Lisa Pixley on Commercial Mushroom Growing | MycoWizards S1E6

0:10 from main Cap N Stem this is the michael wizards podcast i'm eric lohmann and welcome to our sixth installment of this mycological madness i say that too much of an old school radio show the feedback everybody's been giving us has been wildly encouraging so i gotta say thank you so much to all of our amazing listeners out there today we take a bit of a dip into the world of cap and stems humble beginnings um with my conversation with lisa pixley lisa first and foremost is a beautifully kind and sincere human who i would fight very hard to keep on my side through this wildlife luckily i haven't had to you know she's always been there because lisa's she's like the home base for artists in portland maine and she's married to my business partner christopher campbell which definitely ups points for him makes him that much cooler for being married to such a cool woman listening back while putting this episode together i was uh you know i was really amazed at how much we actually talked about mushrooms well lisa is a forager for the love of it she's a professional printmaker with a masterly creative mind and our conversations are always full of departures from the norm so it goes to show interests and obsessions into mycology or in general very deep seated never present so sit back and enjoy the path this conversation took fancy fancy all right i think we're recording now yes cool yeah there it goes you know the nice part about doing this in person too is uh uh it sounds way better yeah it sounds so good so much better yeah i just wanna start singing a song i've had conversations with people who are in there you can tell they're like in somewhere where they don't want to be and they're like trying to ignore things and sounds and whatever either it's their office like during the day for me you know yeah and the hardest ones are like the california recordings because it's seven year but it's five there they're just settling down and i'm like i'm ready to go to bed yeah right right yeah but i did have an interesting conversation speaking of that uh look most people who are like in this mushroom world they did have some relation to like psychedelic growing and the crazy part is is you negate that um basic microscopy spore syringe side when you get into the uh gourmet world and i had an interview that i did with andrew carl reed and uh he's down in tennessee mossy creek mushrooms work basically he's doing breeding programs and it's very normal for cubensis growers to do breeding it's because it's the only way to transport spores that are psychedelic legally because they don't have anything illegal in them so these spores are suspended in water and then you inject that into a sterile media and then it grows yeah but what happens is you have so many different phenotypes growing as you have different sort of um preferences for like the the um available sexual options that each mushroom is potentially a completely different phenotype so then the way to get a culture is to then take one of those mushrooms clone it that's one phenotype yeah so that's pretty like inherent within the psychedelic growing world and he's trying to bring it back and basically like put it into the uh put it into the realm of um gourmet growers so that the sustainability for like the strains and the ideas and the concepts going forward are not like plants we're not like protecting seeds we're actually like creating biodiversity instead of preserving biodiversity yeah if that makes any sense so it makes total sense right um i was sort of fascinated by that with uh just the fruits and vegetables yeah we eat that uh the strawberries that you're buying in the grocery store were selected most likely for shelf life that's flavor um shelf life and you know how pretty it is to buy and uh once you start growing these heirloom varieties you're like oh my god this ugly ugly strawberry is freaking delicious yeah yeah and so that's really important it must be really important with mushrooms gotta be yeah yeah yeah and of course you can select for the ones that have the longest shelf life but yeah you can also select for ones that have that just look cool yeah look cool or that crazy flavor or yeah yeah yeah andrew was talking about like a violet oyster they found like a real real strong violet and it went it disappeared there's like part of the problem when you're doing these breeding programs is you're you're doing so many different options all at once yeah that you kind of forget that like some are going on so you ignore them and you know if you hire people who don't

5:11 really know what they're doing they're just going to harvest them and go about their day right so so he's like i saw it and i said harvest that and put it aside and it got sold to chef and turned into a meal before i ever got to cloning i used to went somewhere yeah so now it's his white whale or his purple whale this is purple speaking of suicide yeah yeah yeah oh my god those books are so good though like what what's the name of that that one's uh uh how to identify and grow silverside and mushrooms yeah yeah it's a fascinating good book looks like a it's an old one it's got some good illustrations in it yeah the comic in the back's pretty good there's like all these hilarious i think it's in the way back somewhere oh yeah gary oh that's hilarious growing smaller um yeah yeah uh i was gonna say something oh it reminds me of the fabulous furry free brothers did you ever no famous first what is this it was something i probably shouldn't have seen at a really young age but it was in my uncle's porn yeah like slightly pornographic comics from it i our chrome might have had something to do with no way okay i had to google it though that i don't know but it's sort of part of that sort of yep yep semi stoned phallic penises i thought they were hilarious oh yeah yeah probably totally screwed me up for life anyway that's what that it looks like i would assume that stuff was korea but i think for most art people it doesn't you know like uh it's the funny part about people who like are you just talking about in the art world you're just used to being around naked people constantly true drama all the time yeah you're like investigating some dude scrotum from like 30 yards away for too long you realize that everything is just like what you make it out to be you know it doesn't matter yeah no it's not true my name is i'm home i'm helping homeschool my nephew's they're of course uh 3 000 miles away yeah and uh and twice a week we meet on zoom and i'm their art teacher which is really fun um but yeah i was trying to describe they're really curious about art school like what was art school like what is it like to do art all day in school they're eight okay yeah they're eight they're twins and uh i'm like well you draw naked people and they're like why what i'm like yeah no like what what is that like i'm like you walk into the classroom and there's all kinds of different naked people like sometimes they're big fat naked people sometimes they're skinny you know sometimes it's an old lady and and they're like they're naked yeah you gotta learn anatomy but we don't have to do that we're gonna keep our clothes on yeah it's hilarious i blew their little minds so that's pretty fantastic i now know they both want to go to art school they're like sweet that's where the naked people are yeah yeah you get to draw naked people they don't realize that it's not as fun as it sounds it's really torturous yeah it's really torturous yeah oh my god yeah we had a couple like good models back at montserrat like this dude dan who i'm sure he still does it he would hold these dramatic proses and like start crying like halfway in between him just trying to hold them you know but they're so good that you're like dedication oh it was pure dedication i swear this is the only thing he will ever do and he's so good at it you know and it's like dramatic like taking of christ poses you're like holy wow so he made it exciting and he would physically like disobey the art professor and like go move a light and be like it's better over here who the is teaching this class that's great oh it's so good we had one woman like that but for us it was mostly like whoever wanted i don't know we were like you know how you can sell blood yeah sell your hair we mostly had people who were like just trying to get their next fix oh yeah for sure yeah yeah people just nodding off yeah exactly like all i gotta do is stay here and this is the best gig ever it's a quick 25 bucks to sit there naked yeah exactly but we definitely had some good models um so have you had them draw from nature at all yet uh a little bit it's hard when you're uh when you're uh you know through a computer around a table so but yeah a little bit they're really excited about the idea of a horizon line yeah any picture becomes a landscape if you just draw a line across it yeah and depending on where you put that line we'll tell the viewer where you're standing yeah you put it way way way up high yeah and you're really low to the ground and if you put it really low to the ground that means you're really high up and they were like

10:11 mine's blown so every time they sit down and draw that's what they do they figure out where they are the horizon line i put their eyes on them that stuff sticks with you forever yeah i remember my uncle playing the scribble game with me before i could even draw anything you know and that was fantastic he just made a scribble and said draw something out of it and then i did the same thing for him yeah and it was like endless joy yeah it was mostly like i don't know why it was just me and him my aunt was busy or my mom was busy or whatever and it'd be like pretty late at night and uh i don't know where everybody was why the it was just him and i have no idea but i remember like specific times they lived in this on the hill in worcester so you know sweet weird old neighborhood and uh we would just play the scribble game yeah he's the first person that had like a it was like a greenhouse atlear and it was this like just full of like art everything you know and he never really did much in it it was mostly in the in the den or the study that he would do stuff but just like seeing that space i was like i always need a space yeah that's that's the first time i was like yes right a little sacral it sounds like a chapel yeah yeah totally yeah just a slightly sacred space yeah it doesn't accumulate junk yeah it's got to be organized yeah that's like i think most people treat uh you know the mushroom thing that way like if you have a lab it has a very particular purpose and it needs to be sterile and b it just has to function correctly right so that you're not like going over your you know crossing like air paths with uh pathogens and so on and so forth you've got to be very deliberate about your movements right this is very kinesthetic and taoist sort of right i don't know adaptation to how you're doing everything yeah yeah yeah uh do you know the word null k-n k-n-o-l-l i feel like i should knowles mechanical they do a lot of our refrigeration i think that's on family name no i don't what's the word it's when you it's when you lay your things out so um uh you know the scene with the surgeon and in the movie and they have like all the scalpels lined up and everything is yeah to hand that's called a knoll it's called to know your things yeah to know your things yeah and it's a it's a very meditative thing i'm about to do some hard um i'm about to do some pr precise i need i can't be you know feeling around in the dark for for my things yeah um anyway yeah it's one of the like when i when i know i'm about to do something that's a little hard yeah i'll clean my area and i'll know just organize yeah yeah it's a funny thing i never even knew that had a term i just thought i was being uh this is like i gotta work on this painting and i'm gonna clean my house first so that's like a passive gnolling i gotta do laundry actually too so yeah i think that's called procrastinating oh whatever that does have a word good thing i never learned english that's funny cisco and i were just talking about that yeah the amount of people that he knows and i don't know who had this certain period in time where they didn't have to learn to read or write yet they made it in the world completely utterly alone figured it out and were most likely really successful yeah right and still to this day they can be like 50 67 years old they still know how to write a read right remember that was a big deal like when we were younger yeah yeah they have like made for tv movies about it yeah like dad has a secret it's embarrassing but it's like at the same time is it and and can you adapt to doing that later in life right that's like it's it's fascinating because when you think about your time as a human and all of the things that you pick up in the path you take if you're like an overtly creative and and gear grindery person you're gonna do it all anyways you know but uh what is it that person didn't do that and then just never had to they just kept going or they came up with other skills that uh were almost harder than reading you know if you think about it yeah yeah knowing how to navigate without signs or at least recognizing the signs as being the sign that was before the turn yeah and actually knowing what it said you know yeah you're you have to be largely visual yeah and you have to force that version of your brain in order to like right cope right whereas we take it for granted i mean i still kind of almost got lost getting up here i almost asked you if you knew where the for richmond oh this is like the dead end if you if you hit the toll you just went too far yeah yeah yeah now i always remember the gosling

15:12 insurance oh yeah yeah yeah that'll keep everybody uh on track yeah yeah is it even gosling insurance anymore i guess it is yeah i've got a great big sign well i made it here so yes you found it yeah yeah yeah well it's amazing how you have landmarks and you even they can change or the building is not like in portland too you go down there now and you're like yeah i don't know where i am i know where i am i'm definitely on india street but this doesn't look like india street anymore or whatever it is yeah yeah it's almost like you traveled into the future or something yeah waiting for like the hover car to drive by like where the is it it's very true yeah the city is changing so fast it is i remember going into like all the bookstores there for a while i was like you know coming from the art letterpress poetry world so you seek those books out in all the different bookstores that were around town and then it was mushrooms and then you start like looking for every little mushroom section which were never there you know and then you found like the one weird psychedelic book or whatever it was you know yeah but it's uh it's a strange town yeah yeah that's a good one it's still weird but slowly slowly changing so yeah yeah but that's the way to call this i guess can't be the same forever i remember moving up there my my mom was like why would you what the are you doing moving to portland there's nothing there so he was burnt out when i was playing in banzai and it can't be any better now and i was like oh yeah it seems pretty good i know people wax poetic about those glory days now yeah yeah yeah my first apartment was 150 bucks and i had a view of the water what's funny is like i didn't really take it at all seriously i might have told you this story but i didn't you know you don't really like anticipate like your uh even your parents pass coming back to you in some fashion and it gets weird when it does but when i got that job delivering for uh native maine oh yeah i remember that this dude worked there named tom dolphin and uh he knew my mom what yeah like crazy he just like immediately he was like your mom and i found a dude who is the bouncer at the free street pub no it wasn't on free street and he killed himself and we found him yeah and i was like well you can't be making that up so i asked her and she was like holy she was like yeah i remember tom oh i was like what in the so like they were just like it was i don't think i ever talked to tom much after that it was too weird it was like bridging a gap in time yeah that i shouldn't have been in i was like oh no no no no oh that's really funny portland has that ghosty side to it yeah a lot's happened there yeah yeah no it's definitely true was it the free street taverna it was called the free street pub and i think it was like where trader joe's is oddly enough oh weird like way down there because my mom was like yeah i used to ride my my yama harley down there and play with the band and you know i'd rip around portland all day yeah play music at night and then we'd be off and we'd do the whole music circuit up being down to canada and back down because she was in a a styx cover band called the renegade that's cool yes nothing is cool no no no it's funny oh yeah oh she was in this band and so like you hear these stories and you live in a place where somebody once lived and then you you're like acquainted with people from their past and you're like this got so out of hand so fast that's crazy i did a i did a art series on um john wilkes booth and lincoln and i just like went deep into um a bunch of these photographs uh of the inauguration and you know other random things and i found out that john wilkes booth had stayed at the um it was a hotel all those buildings were hotels at one point in time but he had stayed in the hotel that's on the corner of oak street and free street yeah kind of across the street from the diagonal from the free street to verna and it was just like huh holy places have ghosts places have ghosts yeah yeah and uh yeah and people moved around and it's all i don't know it's all sort of just there i mean it's it's not here as much as it is in europe yeah i mean like you go to europe and you walk down the street in florence and you're like you kind of expect it there yeah right but here you don't no yeah so when it shows up it's utterly strange right yeah right of course of course somebody that was important yeah stayed in this room or yeah walk down this hallway or walk down the street yeah i always get to get sort of the chills oh yeah want to find that kind of stuff i was talking to uh neil from columbia mushroom company and he lives out in oregon uh yeah right on the

20:15 columbia river and he's not far from like the only place i ever really went in oregon and spent time was mount hood so he's not far from there and the hotel in front of mount hood is where they filmed the exterior shots of the shining totally been to that hotel it's pretty cool it is so beautiful yeah it's outside it's crazy yeah oh i have a funny story about that very hotel but go ahead keep talking no no i was just gonna say that the weird part is you go in there and it's not it's not where they film the shining like the interior shots at all but they had to get rid of room 237 in order to stop people from asking for the room so just the idea that something might have been there right that isn't there anymore right indicates that you can make up the ghosts yeah so like you it's it's all just in your head and it's all this incepted sort of stuff yeah well this is accepted that's a good word for it yeah great movie too yeah yeah the christopher and i went um we actually spent a lot of time out there and uh yeah um we actually i wanted to go there because of the shining oh yeah our favorite book and uh and we're driving up and we see this um uh uh we we know it was there was snow on the ground we see that there was this couple that had um uh broken down on this on the side of the road on one of these turn offs and so we pulled over and and asked them if they needed any help and of course it was weird yeah our cell phone because we had one and they didn't yeah because it was back when it was kind of rare to have cell phones you guys are just immediately those techie people you knew things i guess so um yeah i guess we were they didn't have one we did i'm trying to think of what year was anyways long enough ago that it wouldn't have been like it wasn't weird to loan someone our cell phone um and uh because it was our phone it called the portland maine uh aaa yeah and so anyway not that interesting of a story except that it was like it's not that interesting right now it's a killer story it's like a mitch hepburn joke you know where he like gets lost halfway through the joke and he's like there's something else there there was something out there anyway it took us a long time to figure out that they were in the wrong portland not that interesting story but they owned a club that was a lot like space gallery and this couple because we stopped they invited us to uh to go out to this what turns out to be a somewhat famous club on an island in the middle of the river what the yeah now we never ended up coming but that area is so big and blown out in my mind that every time that i've been there it's just too big like everything is bigger the trees the rivers the animals the bigger yeah the plants even like plants that i grow yeah they're bigger there yeah i didn't know that that was what that plant was supposed to look like yeah it's nuts yeah yeah their mushrooms are bigger yeah oh yeah man yeah the only time i've ever found my takis was uh was out there it was out there and it was uh i don't know if it was just a fluke thing but we went for a walk uh i think mount rainier oh yeah they were just everywhere i could smell it in the air so my brother goes back there every year now and he fixes my uh the might talking about tells you sorry matsutake mushrooms oh matzo okay i was gonna say you can't smell those from miles away you can like sniff your way to them yeah yeah yeah no it's amazing there's something inherently specific about smells and mushrooms and the way that they grow because you the ones you can smell are really hard to find like matsutakes don't just like rear their head up and they're like look at me yeah except when they do yeah and then you're like are those and then you're like no mistaking it yeah mistake that is them and now i'm gonna smell like i say hats and gym socks all the way home and be glad for it yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah matstakis are strange mushroom names are strange i keep like uh uh you know ethan's always listening to that uh last podcast on the left and he was listening to um i forget who like hitler's crazy psychotic human was that like did most of the torture and and madness in mayhem i don't know some name but it's like this three-part episode and um once again i'm losing the same thing you just lost i'm like where the is the story going there's something so specific it was something specific to names mushroom names yeah so mushrooms are so cool oh so this guy's name was coined after trials and so on and so forth because he was the evil human that he was he was called angel of death that was his that was his nickname really trying to think

25:15 of the guy's name it doesn't matter he's a german dude right but you wonder after you look through like um you look through one of those audubon society guides you're like who the named all these mushrooms like common names yeah it's all you know unless it has an origin like matsutake or maitake that means something in a different language angel of death where the like i get it yeah but like was it named after him when was that when was that published who decided to do that you know well i think they're colloquial names and then and it was just sort of the battle of the which colloquial name god got published first you know yeah maybe it was because there's just so many being discovered and organized at once right i mean you don't forget i mean if you're teaching your kids which ones not to eat right angel of death is pretty it's the one don't eat that one which one the one that looks like an angel why because it's death it'll kill you yeah exactly so there are some funny ones that you know they have like nice names and then yeah and then uh yeah and then you read about all the ways in which people bleed out of your orifices i'm like why didn't you just oh there's satan's bully but that's true all the deadly ones should be like truly deadly names yeah yeah yeah at least every common name you will your kidneys yeah no kidney i called you when i ate the amanita caesar right out here oh yeah that's right yeah yeah yeah yeah i bought that at a farmer's market and we were like just building out the mushroom farm there and i was like i don't know i don't even remember what you said i was all hot and sweaty and i was like i might die i should probably text lisa he did i'm like do you know the person you got it from and you're gonna eat it i said no maybe oh at the farmer's market that's legit right oh yeah no no because that was the first question we all have which a lot of mushroom farms from the early 2000s had which were like why is nobody doing this at the mushroom farm you know yeah but people still try to assert themselves now especially in that world where like you have to get my license or sell these mushrooms you know at this place it's all stupid you know but regulations regulations yeah yeah people are still really scared of mushrooms because they're scary for good reason they're scary things yeah um you're the one that told me about the the i guess it's a chart they have in the er right where it's like depending upon maybe i think it was you that told me this maybe making it up um but you were saying like you know there's different levels of like things that will uh they'll say okay if you ate this yeah chances are this will happen but the the last one it just said just make comfortable oh no that wasn't me it wasn't you no okay that's definitely something to hold on to now like it was my own might as well own it yeah i'm gonna blame it all yeah yeah but it's it was that's very practical right very practical yeah like it's very clinical because you're just like okay just make comfortable there's no way you're coming out of that is that the amanitas yeah yeah yeah i think it was amanita and then it was like specifically the um angel of death and then i feel like there's another couple ones on there you know but that one's definitely like the one that you're done yeah yeah yeah yeah we can find a vaccine for corona but we can't reverse angela death yeah i mean what is it the amanita neurotoxin yeah i mean they named the toxin after the mushroom yeah i mean i wonder about those incredibly intense um it was it was it was michael pollan who was who wrote that you know uh someone esoteric piece about you know uh uh you know are are we cultivating the mushrooms or the mushrooms cultivating us yeah and he even you know went so far as to make believe that uh this is the how to change your mind book that you wrote or something smaller you know i didn't didn't read the book it was the there was an article and there was a podcast that i listened to oh okay yeah yeah that he was talking about uh he fell head over heels for mushrooms he fell head over heel for mushrooms and uh and psilocybins in particular yeah the fact that what um the way that it makes you feel yeah um uh you just have to wonder how long we've been seeking out psilocybin mushrooms and having these his spiritual mind opening um uh uh quests with these mushrooms and you have to wonder which came first yeah the um whatever that is that makes us have that happy feeling or did that come first did we come first or did it something that yeah they were like humans the monkeys really like this yeah oh and so they made it better so that we would propagate them more yeah you know that's like such a fascinating a fascinating idea and so you have to wonder about the really poisonous ones you know and that uh um

30:17 why are they there yeah and is it possible that the faster you die the quicker you rot on the ground where you ate the mushrooms which makes food for the mushrooms like is there something there connection yeah that would make us lower on the food chain than the mushrooms if that's correct we would be yeah it would be stalking us you know the food chain is an interesting concept because it is esoteric right there's nothing normal about the food chain right now right it's purely conjecture conjecture based on a real like analysis but it still seems very like mythologically you know based the food chain yeah because if you think about it it's just like that if you start thinking about mushrooms seeking out humans to eat and kill right right and it is esoteric as you know our mushrooms the mass murderers you know right right well yeah is there some level of intention yeah on some level that we can't really understand yeah um that's actually just very practical yeah evolutionary you know yeah you know the venus flight trap i know in a way yeah you can eat some of us but you're not sure which ones that's true come on and try me it's spacey stuff occasionally uh the car guys come over from ejp and uh the car collection tends to like that's in this building tends to it's just the weirdest people who like how they how they get in there and it's like today was two dudes who uh they do the roll up doors for all of ejp you know which is this massive pipe work company plastic pipework company and uh so they get a tour of the cars and i get a call from kelsey and i'm sitting here working on something and she's like hey adam's hearing is a question for you which just means two people are here i don't want to talk to you please give them a quick tour so i was like okay so i go down there and they're like they just want to know what this is and i felt very speedy today so i gave them like the hyper active like every word was rolling off of my tongue and latin derivative craziness and they were just like staring at me like bug-eyed and then i like would pop in like alien or like dog poop or like some other like weird word that like tied in a normal thing and then they would crack a smile but it makes you realize like how esoteric the the mushroom world is to people that are just like what in the yeah i gave him a rishi block and i was like just let it go on your counter and he's like and then do what i'm not eating that thing and i was just like don't eat it then yeah yeah i'm not gonna tell you that it tastes like and it's like wood but you know actually reishi's delicious the the tip right the tip it's probably the most complex umami i have ever tasted really yeah you have to get it when it's just white yeah um snip it off and then it's rubbery you don't want to chew it but if you throw it in um in a stock it's it's it's better than bone broth it's uh just an incredibly the whatever concentration of glutamate that it has is pretty amazing oh yeah it's one of my favorites i feel like i've tried it raw once or twice i mean like i regret that yeah no not pleasant but the uh yeah no it's it's um just purely as a bullying yeah it's like nature's bullying that's so wild shave it off it's it's i haven't i haven't tried it from your blocks yet i mostly just harvest it because it's easy to find in the woods yeah mostly just harvest it in the spring after it's put that those fresh ones out with that fresh white grind and just the rind they grow fast in the wild it always actually amazes me how fast those conical you know hard shelled mushrooms grow yeah outside versus inside that's like a four month mushroom you know is it really yeah it takes a while yeah especially if you wanted to like form that kidney bean shape you know right right yeah yeah yeah it's a peculiar one it is definitely it's one of those ones i want to draw but when i draw it it's uh um it's like it looks just looks like uh it's you know seen from an alien yeah yeah i still like the black trumpet that you did the print of i don't remember uh if that was part of anything other than just doing a black trumpet print i've been meaning to do i found it and ate it oh yeah yeah where uh if i found it and ate it i did a picture of it and then uh i was thinking about you know audubon like doing a quick description of what i did with it what it tasted like that'd be sweet yeah underneath it but i never got around to it well you should do it and then we'll just put it out there it's a Cap N Stem-related thing i've been learning engraving and so i think it might be a sweet set of engravings that's cool yeah yeah mushrooms are really interesting forms to draw yeah yeah as you know so they're just alien yeah they're they're funny shapes of water but they're uh it's wild that something can form that way that fast and that continuously yeah yeah and have so many different meanings you know yeah um yeah i was reading that uh

35:20 it's this one we've been adding this mythological side to um oh it's a whole book on rishi holy that book is crazy town it's insane it's a good one feel free to borrow it but it's like listening it's reishi mushroom herb of spiritual potency and medical wonder by terry willard phd yeah that cat went over and basically started researching you know as far back as he could for mostly like chinese herbs and medicine and then got head over heels in the rishi because it kept going down these different paths of conversation with you know old masters of things and uh they speak a lot about like ancient dallas and such and there but some of the stories are on point and super interesting mythologically based they're they're so cool like there's a story in there about how all these ancient taoists went buck wild trying to find out what mushroom this was after they heard tales of a massacre in which ravens came in with something in their beaks and then they landed on the dead people and dropped this like you know antlerish formation on top of the faces of the dead slain people and they immediately rose up and they were it's in the beginning of that book and uh good luck finding it brad oh i love that story yeah beautiful there's so much in there and upon people seeing this and hearing about the documentation of it these certain taoists were like finding these different mushrooms and trying to figure out what they were and that goes further into it like red means certain things in in chinese like literally like by definition and uh it's connected to soul and like the search for many different weird things in there but uh but it sort of like ties in the mythological stuff in the evolution of people's perceptions of this like elixir search you know and it's interesting that stuff goes really far back and it's not always connected to the psychedelic side right it's not always a 120 minute ad for paul stamets sometimes it's way more this is actually secretly a 120 minute ad for paul stamos it is yeah god bless you paul you know the people who actually come in here and see like all the photoshop that like mark and mike used to do like my face superimposed on paul i can't stop laughing they're like why the didn't we think of that yeah there's none in here there will never be i didn't ask for that yeah yeah these are beautiful so yeah rishi mushrooms are probably the coolest yeah i mean it's lacquer it has a lacquer it's shiny and that weird yeah color red um and in the spring they're just so beautiful with that bright bright white rind yep um yeah yeah mushrooms are cool um there's a student artist that came up here from montserrat a little while back and he's he doesn't belong a monster he's not like an art school kid he's like you know as one of those people who like the concept of art school makes so much sense and it's the people you're after and it's the crowd you're after because your exposure before you go into like a college setting sure and uh he called because everybody i guess montserrat knows what i do now and they they're like he's the only dude go ask him yeah so he calls me up and uh he's talking and i do feel like i was art school was the right spot for me i don't feel like i should have been at mit or anything right and this kid belongs to mit and we're talking about building things out of mushroom mycelium and you know rishi's one of the ones that they use that like michael works to make the vegan mushroom fancy leathers and which is a cool concept so he's trying to understand those things understand how to make formations using you know the sort of blocks and stuff and crushing them and filling them so i asked him you know what he had done so far one of the first conversations i had with him over the phone he said well i i basically just cloned some wild mushrooms and had been growing them out and i've been making blocks and these different shapes with them and i was like what you know and i brought up the rishi because i was like what kind of mushroom did you clone he was like the white one that kills everybody i was like you're making furniture out of the the destroyer angel angel of death where the you want to call it and he was like yeah why and i was like you don't see what's cool about that like at all you know you're not like oh look what i'm doing for me i like thought about it for like days i was like this is so gnarly right right i mean it like begs questions with no answers and it begs this like interesting like conversation between microphobic people and yeah how they perceive of it if they sit down on a chair made of the death cap you're like what you know like i'm surprised i'm surprised that he's able to get such a solid substrate from so is that a mushroom that can grow that's it's basically an isn't it an earth-based mushroom yeah yeah

40:21 he said what's very interesting about that and he was just sort of describing it to me is it is the most vigorous culture more vigorous than any commercial oyster or anything that like we or other people have given him you know he's like it's nuts and i was like huh that makes sense i feel like when i'm out foraging it's the one i always find like just another angel right but who the is gonna clone that yeah this dude didn't even i was like whoa yeah no it's true right right i don't know that's the that's the can't pick it kick it uh thing yeah yeah sort of this useless mushroom but uh and i think he knew that but when you put it in an art setting and this is where i say he doesn't believe in art school because he's too smart to like think of it like the sociological implications of that are far out yeah yeah yeah i wonder i wonder how russell is would do or any of those other ones yeah seem to be so prolific no matter what the weather yeah they're just always there yeah i never expected that it makes me want to play around with that mycelium now in some level yeah and just sort of understand it and uh well there's there's just so much we don't know right yeah that's that's that that kind of what's so exciting it's this frontier right and yeah eventually uh you know we'll get far enough into that frontier to be like okay now the stuff to discover is just sort of like these micro things but but with mushrooms it doesn't seem like that it seems like it's just such a massive massive genus is that the right word genus kingdom it's a kingdom yeah yeah it's a massive kingdom bigger than we are that functions uh the functions on a level that that we we haven't really figured out yet yeah um and we can eat them you know we're cannibalistic in some nature with them because we're just so aligned with them on like a timeline i was explaining that to the roll-up door guys they were like it's very easy for me to like talk too fast being not from maine so i slowed down for a minute and i said something like long lines of uh and i don't remember what spurred it they asked something and i was like well basically co2 right i was like you know we produce co2 these things produce co2 plants don't i was like so that immediately puts us on something that produces something but needs something else right you know and that exchange is a very interesting concept and if you look at what this thing produces yeah co2 wise and you think that 20 000 parts per million is a lot go breathe on a co2 meter i was like you produced that much co2 right you know so we have this funny concept with like you know how bad co2 is for the world and this that and the other and gas emissions yeah just breathe the new co2 meter oh yeah i never even thought of that it's fascinating yeah you know so we're not that far off just metabolically how we how we alter substances for our own benefit yeah is inherent with that plants can't do that yeah it's kind of cool yeah yeah they're they're strange creatures yeah um the thing that blew my mind was that they're i mean this is something that's so obvious to you now but that they're sexually reproducing yeah and so they're still like within their own you know within their own species they're they're constantly evolving at a rapid rapid pace and so you know i'm out foraging and i find um you know one random chanterelle that is slightly whiter or slightly peachier than the rest of the ones that were there or i found um the black chanterelles yes in uh it was actually in a in a very large patch of black trumpets and i found this black trumpet that was just wrong and i was it actually kind of made me nervous because it was so different than the black trumpets and then it dawned on me that it wasn't like trump and it was a black chanterelle how did this how did this get here doing what it is doing what it's doing you know i don't know i think that's that's that's sort of a fascinating thing about it and then you guys making you're cultivating these mushrooms and even the rishi you don't look anything like the ones i'm finding out in the woods or your lion's mane they don't look anything like the ones i'm finding out in the woods and so now that we're interfering with this you know what are we going to discover yeah um well i think that's part of like what i was saying right we started talking was the andrew collier factor you're taking these um these baseline technologies for being covert about your psychedelic growing and you're negating them when you get into the gourmets because all of a sudden you you're comfortable carrying cultures around and trading cultures and shipping things

45:23 but you forget that that covert nature is very mushroom-like and you can just take something as simple as spore syringes and make an immense amount of you know options right right and nobody's really doing that it takes so much time and effort yeah but it's also like half of the experimentation that's fun that is completely out of your control it's like acid etching you know like in our you don't know what the you're gonna get right now it's not a deliberate etching right right it's not screen printing can you reverse engineer those should you get something you know an oyster that tastes like strawberries like um should you stumble accidentally stumble on some gene you know connection that that you unlocked can you reverse engineer back to that or is it like that purple i think it's like the purple oyster yeah you know it's interesting i would have to ask him because he's been far more invested in that side of the world and i've been way more you know like how do i get everybody to grow mushrooms which is ridiculous to think that there's two completely different directions to go just on that level but uh but yeah i think that that that you can kind of go backwards you can do dna sequencing and you can compare these different things with mass spectrometers and such but what is it telling you you know i think the best part about this stuff is the fact that you can contain it and you can control it and you can preserve it to a point but it's not like plants that are thriving for the cloning factor they don't actually want that you know at all and that's because it's the opposite thing we always want to preserve the perfect tomato you know like the monster maine tomatoes you know that concept is is irrelevant to like mushrooms in the way that they grow right right they don't care about that they care about creating diversity right they don't care about preserving a single phenotype which is the billion spores the one cap thing right right right yeah yeah it's an interesting thing that you guys are fooling around with yeah i mean it is it's even interesting that you call yourselves a farm we're not yeah yeah what are we yeah um our mushroom wizards yeah because farm isn't you know when i talk about when i talk about you know um what this thing is to other people like oh yeah and by the way there's this mushroom farm they picture like idyllic rolling hills you know yeah little little nose going and picking the mushrooms even though that that's not that far off um yeah it's uh yeah it's it's not manufacturing yeah it's not um it's just an it's this grand experiment right and it's existential as by product of fruit yeah um yeah you know i've like since being in art school have been fascinated with uh and i talk about it constantly to people who actually listen or care to at all but uh the concept of negative capability right you know and that concept is very simple and it's just like to be in the midst of things and not try to control it but just to see what's there and like let things sort of happen without being bothered by them and i think that's partially what this is is like there's the variables run rampant so like the minute you try to squash one thing out if you're a very controlling person you have no business here right you're just never gonna make it right because it's not a observe and react and report and adjust and move around so it fits my personality of like constant gear tinker move just see you know right it's that observation thing that a lot of people don't they're like terrified of things that are very unstable this is the inevitably unstable you know right yeah i know it's true and it's it's a living organism yeah and it's a crop but it's also in a warehouse yeah uh yeah it's funny just being tuned in to christopher um uh he's constantly checking the temperature he's constantly you know going to be going to bed at night and checking to see what the temperature is going to drop down to or what it's going to increase to because you you've created a a nursery it's a nursery in a sense that you know this that this one is that this box is that's growing these mushrooms um yeah we were talking about it the other night and i was like there is no most plants have an ideal uh habitat yeah right um but mushrooms don't yeah like there isn't like a land of mushrooms there are places that are more ideal like the pacific northwest but but it's really that most places in the world have brief not seasons but like tiny windows every couple of years yeah

50:23 that one species of mushrooms finds one or thirty species of mushrooms find the ideal so maybe this year it's it's uh chanterelles and black trumpets and you know whatever else happens to like you wonder if it's like that weather pre um you wonder if it's uh implicit um to reaction or if it's 100 percent predictive like you i wonder if mushrooms inherently know those things futuristically you know can they see the future sort of thing right sounds ridiculous but yeah can you tell by your integration into the the earth and the the mind works of you know geography what's going to happen next year and do you react accordingly is it sort of predestined in that manner to say this year's chanterelle season series of black drama season you know yeah it's a funny thought to think about but the fact of the matter is it's in it's everywhere right and why wouldn't it have that knowledge right right so it's it's bizarre maybe that's why we interact with it the way we do yeah yeah not to get too far out about it because i'm really not that intrigued by like too far out conversations but yeah but it seems like that they know something we don't you know um or maybe they're just winging it too i don't know like hope it rains yeah it's been raining a long time so yeah so there's there's um yeah there's just just how long have we been mushroom farming no i mean like uh not a species yeah yeah how long when did we first cultivate mushrooms well you know it's like how far back can you go because like ancient egypt definitely cultivated mushrooms yeah look at hieroglyphs baskets of mushrooms like shapes of mushrooms coming out of them so what do you think they did just like scooped up the earth in a place that they found it or you think they understood this is the like bizarre part right like uh you can go pretty far back with this stuff the bhagavad-gita right it's like this ancient um text it's awesome could you say it again the bhagavad-gita say one more time say it again it's a good one that's a good word it's i mean it's a phenomenal text but you read it and it's allegedly like this ancient script you know and when it was written the primary people on the planet were very um so they're ramblers you know they're completely transient nomads yeah that concept of like settlement hadn't it's not realistic yet you know so this stuff is basically describing things that are essentially like nuclear war nuclear fallout you read about the stuff read this you know and this is an actual ancient you know sort of text and it's one of the earliest forms of like written from verbalization totally documented and put out there so if if we want to believe in the ancient alien factor it sort of is implicit that we think about them like us how many times have we misplaced forgotten about and then rediscovered recipes for things like napalm or like whatever we do that we have very small minds humans have evolved in this bizarre way that they don't have the cognitive capacity to sort of like keep history with them whatsoever i can't remember what i ate i have terrible short-term memory you know blame it on weed blame it on whatever but still i have the long-term powder pork chowder corn chow corn cheddar i was like pork chowder that sounds really good it does but you read these things like the bhagavad-gita and you wonder how long have we been doing this like how long have we forgotten and repeated and forgotten and repeated and we know the term like history repeats itself but have we gotten to that point in which we can say people definitely knew how to do this a long time ago so we have to go back to those ancient artifacts yeah and think about like uh the term soma came from not aldex huxley it came from the bhagavad-gita oh wow so like there was this idea of what soma was you know and all these ancient rig veda texts and those sanskrit deviations of something that had this like power and this power plant is so inherent in our like our whatever human going that far back who the knows modern times you know yeah there's you know we can go back as far as we can remember research and like document and how we believe something to be real photographic evidence or written evidence or whatever but uh it's i think it's been a long time and i don't think we've made it very far

55:23 you watch like videos from the 50s you sent me that killer video of like people mushroom farming in pennsylvania in the 50s it was like a path it was like a paths video yeah yeah yeah yeah they're doing the same thing we're doing yeah we have not changed that much in terms of our interaction with these mushrooms which makes me really think that inherently it's very connective oriented yeah right we know that that's food we know that it's something that we can't push too far and uh and at the end of the day we've forgotten about it time and time again right right because if you think back to like not even ancient china but like early yeah early uh whatever you call like bce now the reason that we strike logs for like shitake growing is because we forgot what spores were we didn't know what the spores were we just knew that if you smacked logs of shiitakes on them near other logs it didn't have anything on them yeah spores landed on the logs germinated and colonized the logs oh it was magic yeah utter magic yeah so people ask why why did you smack the out of locks cause you didn't know what the spores were right we definitely knew before you know so you wonder like how far that goes back right right or how specific the knowledge was yeah was it the ritual of smacking the log or did they actually understand that they were releasing something right right right yeah yeah that goes back to the mushroom thing too like when i think about chanterelles centrals always grow on the edge of the path yeah right and uh they lure you in they lure you into the woods and inevitably you don't you walk back to the path and you find some more yeah i said you know in in an interesting way um it feels as though they're flirting with you on some level another they want to be found and then i start thinking about my basket right this open weave thing i'm walking with my basket that i've walked from my spots that i've harvested my chanterelles for you know the past decade and i have to wonder you know how many you know of these that are popping up now potentially were um uh me finding them in the past and if if that isn't likely then maybe it wasn't me maybe it was somebody walking that same path finding the mushrooms and so you have to wonder you know uh who made that path you know yeah um because there's definitely an interesting symbiosis going on there yeah um reading geography like you can tell by stone walls if something was pasture versus if it was for farming right i think you pointed that out a long time ago like it i don't know why i point everything to you maybe it's because you are you better own it i just make up really good well you said like when we were talking before about like a memory like you have really good long-term memory or short-term memory wonderful short-term memory and i'm polar opposite i will not remember anything of this conversation until longer yeah i can't do it and short-term memory is like an anomaly to me just like christopher recounting a whole story from 10 years ago as an anomaly to you you know yeah yeah i don't know why i don't got it you know i don't know why either i feel bad i asked kate like the same question three times today and she's like i'm not answering that one again and i was like i had this moment i felt really bad i was like yeah i'm broken i don't know what you're making for dinner i can't remember i'm so sorry but you know you're either one way or another yeah but yeah i think that's why the split and sort of how people remember things and conceptualize things is also inherent to why we lose track of these concepts like growing or you know going along or making a path and why the mushrooms are still there you know what's funny is that i can remember my mushroom spots better than i can remember going foraging yeah like i'll be walking in the woods and i'll look around and go oh i found this is where i found um you know that uh lions made in the tree that time yeah and i remember it so clearly i could taste it yeah um so but we were we were talking about that um that too that uh something that i find fascinating about foraging is uh when you're finding food your brain goes into this auto record mode yeah um because it is it is taking note when you find food it is taking note of some really crucial information yeah and uh uh even if i'm in that spot in wintertime like i remember like it's i know exactly where i am um but it is interesting like uh again this is it was something i read somewhere that

1:00:23 i've long since forgotten but i was reading that this is something that grocery stores take advantage of oh yeah for sure um they're uh um you know if you're in that if um oh you know this might that might have been michael pollan this is the michael pollan thing yeah this is the michael palm thing and then when you go into the grocery store and you're in that uh can i eat it can i not can i eat it yeah um your brain is always sort of doing this this is safe to eat yeah you know these two colors together the way this uh this this uh um this intersection of the grocery store uh you know with the oranges over there tells me that this thing that i'm purchasing here that's safe and it throws me off you know when when a grocery store rearranges the eyes oh dude it you up i get so inordinately upset about it have you ever been to a place like an island grocery store or like some like the place that happened to me was in west texas somewhere and we were hitchhiking through god knows what and uh and this is on the way back and i i think i don't remember where we landed but there was a little like store and a bunch of that was closed and just desert for miles but i went into the store and like nothing was where it should have been yeah like produce was in isles and it was like just not well thought out and it was as if all this happened by accident and it was just because it's the only thing yeah it didn't matter yeah you can look for bananas next to oreos who the carrots you know like it's small enough that doesn't upset me nearly as much as when hannaford like moves produce from the left to the right of the building you're like ah right right why yeah right and and i think it i think it taps into that right it has a um uh whether you know it or not there's a little uh uh a danger meter happening in the back your brain that's going why did this change why did this change um especially now uh during coven where going to the grocery store is probably the most dangerous thing i do in a day or home depot or in our home depot anywhere yeah and especially with the way that it's tied up with food yeah um and there and and anxiety of being in the grocery store um i don't know i don't know if it's more primal or less primal but uh i think for people like uh i mean you guys are sort of stuck you know where you're at because of the proximity to options and like you have to drive to go to a farm stand or something but you know i don't the amount of stuff you can get around here without going into store is huge you know what do you mean like how do you like you can just get chicken from you know the farm down the road or you can go to sheepskit or you can whatever you're gonna see four people right right you're not gonna see 150 people in the minute you're in there so your like proximity to populist is so much less yeah yeah yeah yeah it's so funny they're strange times definitely strange times but and the fact that it's so uh you have to do it you have to go in public to find food um it's even definitely making me want to forage more this coming summer for some reason i've gotten out of it for so long you know i think it's something you do for a long time and then you you don't get tired of it but it's like these things hurt your ears after a while they do yeah yeah you gotta get other ones that are a little more comfortable but um yeah i think uh well we've had a bunch of it's been uh a good five years of pretty dud seasons and uh and i think even so it's almost now worth going out so you're waiting and waiting and waiting and then the dude you go out and you spend three hours out in the woods and you find like a tiny little handful of uh dried out two chanterelles yeah you're like chopping them up and like carefully like cooking them to put them on one slice of toast and you're like no yes i don't know i mean it might be a global warming thing it might be but there's no rain in the summer anymore there's no rain in the summer it's a really strange thing and i'm i'm i'm hoping it's just sort of a you know just a just a sort of slow drought yeah that we've been getting but uh but yeah when i first started foraging even in in sort of not as good boom years yeah i still find a lot but i feel like yeah the past five years it hasn't really been it hasn't been the bounty that it kind of was so i know uh i don't know if it's my anxiety talking or not but i'm like this is you know our mushrooms are the mushrooms okay yeah yeah yeah are they okay are they uh

1:05:25 they're holding out waiting to um waiting for that rainy season to really pop and propagate um so so yeah i mean there were years where i was just finding um so much chicken so many chickens the chicken of the woods i associate you and christopher with bountiful fresh like wild mushrooms like you wouldn't believe because it was just always there every time i was like at a kitchen table or somewhere where you guys were pile of something piles of chanterelles yeah piles of black trumpets yeah i've been years like that in a long time and it's also i mean i started my own business so i'm like yeah i haven't been getting out into the woods as much so i'm like there's no mushrooms out there there's none it couldn't possibly be me it's the mushrooms that's true no but you know the woods are suspect too and they they like you know you you also find weird things like you were just talking about um like one of the weirdest circumstances speaking of paths and like history of spaces and why the continual like cropping of certain mushrooms in certain areas every time that i have gone in to uh what we call the hobbit lands over in hollowell somebody has picked lobster mushrooms and then discarded them along the way and they're like full on somebody grabbed them you can even see the fingerprints and that like glittery orange color you take them home yeah oh yeah yeah but like why did somebody and this has happened like three four years in a row now that i've been in the woods around that time yeah and without a doubt somebody has like picked them and then decided yeah i don't know maybe they're just trying to spread them because it is that sort of like uh parasitic uh fungus that attacks them i don't know but they're better they're like what is this weird thing that looks like a dead lobster yeah yeah because it doesn't look like a lobster and when you find them rotten they smell like dead lobster too they sound terrible yeah that sounds really terrible no i seem to get them like right at the end so yeah i don't know it's right after somebody's picked him but it's funny to like think about the path and then people were there before and the whole sort of gamut of foraging and who's doing it at the same time you think you're the the first and the last human that's been there for a long time but chances are yeah um but again i don't know i think that but i mean i've won i've gone for walks in public parks that uh you know hundreds maybe even thousands of people visited in a day and found crops of mushrooms and i'm like really of all those people nobody nobody knew what a chance forever was yeah i mean good for me how many people walked by took a selfie with this beautiful tree filled with sulfur shells and uh and uh and then and then kept walking not knowing that that that is the best shaken break ever that's true yeah yeah i remember going you know the nature as a falmouth nature preserve preserved for united there's some really good mushrooms there yeah oh yeah the only time that's happened to me though oh yeah title get lost in man that's right it's just mushroom people everybody knows it now too yeah everybody calls me like okay where'd you uh remember that time we went in the woods there and i'm like i don't remember so sorry not like i go there but yeah yeah yeah but we i remember going down you can take that path to the right that goes almost right down to the bog sort of area they totally pictured that you know where it is because i found mushrooms there absolutely off to the right you go through those woods that wrap around and always on that hill there's always something yeah and i knew it and we got there like 20 minutes too late because right as we're coming down that hill and you can see like where it gets kind of piney and weird off to the right this couple's like walking up super hippie nice beautiful picturesque you know patagonia couple for sake we're walking up with a basket chock full of chanterelles i just turned around and was like we're leaving kevin was like why and i was like look she was like what the so you get like inherently mad you're like oh that's my dinner oh it's mine yeah this competition around this there yes yeah there's a great competition between uh damon who works here at the farm and his wife because they do they just got crossbow hunting licenses and uh she's gotten like three deer and he's got like one yeah like you know they like do the whole thing venison like preservation jerky everything and uh and yeah he's like you can tell he's bumming like he's too busy yeah yeah it's hard to get into the woods sometimes yeah yeah i think uh i think this year i think we're gonna

1:10:27 need it yeah yeah i think so too we've definitely i've definitely stepped away from going into the woods but i remember when the pandemic first hit and kate came up with her kiddo and we just went to the hobbit woods and it was like the greatest thing ever like the explosiveness of this thing just died away with like the sound of the water you know and not enough people get that anymore you know we like find our ways to just calm down enough to do the next day yeah right you gotta go into the woods yeah yeah this winter i think i think we'll need to uh i don't know google winter camping i think at least yeah winter camping yeah yeah yeah well this has been fun round two for conversating yeah yeah yeah it has been has been fun um we didn't talk about how it all started no he didn't should we run through it yeah all right yeah so all i have is that initial story because i didn't know who the anybody was when we moved up here to portland and then i ran into uh reuben yeah and uh diane and they just yeah they wanted nothing to do with me because it was the letterpress thing right there get the out here little art kid go visit lisa so then i rang your your infamous esoteric doorbell yeah but that's where my short-term memory failed me yeah i don't remember what happened after that besides moving a press upstairs so how how did this happen i don't remember the first conversation i remember kathleen because she was just so cool um but i i almost remember her the next day more i remember the two of you the next day um but yeah you came up i gave you a tour was it the next day that the press went up yeah it was just coincidentally i was telling you what we were doing and i was like shooting boom forklift checking out the window okay oh that's so cool what are you doing that i'm like tomorrow at 4 30 in the morning and you're like i want to be there yeah i was like sure you are dude and you showed up yeah yeah kathleen showed up like did you seriously get so excited about moving presses at 4 30 in the morning yeah and i just i think in that moment i decided we were friends for life i'm like who does that who shows up at four o'clock in the morning to help out some weirdo moving presses in the window i can't believe kathleen did because in all honesty she's not a morning person yeah she showed up and she had um uh was it that camera she had a camera that you look like oh yeah she had well there wasn't that one i just got that but she yeah she had a bunch of she probably shot film of that i think she did yeah yeah no idea where that would have gone yeah um but yeah i remember you and kathleen i remember moving the presses i remember being really grateful for having you there because uh um because the window had like a three foot gap the window yeah and the guy the guy that i hired i'm doing air quotes i hired um nice nice guy but uh a bit cocky uh yeah a forklift and i remember him yeah yeah charlie yeah holy there's just a lot of scary movement moving you know anytime you suspend you know a couple tons of steel into the air three stories yeah something's gonna go wrong it's gonna go wrong so yeah i remember that day yeah but how did mushrooms start like how did was it me first or you first well kathleen and i read uh i like was well acquainted with the psychedelic stuff but it never not once thought about gourmet mushrooms eating just a white trash kid that yeah knew how to get high yeah yeah but it was never like a never the propensity to like push that wasn't really that there yeah and uh so her was that did you come up here i mean now come up to the to the camp no so like so her and i read an article and it was you know had all the now since sort of subsequent uh portland people out of it it was greg marley it was rick tibbetts and it was uh joe from the farm stand and rosemont and all that and they were all talking about forging and once again this is pushing the like you know you've got to have a license shelter can't be a drunk coming into a goddamn bar in the middle of the night trying to sell us trails that are going to kill us but and uh so they're pushing this in the article and simultaneously in the background i think uh craig marley's just pushing his book

1:15:27 these mushroom guys were pushing needing a license yeah yeah this is the rick tip it's factor this is like this is a dude i've talked about him too many times but yeah he was pushing it he was trying to make money at any avenue and i give him credit cause he just lied everybody and said i got all these mushroom barns down in pennsylvania and you're like yeah you do sure yeah he's just buying in and selling it which to his credit that's how mushrooms got to portland didn't get any other way you know yeah yeah so that article mentioned amanita dreams and uh mustard sean charles dreams nominee nightmares by greg marley i think i got the book it uh longfellow and then you gave me that book i gave you the book i think kathleen said something like we just grow them in our closet you know like we started like everybody else and that's that's when i i think i started talking to you about it and you had already had sort of your um interactions with foraging you know way before or i don't know when you tell me i think it was around that time that i was that i was that i was going out we were both fueled yeah i was um cornering mushroom dudes and being like you take me out with you um because it was stephen who took you out right first and then it was steven at first and then he got really connected to uh uh a community of foragers but steven really knows this stuff yeah yeah he was the one who told us he's still teaching me tons of things really yeah he's one of those guys it's an information junkie just about very specific things and then and then uh yeah then he just reads and talks and learns everything that he can yeah but there are lots of random things but mushrooms happen to be one of his things that he's been foraging since he was a little kid with his with his uncle really yeah so that goes way back yeah it goes way way back for him but uh yeah walking through the woods with that guy you're just snacking yeah there you go yeah um and uh if you can eat it he knows it um so not only that we go back i mean he's the guy we went out and he there wasn't much in the way of mushroom foraging but he just started snapping off the flowers the blooms on milkweed oh right and he came we went back to our house and he fried he made milkweed croquettes uh and bread uh breaded batter with like this mayonnaise cream sauce and it was amazing you can't replicate some tastes that you find on forged foods on forage foods yeah no i think uh and i just got to talk about this again because i think it's a really cool thing to talk about uh the flavors yeah that are not part of the 30 sanctioned flavors that are that are the u.s food industry and uh like the matsutake yeah um deliciousness that yeah that cinnamon yeah it's just it's a flavor that we don't have whenever that thing is that we don't even have words for so we have to we have to like put four words together that that like most other languages that yeah a word means much more than just the definition of the word dirty yeah yeah and uh the peachy flavors that are in chanterelles and um that apricot scent is like beyond bizarre i can't smell that smell really yeah christopher's like i can smell it from here and i just i can smell it on the counter yeah i'm like no i just smell it's like a faintly rubbery smell and i don't get the the peaches um i've tasted it i mean i can taste like that that that chanchol flavor it's got yeah it's a fruity sort of aroma yeah transfers even black trumpets have like a it's a flavor i can't describe there was one year that i found so many that i i remember yeah oh just it was incredible that i tried drying them but i don't have a dryer you had like boats with like paper towels lining them like what was probably like 10 pounds of mushrooms but for black trumpets was like enormous i think it was one i think we weighed them and i had found like 35 40 pounds it was insane and so i tried drawing them but the only way i had to dry them was in our oven one sheet at a time and so it was like four or five days of going to bed with the oven on a really low temperature and it like got into my skin and we were breathing it and i'd wake up in the morning anyway to this day i have a hard time eating black trumpets i'm like okay it's just too much i owe to eat on that's it dark side of boone years of mushrooming um yeah but yeah there's like uh the dark side's cleaning those with like maggots and paint uh

1:20:27 needles and you get over oh yeah yeah no but i mean like literally like you you have that same like shocking thing it's true yeah yeah you're like what's gonna pop out this time you get sort of dulled out by it yeah yeah i found a or a pasta a patch of matsutakis um that was rot like they were their past and i'm like i don't care i don't care i'm eating the maggots anyway yeah once you've got your goal and your eyes set on finding a particular mushroom which is always how it is you don't like just magically stumble across them sometimes you do but yeah yeah um but yeah no it's uh it's once you start foraging and you realize that there's there are just this world of flavors yeah when you're walking through the woods and that's something i learned from stephen when i go out he's just like taste that taste that just taste it just put it in your mouth yeah you know well it's his wife who introduced you to the indian cucumber right and you showed us that that's right yeah the indian cucumber i wonder i should probably learn the latin what it is yeah i just noticed that double decker stem with the flat band leaves yeah in the uh yeah they have to be you have to harvest it in the fall too i think it has to be yeah um that later season you get a little white carrot um but i guess you have to be careful with those because it's a tuber right you shouldn't forage them right you can eat them as a trail nibble but uh yeah it's not like a mass harvest yeah to get like a few ounces of little tiny carrots yeah no when you do see them everywhere though like you grab one and you're like that's good yeah that's a good way to put it it's a forest nibble it's a granola yeah exactly it's a forest nipple but yeah there's just so much out there the um uh wintergreen yeah and you realize wintergreen was in everything it's in root beer it's in toothpaste yeah and it grows all over the forest floor in maine if you walk partridge berry um frozen partridge fairies are like one of my favorite things yeah um and anyway so i can go on and on about these flavors but they're uh they're so far far-fetched from normal food for sure yeah like that on mommy i was describing yeah and the um in the rishi mushrooms is that uh yeah it is it is funny it's like it's like i think for me it's like um uh that conspiracy that you feel when you find out the easter bunny and santa claus yeah uh is not er yeah we're alive you know yeah um the fact that there's only 30 flavors in an american palette is a lie you know yes strawberry flavor blueberry flavor butter flavor beef flavor chicken flavor like just tonight by the way learned that tyler 11 years old does no longer believes in santa claus and he's totally okay with that he just felt bad and didn't feel like you should say anything because you know who knows why you feel like you're not going to get gifts or something okay it was i was like congratulations you can finally take credit where credit is due true you know that's true but so it's a bummer to like lose those things but at the same time it opens up windows did somebody tell him what happened i don't know i have to get the story after we're finished recording because uh we've been talking about it for like a little while now like does he doesn't he yeah who do you like write these gifts out for because you're never buying gifts for yourself you're just like and then there's a kid involved you're like just give them all the things see i never had that like there was no i knew my mom she would be bitching yeah yeah you're broke right gotta go to the store and buy the goddamn christmas presents my parents kept it up the trunk yeah yeah look at the trunk no yeah it got up for me when i i like opened the package i think it's said from santa and it was still in the box where they had like the ups label to like my parents and like they they started it was i was probably his age you know and like i i was like yeah i already kind of knew that but uh but it was the moment where it's like what we were talking about earlier when you're worried what other people are going to think right about your right whatever everybody's going to keep up the rules yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i think i need to him and just pretend to be santa claus and be sorely disappointed you know just to be that now everybody hey kid everybody else is the liar everybody i am real my name is christopher campbell he does kind of look like santa these days oh my god it's so bad is that bad is that is that affecting your uh your uh no i always had a thing for santa claus

1:25:29 there you go so you got what you're after well so then okay you get what you deserve anyway that's true it's true well he came with the territory when you and i started talking i didn't i didn't even realize i think when when we were moving that press in that you two were a unit i i didn't you know we were just like letter presses it was so exciting and you were sort of perpetuating it by even just inviting us to bring that press up but i remember him and i talking about wrestling and then i realized who he was yeah so that was our first like connection you know aside from anything else but uh yeah i think we started talking about mushrooms and stuff by the way who me and christopher russell he kicked my ass he's got old man strength you know right i don't know maybe not we should get a pet he was talking about it for a long time doing like uh i think it would be great i think he needs yeah i don't think he needs it but i wrestle with him it's no fun like huh and he's got me in a chokehold in like three seconds yeah you want to wrestle now so i just want to see him get his ass kicked so if you don't think you can beat him but never mind i didn't say that but maybe probably yeah he's tougher than he looks it's always this is calculating he's very calculated yeah he knows what moves he'd already use on me yeah he's uh he's already sussed it up he's already got the match in his head and he's beat you yeah oh i'm sure he's one of those savanty yeah yeah that's why i played dirty just pinch poke prod just wait till he's not getting that's the only way he can go and up on him oh man you gotta catch him off guard yeah if he's a pattern oriented man that's why he flinches every time i walk by yeah yeah it covers his nipples yeah nobody wants nobody wants that that's pain that's just like it's it's inherent across the board of female and male you're like please stop but but you should not beat me every time you humiliate me when i want to wrestle he's gotta gotta let you in eventually he will never let me win no he's not this is like our friend liz madden who um never lets edna win at tug of war cause she was like if you admit defeat to this dog she will call you a sucker fish forever and i was like it's a dog i was like no i will never lose to this animal i'm like you're wild what are you talking about i always let my dog wet dog zone but that's why i have dogs that's so good dogs yep well so okay so that i don't after that you know that was a turbulent time for kathleen and i was like we had already been together for too long and we were different we were like growing completely apart in a weird way so we made the rash decision yeah yeah at that time oh you guys were always so solid to me yeah yeah well we were we weren't we weren't not solid yeah we were like literally just had to like you know it's not as if we had enough of one another we by the time we got i got and uh her we got out to arizona she left and we were split for i don't know how long we talked every day yeah right so like you're inherently stuck to some people and you have to make the best out of it especially if you know there's no way around it you know so it got better with time but you know we had those moments where it wasn't gonna happen but we met one another young yeah so so yeah we decided to sell everything which was pretty much everything i sold my whole like library of strange books to yes books and that dude just like you could tell he like felt for me he was like i was like i'm just trying to buy a van dude give me 1500 bucks for all these books and he was like yeah all right so so that dude bought my van basically by giving buying all my books which are still there i still go in and i'm like nobody wanted that it's a great poetry nobody cares about poetry no come on oh my god that's the best part it's like gravitating towards the things nobody gives a about you're like ah but it's so good to me i know i understand though i don't know i remember i'm a letterpress person yeah nobody should care about that no nobody said but the soccer moms and the hockey dads who wanted to start a part-time business sure as did and now vandercook's cost too much yeah well that's true that's definitely true but so yeah we left i remember the only real interaction that i think i had with you guys is when we were stuck it was like right before you realized it

1:30:29 was a really dangerous situation i think i see a text of like this massive weed grow oh yeah that we had like landed in and then that was crazy we had to like run in the middle of the night like gunfire and stuff it was nuts too long of a story to go into but it was we got down the mountain got out you know being chased by wild boars and people on methamphetamine with guns this is like weird before tell me this story you're only telling me about eating caesar's mushrooms but that seems like it was at least your troubles oh god that was nothing yeah leading up to getting to arizona was like traveling bus rides hitchhiking getting anywhere and anywhere just trying to like find enough uh work of random things to live with people who'd feed you you know like we're doing that whole thing yeah living hand and mouth but uh yeah yeah yeah yeah we outfitted it with like a screen printing thing yeah yeah it was cool it was like a little shop but the van got down to florida and then we there's like two lug studs left on it so we sold it to some poor dude who i'm sure i'm going to hell over if there is one because he just was going back to new york and he was so stoked on it and i was like just give me enough money to get the out of oh man so you're gone yeah and then you know we we went everywhere and then ended up in arizona and that's when we started that first iteration of a mushroom farm which was cool we were just reading about it and they were the first people who were just like excited by people being excited about it and they're like just do it and we did it to a degree and then uh kathleen left that situation came back to mass and then i swiftly came after because there's no way i was gonna make it in the goddamn desert that was trying to swallow me alive yeah and then when i came back i think i nobody knew i came back and then i immediately came back up to portland because i like hadn't finished portland it was like a premature exit you know yeah and then yeah you liked it there i did yeah i didn't get enough time there at all and that was partially the issue you know we like had to leave to figure it out and then uh of course nobody knew this we're quiet little artist drama people you know yeah and there's so many other factors that play there but yeah and then and then just trying to like find my way through that living in my car living in the studio building eventually getting an apartment like getting off of the like transit nature of travel and back to like having a like i remember renting that apartment with burger and mike and uh just like i don't think i can came out of my room for like a week i like finally had a space again and i was like whoa yeah all my is not gonna be stolen like everything's fine were you and kathleen split at that point yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i kind of stalked her around coming back a little bit see my long-term memories like it's like yeah yeah yeah i remember reuben speaking of reuben i came back into portland and we were paying houses and reuben was doing some construction we were both working for tony d'agostino who died suddenly like a year ago now i don't i didn't know tony did you know tony yeah he was he was an interesting cat really cool dude um we were working on a house and ruben's like yeah i didn't really like her anyway she was always super disinterested and i was like i've seen reuben on sunday too to get a tattoo oh yeah he said that to me and i was like i was like yeah i guess you're right what a and then like a week later she moved back up to maine yeah man a few words but when he does speak he puts this one as well i think yeah yeah he totally did the other random time she's getting a tattoo by ruben and i don't think i ever told her that ruben said that about her yeah and uh why would i he was just trying to make you feel good she was disinterested i mean of all things that's not a very bad thing to say oh no that was pretty nice actually no but he was uh he was and i'll totally air this because it's hilarious but um he's working on a tattoo and liz madden who i was just talking about never lets edna win it tug of war she had she was living above us having like extremely loud and presumably violent sex with this boyfriend she was with at the time and uh and i think one of us said something to ruben because we were like trying to adjust to this bliss life and like we were both getting tattoos by him or some three years go by yeah and she pops in while kathleen's getting a tattoo by reuben and uh and she quickly introduces reuben and uh he goes oh this is the woman who has the loud violent sex and like we all just sort of like looked at one another i was looking at my phone and i like looked up and i was like you got to be me i was like what

1:35:29 the just happened and she was like oh really it was this awkward moment and reuben did it again he pulled it off oh what i don't think he knows he does it either how can you fault them i would never yeah it's reuben he's speaking the truth yeah yeah saying the truth um but yeah so when we came back then i guess that was uh that was a quick digression but yeah yeah that's when uh i guess i don't i don't remember i remember you and christopher had a conversation then called me and we're like we should you guys had gone out to eat and talked about it or something and said we should start a mushroom farm because i'd come back with like no i'm good it was your idea you think so you were just looking for a space no no you guys like did we i was done with it i was totally done with mushroom farming i was like trying to figure out how to make art again i was like i think we went out and had beers this is gonna be our out we went out and we had beers and we drank so much but the conversation was lost forever but at the end of it christopher was really inspired by mushrooms yeah he was and he's like you know i've got this space i've got there's a there's that weird little area in the basement let's try it out death chamber yeah and then it just kept getting bigger yeah bigger and bigger and the next thing you know you guys are granting a space in westbrook and that just kept getting bigger and bigger he just she fell down the rabbit hole and i just kept going with it too yeah it was weird you know how many times i've given christopher now i'm like you know you can leave at any time and every time i do that i feel like it's reverse uh you know uh engineering the whole sort of idea of why you keep going in a business because he's like i feel like it encourages him a little bit more every time and i didn't realize that yeah you know we had tough moments trying to like figure this whole thing out yeah well it's been a hard road right i mean there have been crop failures and there have been um air conditioning failures and heating failures and uh you know one right after the other yeah all of these things but then you realize that you're also kind of you know in maine in the northeast there was a time when everybody who could grow oysters out of straw bags was doing that and and now when we when we first started doing this and i say we as i'm i'm the one cheering in the background um you couldn't get oysters at the grocery store no you couldn't get shiitakes occasionally you'd see like a really secret sea creature-esque like right decomposing dried out oysters or stockies right right in like a styrofoam container that were yeah wrapped in cellophane and and then we started bringing to market these boxes of mushrooms to restaurants and to you know these places that had never seen shiitake that hadn't been strangled to death yeah they'd never seen it and they were just gorgeous yeah that's what that's how you always up because you go really good mushrooms in the beginning but you yields suck yeah so it doesn't even make sense to sell something so good you should have given up right there no i know but but i think uh i think that's part of why christopher's so excited about it because you know yeah it's a lot it's farming it's farming um it's a farm yeah it's in a warehouse but it's still a farm but yeah there's still there's still really something about this something exciting about disrupting a market there's something really exciting about going to a restaurant yeah and knowing that the mushrooms that they're serving in that restaurant came out of here yeah and uh yeah empire was the weirdest one when you'd go in there because she bought a out of mushrooms from us yeah yeah i mean still it still when i see and if it says local on it yeah i know they're ours yeah um and if it says well or they're lying to a lot of people so much has changed you know yeah yeah yeah for a while though there was there was a good possibility it was ours like across the board yeah yeah yeah i don't know what the competition is nowadays but if you push them you push them like where do these come from yeah always interrogate oh yeah they interrogate the waitress and they're like i'll go ask the chef you know and they'll come out like yeah north sport like oh yeah yeah yeah yeah right yeah yeah it's funny man there's but i think that's what keeps him going

1:40:29 yeah you know just that it's it's still there not only is it still there but it's uh it's there's no stagnation yeah i remember having a conversation with mark at hella good tacos before josh closed it and he it was when we were bringing him on and we needed the capital and we needed somebody else we just needed a body but to hire an employee there wasn't enough vested interest there and he just said you know i think the one thing we can't do is ever get complacent and uh and i don't think we've ever had a chance to get complacent no i mean dead wives friends family we still have to keep going yeah right and it's it's it's ball and chain-ish but at the same time it's not yeah because you realize that like the minute you drop it's it's all gone yeah you know so it's there's an overwhelming sense of responsibility to keep it going yeah yeah and there's something inherently cool about it too and i mean cool and like the okay yeah that's yes that's an accomplishment and uh i think christopher did some thing recently some mainstay agriculture thing where he had to be in a room with gretchen with his product yeah and uh i enjoy him being that face because i hate it and part of him hates it too but but i think part of him really likes it especially when you know you go down the row of people like this is my gym yeah these are my coasters and you know i think you get to christopher and he has this pile of alien rishi mushrooms just reaching out of the bag yeah i think you know not to speak for him but knowing so much that i do about him that you know i actually do think in that moment he's proud you know he's like there's a sense of ownership there yeah and yeah completion yeah and people walk by and they're like what is that you know it's it's peddling your art you know yeah yeah yeah in a lot of ways or we're peddling a um uh a new way of life you know yeah not to get and i don't think that's hyperbole like no but you guys i don't think i ever intended to start a mushroom farm nor did i really we just fell into it twice and then it just turned into like experiment after experiment after experiment because there was no but they're just so compelling yeah they suck you in you know you can't get out of it right yeah hey i'm sitting and looking at this dried up and they're just always there always there they're now petrified yeah and it'll be like that forever yeah it's a bonsai space alien it is it's like this weird plant and so that's only in here because i put headphones on it to like uh promote a podcast and we need to come up with a good voice for it oh yeah we should yeah they are i think once you get into it there's no getting out of it necessarily the people who've gone out of it have been interesting like when i first started researching this stuff and uh even like in psychedelic land before portland before ever meeting you guys it was shroomery it's still there and it's this fantastic like black screen uh blue type like hard to read late at night sort of blog or you know it's like a twitter like anything like that it's like an old thing and uh and everybody on this board is like always commenting their grow charts or everything you know it's very nerdy so that immediately was the entrance for us and uh there was a cat named roger rabbit his name was keith something or other and he did the first series of like how to grow mushroom videos um benzis all the way through gourmets and he was the first person really doing blocks and shiitakes and the strains that carried forward were really you know his you know inceptions his wife died of cancer and he got out of it he was done he was growing tons of weed for a while for her i think and sounds oddly familiar and uh and then he i've i was talking to neil from columbia mushrooms out in oregon uh the other night and he was like you know i was recently on there and like saw that he's still active and he'll still like make a comment and i was like god damn because that motherfucker's been on there forever like forever yeah yeah and that's a wild thing that like somebody can go away entirely yeah and still have something to say about it right you know right so you're sucked in you can't keep away well you you can't unlearn the knowledge either and so it's all that shit's just rattling around in your brain what you're gonna do with it yeah so that's the hardest part is when you know a lot of these farms now want to be consults and offer consultation services and not enough have been in it long enough to have seen everything yet so some of them are just offering you know misguided information

1:45:30 and and i think that's why we haven't pushed the consultation thing as like a financial contributor to the farm at all because hey it's very time consuming yeah but b it's like we're still figuring it out you know and and that's the best part you know you can tell everybody what you know and you do have a wealth spring of information but at the end of the day you still have something to gain and something to learn and it's gonna you're gonna run into an issue and have to figure your way out of it right right yeah yeah you're pioneering like we said before yeah um and right now it's food but right yeah who knows what you're going to discover and uh and of course you know the real discoveries are going to happen in mit but but if those cats are going to be yeah you know i got you say cats yes this is a game i play that christopher didn't do that all the time you just say a word and you incept that right into the conversation and you just used insept again too yeah see you're trying to get in my head man christopher used to hum when we were like in westbrook he would like to start humming a song and i would start humming it and be like i know and then i would pick one oh man i'm so sorry run girl you're a much too young girl like where did you get that it's all eric's fault yeah yeah oh yeah i got a couple good ones in him i think where have all the cowboys gone is like my dude it will your life up it's also a good one for forgetting songs like if you're like you got so i did that to kate the other day and she was like you're a dick yeah for me yeah the one that always wins this parsley sage rose mary and todd it's just forever there yeah it's just there you go this is the that really is damaging to our uh our like alive humans right now if we're in old folks homes it's the jingles of the day that are just gonna keep spitting out of us as we're like going through alzheimer's and we're just gonna have ernie bock jr commercials in our brains yeah no it's true but it's better than the taylor swift i guess who so i wasn't this is like a quick story and then we don't ever have to have these conversations ever again but i was in boston and i was working at the book bindery which uh kathleen was the only job she ever made me quit because she was like this job is gonna kill you if you don't stop like you're a psychopath yeah and it was because i would get in there it'd be dark i'd be leaving it was dark train in train out train entry now yeah it costs more to have uh the train rides every day than i was getting paid it didn't make any sense but i really wanted to get in a hardcore bindery and i was just trying to work my way through acme and so on and so forth really this is a this is a lot of chapter of real life i didn't know i got lots of those i keep them to my every mike every time we have a conversation he's like there's another one i didn't know that i'm gonna double check it with your mom i'm like i can't make this stuff up but uh oh man once again this is the third time it comes in threes i know sorry i'm blinder than you you wish anyway go ahead no no i'm trying to remember now did you just completely lose the story entirely what do we there must be like uh high co2 levels in here today you know that would make sense i try to explain that thing to people where you walk across the farm for a hamburger and you come back with a hammer or vice versa you're like what is happening to me right now co2 does damage to you and it's long lasting damage i forget what the story was it was a quick digression and then that was it yeah it seemed like a really promising one too oh they meant the jobs different jobs you've had in your life if you had different jobs yeah a book binder you're at the book bindery training train out i was i was so so tired kathleen made me quit i don't remember it's a blank oh it's what comes out of the blank that's more interesting i guess i have no idea whatever that's what he said what's funny is i'll listen to this and edit it down and adjust the volume and i'll be like god damn it that's what i was supposed to tell do i just say it and like you know like put people's voice i don't know you could always edit it again right now that'd be the worst no it's kind of super nerdy the super nerdy i really this one up man it'd be like putting in an audio um version of an asterix in it stay tuned to the end of the podcast this is a mitch hepburn thing those are my favorite stand-up jokes where like they every joke of his was like that hyphen you're just like her that little asterisk you're just like there was something here now it's a footnote and i forgot the joke was funny for 10 seconds while i was telling it

1:50:30 now it's over yeah because i forgot it yeah yeah i think it is the co2 it's the co2 we're really not this dumb person yeah yeah we're just tired i think we are telling i had to pee too all right cool we're gonna call it this has been fun thanks for doing it with me well that was a lisa pixley man go check her print making madness out on instagram at print craft pixley p-r-i-n-t c-r-a-f-t p-i-x-l-e-y and if you're uh in portland swing on into her shop print craft at 246 danforth street thanks so much for listening to the show this week you can follow or subscribe to micah wizards wherever the hell you get your power casts and write to us at p.o box 897 in gardiner maine i sure do love that old school snail mail and 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 Maine Cap N Stem mushroom company with music composed by damon hicks head on over to Cap N Stem dot com for certified organic substrate and spawn for all your mycological needs and until next time later on man he was the stallion man blue stallion man hi gym done real quick if you're still listening jump back on instagram like you have nothing better to do and check out mico lycos connecting music synthesizers to mushrooms what you