and so do you guys when you're buying from a company like that there is a loss of it's more of a business transaction um so when when you get into that realm and it's just a bit simply a business transaction you lose you lose something there yeah um that i think needs to be there and with that with the sincerity that that you guys have or that i have or that most of the um mushroom industry here has yeah they don't have loyalty to a company these these companies buying chinese blocks or buying blocks from somewhere else they don't have loyalty it's strictly a business transaction on their end also yeah i think that there is still hope for um our industry being able to recapture that because of these companies don't have loyalty to kaihi they have loyalty to that price the bottom dollar so if we can one if we can innovate our way to be able to compete in in a capitalistic fashion we can apples to apples we can get if not match their price match close to it then we can regain all of that straight up you know ingenuity coming up with things but we got to change is what i'm saying yeah as an industry the industry we have to look at we are we are in a world market you know what i mean as much as as much as you know you have you have two sides of the political spectrum one is um america america america one one is um and i won't say anything about my political affiliation or any of that but what i what you do see is some people want everything made here and they would rather pay more but in in reality businesses when it goes back to knowing care the electricity company doesn't care how they get their money they just want their money so in turn you end up buying kaihi blocks yeah because you know that you have to pay the electric bill yeah and when we come to the realization that one we are in a world market whether we want to believe it or not people things are going all over the world so we have to be not only good enough to recapture the american market we have to prove that we are good enough to capture everything that that's what we're known for is we make the american mushroom industry the industry we do it the best and we need everybody to think you know to use their brain think outside of the box how can we do this better stronger faster and compete with these people and not just roll over right yeah no it's totally that's where i'm at yeah it's a good stance to be at and to maintain even through like 2020 you know like it's this is definitely like a restructuring year for a lot of us to be able to look at these like little loophole sort of things that we've been missing or little tiny versions of the

1:40:49 industry they're exploding whether it be retail kits or whatever but yeah reality comes down to it is like we're we're pushing two different uh sort of demographics it is that like consumer cool kitschy thing and then it is the supply chain yeah that uh feeds everything on a larger cisco size scale you know yeah and that's something that is predominantly misunderstood you know in terms of who's doing what in the industry and who's supplying what but you can look at any other form of a food distribution system and there's always small growers and big growers and you even look at like ranchers you know like look anywhere in the the country where ranching is still a thing it's more of a hobby you know because you cannot legitimately do it it's a lifestyle choice and it's as probably as as desperate as it can get you know but it's something that is so old world nobody's gonna let go of it so it would suck to like push an industry to that degree you know and i don't think it would get there based on the vulnerability of the product and it's strange that it got there with something like you know animals but uh but you know it has the the potential to really like slip down that slope of uh yeah being something that doesn't exist anymore um on a local scale so i feel like if yeah there is that motivation to like change to innovate and to really like just create that network that continues to grow and and force one another to sort of not jeopardize what they're doing for the sake of just money you know yeah to look at yeah it's like an improvement into the overall health of humanity you know i mean we're growing up yeah product you know we're not hurting the yeah people at the end of the day that's that's that's the truth so yeah yeah i mean that's yeah it's valuable i think to look at the things that way and i don't think a lot of small farms do but you know don't get there there's just so many now coming up it's it's unfucking real man it is crazy it's crazy the last year i mean it is just off the hook how many people are interested in mushrooms now it's crazy yeah it's mildly embarrassing like because i feel like i'm like losing uh like touch with it a little bit and i'm like oh god man this is like i i tell a story continuously but when like a 10 year old girl shows up to the farm with her dad and and just wants to buy spawn to inoculate her substrate and says that verbatim you're like what you know like i don't what the so there's this like the verbiage is sinking in and the concepts are sinking in and it's it's part of an educational platform on these like uh you know more specialized schools like montessori schools or whatever to like educate kids in a different manner and it's i never thought much about it coming from like just public school but yeah but it's kind of cool you know to watch these kids actually say like this is a model of an industry that i could actually participate in and not feel too bad about because i think that's definitely what this is like the millennial generation down a notch is like they're just they look at all the bad sides stuff and they're like i'm not gonna i don't want to participate in that so i won't you know instead of changing it yeah trying to adapt to it or motivate some sort of uh integral move or advancement so that's yeah it's a tough balance man but kovit has definitely been this like wake up call for i think a lot of us to just keep doing what we're doing which is yeah great you know no complacency heck yeah yeah seeing no complacency are you moving pretty hard i mean this is great to watch these like mitake uh explosions like on your your instagram against like pink styrofoam walls in the background i'm like great collar choice but is that your is that your push now you really want to go towards the mitake scene yeah i mean as far as fresh mushrooms whenever i stopped fruiting mushrooms about a year ago ago the goal was when i i had no intention of stopping forever but it was to come back and do mayataki and then expand maitaki and then do kings yeah so i feel like those mushrooms um you know a lot of people you probably see this as well a lot of people don't want to grow mayataki one it's difficult yeah two it takes up way more room in your colonization so as far as the small scale industry a lot of guys will never grow those so that what does that say say to me is well there is uh a hole in the market you know what i mean so there can if if if you're good at something that other people are not good at a lot of people are not good at growing mayataki but in general if you're good at something that other people aren't usually you can make i can pay the electric bill with

1:45:50 that you know what i mean yeah and um so i just and the challenge thing you know so the whole goal was to get back into it um and expand mayataki and not that i have them it's one of you know i've done this long enough that i know that you never have full control you only have you only have a little bit of control and i just feel like i'm gaining just a smidgen of control and sort of understanding what's going on right now right now so i started almost a year ago and it was eight months or something like that that i started literally just doing 10 mayataki blocks a week and you know letting them go through the progression and then i upped it to about 40 yeah and and then from there you know i feel like i have more more control than i did sort of understanding how the who what when where why and yeah so then i'm going to continue to expand um fruiting mayataki and then at some point down the road i would like to do kings okay um yeah yeah my attackers many people get in and get out fast it's the same vulnerability of success right for kings and might yeah so you do them great and then you're like something happened yeah something happened yeah you know i was growing i was growing 200 pounds of kings a week and i think i told you this like i could get away with murder yeah and i was i could spray them with water and they wouldn't they wouldn't blotch and they were just lure in me they're like come tr we have cookies come on over they're letting me do stupid stuff like spraying them with a hose whereas for people listening that have never grown kings things will straight up just demoralize you they will eviscerate you because of but they're highly susceptible to blotch yeah well i got away with all of this stuff that i shouldn't have been able to get away with but you know whether the stars were aligned or whatever and i was growing 200 pounds a week um week after week after week after week just having success and then literally like someone flipped a light switch yeah they started blotching out well you know i was growing they're one of the ones that you don't like to grow them with other mushrooms you go to the sport load and all that stuff and i i was fruiting him with other mushrooms but i had fruited him with other mushrooms the whole time you know what i mean sure but that doesn't mean you can get away with it forever just means you can get away with it till they decide that they are not going to let you get away with it anymore and they decided to uh cut you not let you get away with it yeah they cut me off and you know through this whole time you know you learn over time that you know be good at something not a whole bunch of things you can't be good at a whole bunch of things you can only be good at a finite amount of things pick them and do them well so my thing is i want to do my attacking well i want to do then king's will and when you commit more time to one thing you can get better at it you're learning the intricacies of this you're learning the art behind them um so when i got out of all of the fresh the fresh mushrooms when i was fruiting them all together when i got back into it i'm like i'm going to have committed rooms to they will be my taking rooms i'm only going to fruit mayataki i'm going to gear everything towards mayataki and that gives you a better chance of success so hopefully hopefully that seclusion is what they're after which is a really up thing that so many farms get away with fruiting the gamut for as long as they do but inherently as you and i know like they never get away with it forever and it always comes back to never get away from you sir the spawn producer or whatever oh yeah yep yep and yep and this is so i've gotten away with everybody out there yeah you're gonna blame me or we talk to one another so yeah you try to screw you try to screw me or if you try to talk smack on the phone about eric to me because you think you're gaining loyalty points i'm just gonna be like yeah i'm just gonna tell him um yeah but yeah it's it's challenging too and i see it all the time and it is a frustrating thing especially when you know one farm is having like rose comb issues or another's having blotch issues and they're like everybody's got to be seeing this right this is your block's fault and i'm like you're the first one i've heard of so far you know or so far this season or whatever it's like you know the vulnerability of the farm's fruiting setup is so much more important than they they really like put into perspective just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's about to not you over it will yeah you know yeah preventative measures and cleaning and protocols are everything because you just you gotta know that it's not just all coming from the precursor you know

1:50:50 yeah yeah yep and i will i and you guys are doing spawn i do a little bit of spawn spawn is the hardest in that because everybody wants to blame the spawn yeah everybody wants to blame the spawn and it's so hard and not that but not that not that i don't i haven't sent out spawn that was bad or that you haven't sent out smart because that's an amicel sylvan lambert they send out spawn that's bad because it's that hard it's that hard and and so yeah it does happen but not near as much as we get blamed for you know you know what i mean you know what i'm saying no absolutely man spawn has been one of those things we tried to stay away from forever and we just couldn't do it anymore nobody was gonna do it and you know i got so many like hats off to you sort of comments and i was like yeah i wish it was a hats off moment but it's more just like uh you know nobody else is gonna do it what the you know let's do it yeah let's do it my wife's almost dead let's just do it that sounds more yeah i'm older than it is but in reality it's like you that's how you think of it you know if you if you're in this business you're in it and you cannot get out of it in that manner you're just it's always on your mind you know no yeah it's an unreal sort of circumstance but i think that the number of uh farmers that have sort of seen like the ups and downs of the industry since like 08 you know and like had that first encounter with psychedelics on cow patties or whatever the it is yeah it's invasive it's it's terrifyingly like like i mentioned like it's a bite it's just like all of a sudden you're bit by it and you're and you're you're stuck you're stuck it's like cancer you can't exactly you can't beat it no you can't it just swallows you what's the great uh you know uh quote from bukowski you know find what you love and let it kill you yeah that's that's 100 true oh man this has been fun what do you want to leave people with because you know you you've got this youtube channel and you've got this uh sort of presence and people know who you are you're the man of the master mix you're the man of shitakes that occasionally rape you and uh call your life but yeah what do you got for advice i don't know i guess the only advice would be um one don't think you ever have it under control and because you don't you only you only have a smidgen of control and the most advanced growers you will come in contact with will tell you the same thing um you start off and you think you have it under control and you don't you don't don't listen to anyone who says they have it under control never that should be the the thing if you go online and you hear someone speaking on how they have it so much under control with no humility and that would have been t that would have been tr davis in 2015 who had it all under control and this is how you do it and that's the dumbest thing i've ever heard in my life don't listen to that person and i'm saying this about my my previous self because once you get beat up so much then you realize you know over time is that you don't have it under control you know have some humility and know that um there are people that know more than you try to learn from them um and look for the people who will admit that they've been beat up over time those are the people who know more than the guys who think they know everything because i was one of them until i just you know until you have your ass handed to you a handful of times and then your your whole demeanor changes you can usually see their eyes we look pretty tired you got that thousand yard stare you know what i mean you leave work like you just came out of combat yeah but uh that's just the cs um yeah and you don't be afraid to ask for help that's uh that's a big thing there's not a lot of information out there there's more than we start when we started but don't be afraid to ask you know hey i don't know what this is doing i don't know what this is i don't know how to do this um you'll get a lot further ahead that i guess that's what i have to leave people with yeah i think it's important stuff man and i appreciate it you know because i think that's yeah man that's a valid uh the thing people are scared of they were like in this i had it when i was a kid right i remember like taking the subway like into boston and like being nervous like at the certain age about like pulling out a book that i was reading because i was assuming that everybody was going to like side on me and be like yeah kid i remember when i was reading that book and the loser like it's this weird thing that's inside of you that's like don't express what you don't know don't show the world what you don't know but the reality is you

1:55:52 have to get past that and really just you do ask the question you know yeah and because if you don't you're going to just get brutalized you're going to get brutalized i've been there yeah i've been there i've been brutalized i'm a different i am not the same person as that that version on cmg and in 2015 that would hoot and holler and all all kinds of you know i just thought i had it in the green i'll still never forget that be like this dude's bat what the is he talking about but then again man we started making spawn tyler looked at me like cross-eyed because i i was like what the is the matter with me i don't know why these like slants are not happening and he's like well you're tightening the lid all the way down on the slant before it grows and i was like oh i'm i just i'd like just deprived it of life and oxygen yeah yeah it's so you just you do dumb stuff you know and you just have to like double back and like man that's that's all right i'll get past it eventually yeah do something yeah just hopefully learn from what you want from your mistakes man i appreciate the out of it and uh we should do it again yeah thank you thanks for having yeah man for sure and thanks for having me on dude absolutely we'll talk soon all right later bye well that wraps up season one of the mico wizards podcast if y'all want more yell at us now we got more don't worry there's episodes being edited so hold your horses thanks so much for listening to the show this week you can follow or subscribe to micah wizards wherever you go for your podcasts write to us at p.o box 897 in gardner-maine if you want to follow us head on over to instagram and find us at michael wizards podcast this episode was produced and sponsored by main Cap N Stem mushroom company with music composed by the infamous damien hicks head on over to captainstem.com for all of your certified organic spawn and substrate needs and until next time later on