Inside Mile High Fungi | MycoWizards S1E9

0:11 the coffee's hot from Maine Cap N Stem this is the mica wizards podcast on today's show i've got the mighty mad dog the colorado scene mr michael nail of mile high fungi michael and liz nail are a badass duo and they really have this multi-faceted and extraordinary talent that's very much needed to get into the bigger mushroom setups these two now three with a brand new kid share the same sentiments as Cap N Stem really just help push the industry forward and keep farms growing so saddle up them shiitake slinging scissors and get to listening while you harvest as michael and i shoot the shroom for a little bit of mike go wizard ear candy that's the weirdest entrepreneur well you know being a dad that's probably the newest thing uh that's kind of changed yeah but uh yeah yeah imagine yeah getting ready for season still kind of in that snowy muddy season as far as outdoor work it's the same thing here so yeah just getting wound up for uh what i'm hoping to be our best season yet so hell yeah man what uh when was your kid born i feel like i saw an instagram post and then uh and then i i didn't see really an update after that yeah so three months ago today so it's it's definitely been a interesting transition but we finally got into the house we've been building for the last four years and it's been uh it's just like just in the nick of time like three weeks before the baby came so that's how it always goes man right yeah we're good at uh hustling at the very end yeah i think uh that's most of us like psycho people who decide to open businesses you just your whole life's a hustle right and then you figure that you're just passing that on to your kid totally when i figure she's gonna end up hating mushrooms and be a corporate banker but i'm gonna try my best to do the opposite yeah is that your goal like to pass the inheritance of mycological nerdiness onto her we're just kind of like wild woman stuff you know we've got some acreage up in the mountains and just knowing how to be resourceful and i don't know not kind of fall into unnecessary gender norms and just kind of show her you know liz is a badass and knows how to do all the you know electrical plumbing carpentry stuff that i do and you know she carries a lot of the weight around here as well so i feel like having that as an example and just kind of showing her all the stuff that maybe i didn't know growing up uh yeah i think that's yeah that's the goal mushroom that's great man i know yeah i have a lot of friends who are you know they're in that age group now where they're starting to like figure out how to raise their kids in those environments and like the pandemic has pushed it my friends jose and celine had a a kid her name's alma down in brooklyn and uh they came up here like the week before the pandemic was actually a thing and then they just never left and their whole life now is just like completely different than living in the city and they're so stoked on it and so is she like the the little one you know it's just a different way of life when you can get the hell out of an urban setting and and learn how to live again you know yeah it's kind of wild for us because you know we started in the city and as we were expanding i mean it's like cannabis had exploded so if you had a derelict warehouse anywhere in the city it was being snatched up for millions of dollars and i was like well we're not gonna be able to make those dollars make sense uh so we're like 45 minutes into the high country west of denver but it's nice because you feel like you're at the end of the earth and you pretty much are but you can still be to the center of town in under an hour so it's kind of a sweet spot for us any further we couldn't really make it the logistics work as far as transport um but 45 yeah because i remember when we were shipping stuff to you it was like uh it was a feat to try and get a truck that would even come near you guys and it was like not happening for a hot second totally coming up your way yeah denver or nothing you know anything ltl they're like yo we'll set up a delivery i'm like you can't get a tractor in a trailer here for sure you know or if you do you're gonna have a really pissed off driver

5:11 and they take it out on you at the end of the day you know they get righteously pissed i mean i haven't come from that world too dude yeah i feel like it was uh it wasn't neil brent who posted a photo of like a tractor trailer truck trying to turn around in his spot and getting stuck in a ditch on cmgn yeah they're all in these weird spots yeah we get lucky trucks can't really find us here but you know what's that i prefer to be in the weird spot yeah man it's it's it's worth the hassle at the end of the day for sure i mean you figure out your own logistics i mean for us it's like we've built the business you know building included ourselves uh same with the house and so you kind of get aware of how the logistics work so whenever we get heavy equipment delivered it's like there's this one spot you have to turn around and drop off the machine and and that's the only spot because if you come any further you're going to be cursing me for sure and yeah you're totally right yeah man it's always entertaining but you know in the end of the day i don't want to deal with that bit yeah that's the thing too is like when you live in those rural settings your day is mostly broken up by people who get or stuck or whatever and you spend your time like towing them out of a ditch or whatever it is you know and well it's fun well it's happening it's like uh if not if it's every day you're just like be responsible in the beginning that was us you know getting towed out of the snow bank in the ditch just getting our asses handed to us and now we're like fully equipped you know everything's chained up and burly and spares of everything so you know there's an initiation and everybody who lives around you i'm sure kind of knows it too and they just sort of wait you know do you have like good or close neighbors like in relative proximity are you guys pretty isolated you know everybody's got like a decent tract of land so we don't stare at each other but we you know are on the same private road and everybody's got some degree of heavy equipment whether that's like you know trackhoes or mini x's we've got a little skid steer you know it's like we all could pull ourselves out of a bind if need be and occasionally it's the excitement on the road right you just kind of like all right this asshole's stuck yeah that's the fun part about tourists in the wrong area you know we are definitely close to the public but every once in a while you'll get some dude looking for boomers like hey man i'm in town for the weekend i'm like you're in the wrong place but hey you know yeah yeah it is colorado right you know like it's outlaw territory now with the weed that's gone explosive there and it's been the only state that's really been able to manage it to a pretty finite degree it seems i mean we lead the way california had the chance uh but yeah we were able to just kind of swoop in and say this is how it's done and you know i've got a lot of friends that work in the industry and basically at this point as it's blowing up elsewhere people from colorado are coming out to these other locales to help start businesses kind of show people the ropes all the legal framework all that stuff um so you know it's like it's a replicable model that's for sure like what we've done here and we've made so much money you know i mean at this point like i don't care if you're republican democrat libertarian whatever it's like it's generated so much money for school systems and just like the public works um so at this point like nobody blows my mind to think about it no certainly not and it's it's come so far too and and it's uh i mean it still catches me off guard because you know even though maine's like a pretty liberal state when it comes to it you still have that feeling when you're like driving down the road you're like is there like a roach in my like uh you know ashtray or like you'd see blues and you're like what's on me you know and it's it gets this weird thing in your head when you grew up with it being such an oppressive like herb that's around you if you're a you know habitual stoner oh for sure i mean the kids here will never know what schwag looks like it's just like no anomaly to them like there's this stuff that was like compressed with maybe coca-cola and filled with seeds like yeah it's diesel yeah yeah yeah sometimes it had pcp in

10:11 it man and well that's how we did our first second drug sometimes unintentionally jesus christ yo most of the time unintentionally until the whole room took a bong hit and you were like okay now we're melting into our chairs here it goes so what did you you and liz did you meet before you started uh mile high or did you guys start it after or yeah i mean we're like an anomaly we've been together 17 years so we met for you guys and i was studying sustainable agriculture we got into mushroom foraging some of like my best friends went on to run i'd still do actually a stamet slab at fungi perfect i and run the host defense line some of that stuff and so it was just like mushrooms were everywhere uh we went to school at evergreen state college which you know michael bug used to teach at and uh you know standards as an alumni of and so it's just kind of like in your face plus it's just prolific as far as hunting and eating and whatever right um so we kind of got turned on there and then i was continuing work with a bunch of different kind of agricultural projects and then just kind of getting i don't know quarter life crisis and a friend of mine offered me a job down in the islands and he was like do you want to be a kayak guide and i was like sure so he just took off for three years and just said it and live down in the virgin islands and uh this is you and liz liz and i the entirety of the uh the journey uh yeah and so when we moved back i started working in the cannabis industry and i worked for denver urban gardens and we were just kind of trying to figure out like what to do as far as adventure and yeah we're like we should grow mushrooms was it established that you guys like right was it established that you guys like wanted to start a business or were you entrepreneurs from like the get-go or did it seem sort of foreign to try to do it do it on your own well i guess i'm elapsing a little bit when we first came back uh we had some extra seed cash and it was right before the housing market exploded in denver we bought an old victorian and spent a year and a half completely rebuilding it we ripped off an old edition added a 1200 square foot edition took everything down studs rewired everything plumbing just like brand new pretty much in the end with like an old 1890s shell and we're like this is too much house we'll never fill this house uh we should sell this and the market was booming and so we sold it and then we had some seed capital to like start something and liz was like let's grow mushrooms i was like i don't know how to grow mushrooms she's like we can figure it out i was like i think we can too and you know here we are it's what seven years later in the journey wait back up what do you so she just said uh she just said let do you think we should grow some mushrooms that's the whole start of it how did she had to choose what was the beginning of that well you know it's funny because when we were in college we maybe peddled a little bit in illicit herbs and mushrooms and she said wouldn't it be funny if we legitimately grew legal herbs and legal mushrooms it would be super ironic wouldn't it and i was like yeah you know i looked into like the basil market and i was like i don't think there's room for me to jump in on that i looked in the mushroom market i was like doing that here like literally nobody doing that here right uh well we're like builders more than anything you know like i went to school for agriculture like i believe in sustainable agriculture and uh it's definitely where a huge part of my passion lies but like i like systems and building and uh mushrooms were like a perfect melding of those things because it kind of forces you to be good at at least a little bit everything um or you won't make it and uh so you certainly won't man i mean or you will now it's kind of up in the air you can buy everything in now and start a mushroom farm out of nothing you know it's it is i mean right now actually during the off season we shut down seasonally

15:11 um because we never really made the dollars made make sense in the wintertime uh but you know like i'm outfitting a shipping container for a ranch up in the higher country than us that's just like a plug and play thing like the top-line sensors built-in radiant floors like super super nice kitted out and you know like they've full blown said you know we don't ever want to do the back end we just want to bring in blocks we just uh you know you actually sold some to those guys recently i told them to order from you guys kind of while we were tinkering around with some stuff and who's this uh sandy with knapp ranch sandy story she worked mainly with kelsey cool yep yep yep um yeah i know for sure yeah i was just kind of pointing her and they've got like a boomy micro greens business and um yeah you know for us it was just kind of a cool way for us to do something in the off season continue to tinker around that way i can be close to the babe and and everything and not be in full blown mushroom grind from the very beginning you know the one thing i like about agriculture is there is a winter and you fix everything that broke and and all that you know i mean and sleep a little bit yeah um to a movie or maybe not remember yeah right something besides trim a thousand shiitakes and pressure wash rooms and the whole grind um and you know everyone's like you could go year round and i was like yeah i know and i'm not i'm just not you know um you know we just hustle super that's good it's smart yeah i mean it works it's just it's so smart to like uh figure that out man well i think it works for like i can think of a handful of farms when we first started supplying farms with just substrate who were only seasonal and they were mostly like in warmer climates and i think you guys were the first ones that i noted that were in a cooler climate and it just made sense for you to not have to like hustle through it so it's it's an interesting thing to have been from that block supplier side and see the variations and the ideals that farms go through to justify like not being a workaholic or not working themselves so far into the ground that they just they don't want to keep going because eventually everybody hits that wall right so if you know it's coming you can be like nah yeah i mean we're maniacs anyway we're gluttons for punishment we still build in the winter we still do all sorts of and you know where we live sometimes we'll get like a four foot dump right the idea of like moving the skidder in with a bunch of sawdust and trying to mix it it was like that sounds like a nightmare plus you know for us we've really targeted csa models we've targeted uh you know farmers markets you know we do work with some restaurants and kind of it was kind of a blessing actually in the pandemic because we had all this stuff that was slotted for restaurant production and uh it pretty much like evaporated overnight and then i started crunching the numbers and i was like you know i offer pretty generous terms with established clients you know net 30 we've got net 15 for everybody new but then you're working with these restaurants and sometimes it's like 45 days later i haven't gotten paid yet and so yeah instead of having 30 or 40 grand large out we're like we should just re focus that energy and beef up these models that are working right now and if restaurants do want to buy mushrooms from us it's cod and you know maybe four dollars off uh retail price that's it that we're not we're not doing anything extra for you like we appreciate the work you do but i felt like in the beginning i don't know if it was like status or feeling like i had to do it a certain way but i was like we need to target the restaurants you know there's this booming restaurant seen in denver we should be totally doing this and then i realized we were working for pennies and i was like this is dumb um can we do this better so the pandemic actually helped us tighten the belt a little bit and go this is not the way forward at least the way we were doing it so yeah it's been it's been an interesting journey yeah that's an interesting timeline man it's like every farm kind of figures out that they have to diversify their you know supply chain but also they're selling markets too because i don't know how many farms have gone through that where they realize the simple fact that uh restaurants in general only make money when they sell

20:13 and they're no longer the owners of the restaurant you know you don't make massive cash unless you're some like fantastically like well supported and and famous restaurant you know so the cash is always tight and that's where it's it's cut throughout you just get paid or get you know well you know the thing is we wanted to be like semi-competitive with pennsylvania and california and you know with dia being here people can get stuff shipped in and it was like so trying to keep up with the joneses but like obviously our cost of production is totally different and so it took us a while to realize that you know and just say hey you know if you want our stuff it costs x i'm not really budging on anything uh we'd love to work with you but it's okay if we don't and um yeah just kind of like a liberating feeling in the end you know just because everything else has partially because of the pandemic but also just because year after year i feel like we do a better job for the the csas and the other markets that we do and so we grow every year in those venues and so it was just kind of being usurped from the restaurant uh kind of black hole that happened early on and i was like we shouldn't go back the other way yeah that's smart dude because it really is a black hole like at the end of the day especially if you see it coming and you test your like patience for relationships too in terms of like you got to get paid to pay the bills to keep growing you know that's the hardest part about scaling up the restaurants sold the mushrooms two days after you gave it to them but i have to wait 40 days to get paid i'm like there's no interaction i want to be a part of that works like that right yeah i'm making a huge big yeah yeah we struck the ground with like the block thing and it's a hard thing to explain to new people coming into it but you know we've had so many farms that have just this this weird like mycological i'm gonna start a mushroom farm boom just occurred and it just keeps growing and most farms are understanding of it now but we still have the outliers it's like look we it's it's pretty much cod we're doing half of the production for you we have to buy in all the raw materials we have to hire all the labor do all the production get the spawn everything and uh and then it gets to you and then you have to do the other side you know so it's it's looking at the industry when it's split up like that and uh and as soon as you have it under one roof you realize that it's three-fold now especially if you're doing spawn you're doing block production and fruiting you have that much more overhead to really manage and understand the the breakdown of and that's that's the biggest biggest like pressure point when it comes to trying to figure out how to keep your business afloat cash flow-wise oh 100 percent you know that now we're finally at the point where we're actually doing everything start to finish ourselves again you know we're still supplementing here and there you know i bring and spawn from you guys sometimes or tr yeah but at this point with autoclave running we're back to the sports store model but like at our larger scale at this point and you know yeah definitely a lot but seven years later i feel like we have the numbers we know what the actual cash flow needs to be we know how far in the hole we can go in the beginning of the season and you know especially targeting the csa models and like true csas where they pay in june you know we start ramping up march and april and then basically into may beginning of june we're in the hole but then you know yeah let's just say 30 of the revenue we're gonna generate for the year maybe a little bit more comes in all at once and that's huge i mean we looked into farm service agency loans and and you know term operating loans that kind of stuff and you know there are decent rates but it was like just figuring out how much money you needed to get going every year especially since we put the brakes on in the winter right so there's no like carry over just like a dead stop to you know just a dead start right yeah to a hard start again right yeah uh but you know yeah that's a scary thing man but it's it seems like it's working and that's sort of that model that i'm intrigued by because i don't think a lot of people are you either do it by default or uh you realize that if you stop you're kind of done it's it's like the adage of you know if you don't go to college right out of high school you're never going to go sort of thing and it's a total like you know misfire of a fact and it's not really a fact at that level you realize that you can stop and you can't start and it probably gives you and correct me if i'm wrong but a complete like handle

25:14 on the situation to know what it is to keep going and what it is to stop what it is restart oh yeah i mean atrophy is a no doubt i mean but like i said we never really stop stop we just stop production right you know it's just like what are we doing next season you know going through all the taxes all the spreadsheets all the numbers making sure that we're like staying lean um and then just like with that pause you know i love like the european model where people like have like a month or plus to just take off and be with their family and go for walks and think because you can't think when you're going a billion miles a minute you know you just you just do what's in front of you um which might lead you off a cliff and so having that pause that reflection point is like super important for our business mental health everything um you know and like i mean with you guys in the sense that you know you have a little bit bigger staff you might be able to pull away for the weekends and that kind of thing and if you can build that into your model great you know but if it's just a two-man three-man op it's definitely super important to build that space for yourself yeah it really is man and it it turns into this survival thing because i've definitely seen the burnouts and um like eric milligan was one of them he hadn't taken a vacation until this year and he took like a month and a half off and i think still he got super stir crazy and ended up like getting back into it more early but i was stoked man when he came to record that podcast this winter he just was like he's like i gotta make a decision and i just have to decide to like hold back for a while and this is like in the you know in the darker days of the beginning of the pandemic and he did it and i think he did a world of wonder because it allows you to reanalyze and and i remember i feel like it was a conversation i had with tr and like the early joey schlegel cmgn days or maybe it was a post that he made but he references like you can't create the momentum of a business if you're worried about everything being perfect you just have to create a storm and just go go go go go and ignore the small stuff that's like the little piles that are going to be around and the little construction material you know areas and then eventually you catch up with it and i think that works for a while and then all of a sudden you realize that a bigger scale you have to have people to worry about those little piles that get too big you know the stupid construction debris or the osha issues or whatever it is and then it's a beast and you can't ever shut the off you know it gets scary no i can imagine i mean for us because you know we built the boiler room ourselves we did all this stuff it was like there's all this time and we did that in the winter pretty much every year that's like when we would tackle like the next big thing like this year it's air handling you know we're putting in some two massive swamp cooler systems and big louvered vents and um just because you know i guess it's true in all the things mushroom related is once you have a few successes and you realize that this has created its own problem you know and incubating thousands of blocks in the barn in the summer before when we weren't incubating really it wasn't the heat wasn't such an issue right and then you have all these blocks and then you got the boiler running and all this and it's like we need an air handling system like what what are we thinking you know maybe we should have done that first but yeah whatever you know you've figured out you live and you learn and um that's true we're getting all these projects done and we lived in the barn uh that we've been growing the mushrooms and we cohabitated with them for like two and a half years and so so you are genuinely insane yeah no for sure to leave that relationship is liberating right because i bet i now live 100 yards away and i can go visit the mushrooms and it's a little bit different than having roommates it's very true yeah especially when the roommates create too much co2 you know just all spaced out all the time yeah i know it's it's huge man it's uh being too surrounded like that uh it breaks your brain after a while which is like why there's a motorcycle shop at our farm it's why there's people coming in doing different things even through the pandemic just to create some like break in the redundant production scale sort of style this you know an approach to this thing

30:14 and uh and it makes for a little bit more of an easy going crew staff and and then business model in general so we're not all burnt out but yeah it's it's a challenge no matter what so you guys you were living at the farm but what's the beginning of this what was the first thing that you guys you know invested in how did you get rolling and sort of uh create your your idealistic version of uh yeah this is working we can actually do this well so we started out of our house also like maniacs i like cut a bunch of holes in the floor put floor drains in turned random rooms into fruiting chambers like just got buckwild with it and then it like squeezed us pretty much out of the house and then i was like you know i've seen the shipping container model um you know just like those old how to grow mushroom videos and you've seen these different people using shipping containers and it was like all right well we can get some shipping containers we'll plop them in the backyard and we're like the house right next to sports authority field where the broncos play so we were pretty prominent denver and um i'd called to see if i could get like a permit to do it and they said you know it's kind of a gray area we don't really have a way to legally permit them we know they're all over the city uh you know basically you'll find out if you have a shitty neighbor so we plotted backyard ripped down the fence and like a week and a half went by nothing i'm like all right i'm feeling pretty good about this two weeks later a season desist from the city i'm like you got to be me um so i kind of did a little snooping around figured out who it was i was like okay uh what do we do next and basically i re realized that there was this very bureaucratic board of appeals um process that we could go through uh so i guess this board of adjustments i believe and what should have been like a two-week grace period we turned into two and a half years of putting that keeping them in the backyard uh going to these hearings showing them we were making progress we bought and it forced our hand to buy the land that we're currently at uh but it gave me a chance to outfit them get things rolling uh get production up a little bit and then uh that's kind of where we first met you guys you guys were moving facilities and you're like offloading a bunch of shitake super cheap and yeah we grabbed some of them and they performed well and i had most the rest of my stuff for the season we were getting close to the end of our season all lined out and uh i took one vacation major faux pas in the mushroom world take a vacation during season and the guy that was the guy that was tending the first employee you know the humidistat goes out right so it's just constantly humidifying the mushrooms are sopping wet and then he ran out of blocks or not blocks boxes to put the mushrooms in and so he went to the home depot and was literally putting like 20 pounds of wet oysters into home depot boxes like moving boxes right as i came back from vacation with just like this like wet mushroom trash and i was like oh and so then he had let a bunch of other stuff just go sideways i was like you gotta be me so um yeah like there's a lot of farms that have the same exact story i was like do you guys have extra blocks and he's like yeah we got extra bucks so that's when i first brought in kind of like a diverse mix from you guys and then uh we built out the barn up here so as we were approaching our deadline with the with the city to move the containers we had bought this land we had figured out like we're gonna put up a steel building designed it all that and then that winter we built the building and the fruiting rooms um and then the shipping containers up here and then basically for those first two years you know we were bringing in stuff from you guys and a little bit of production on our own but mainly just like filling the fruiting rooms you know we built this big facility without adequate sterilization equipment incubation space built out or any of that stuff it was just like maximize these rooms output and you know we did that for a number of years and it was the train wheels we really needed there was no way we were going to get

35:14 the autoclave online ourselves there was no way we were going to keep on tinkering around uh on the on the property uh if we were doing all of those levels of production at that time and so it's been kind of nice now where i'm like finally at the point where it's like everything's working i'm basically fine-tuning little things adding in a little extra here and there and i've kind of had like a mushroom emotional renaissance in the sense that i'm like i'm feeling it all over again i'm like listening to your podcasts i'm listening to the mushroom hour i'm just listening to like you know random tidbits some i'm like excited again which is kind of nice i think it's yeah i don't live here anymore so dude i mean that's you you really need that to sort of make it through a day sometimes especially when you've been in it for a while and i think that was why i wanted to start this podcast and and a few people suggested it to me and i was like man this is going to be the only thing that's going to keep me sane so sure because you know nobody i'm like i'm sure a lot of people have the story but i was planning to just travel and visit farms right before the pandemic happened and it was just like that's the goal we're just going to go see what everybody's up to see what they need see what they're interested in and sort of spend the year cultivating the next move and uh and it just didn't happen that way so this thing it it's allowed me to actually like every time i record one of these i'm like oh man all right so like everybody's still sort of into this and i'll get an email like i got an email from a dude today who was like oh man the the buzz on the shrimmery about your podcast is far out and i was like jesus really like i mean i'm not going on the shrimmery to see what people are talking about and uh and he was like yeah it got shut down you should join our discord and blah blah blah and i was like man everybody is filtering into these weird little enclaves of a digital sphere of how to communicate how to keep in touch how to keep innovating keep growing and that the shroom thing just keeps going it's unreal it's fascinating so it keeps me pumped if i think about it oh for sure i mean i think it was nearly impossible for any of us to foresee the increase of popularity just general information just that just emerged kind of all at once you know it's like one of our clients and super good friend uh him and his dad and gary lincoff all started the telly ride mushroom festival now what some 40 some odd years ago and they've become close friends you know just talking with him he's just like we were just straight outcasts like nobody like you talking about like where now i get people at the farmers market talking you know more than i know about the beta glucans and and whatnot i'm like oh okay yeah you sound like you know what you're talking about yeah it turns around man and then you realize like you're actually learning from some of the people you know and you're like holy it's amazing we i've told the story a million times but we had this like 11 year old girl and her dad come in and uh i like looked up at her dad and i i basically said uh can i help you and he was he just sort of looked down at his daughter who's like three foot and whatever and she just goes yeah i just need some oyster spawn to inoculate my straw substrate and i was just like what in the i was like blown away you know like not only would they like just the general verbiage but just this like little kid is just like is just jamming on the dream and and trying to grow stuff that's so far out for like my perception of a kid getting into this stuff and i'm sure like you having a daughter now like you think about this stuff like it's gonna matter more and more as time goes on that people do stick to these patterns and paths and and learn to sort of work within these you know nice mellow systems of food production you know yeah no i mean it's truly amazing you know at this point we've kind of developed some some nice lines with folks where it's like we actually are back to work with some woodworkers and arborists and there's like a new group of folks that do like urban harvesting that are collecting sawdust for us and stuff and just and then they're aware of it because they're tossing it or whatever you know throwing it in a pile in the backyard letting it become soil but being able to grab at least uh one food crop rotation through it um you know we're actually playing around with doing some agaricus this year just with some of our cups because we've we've never sold the compost and we we've got more agricultural endeavors beyond the mushrooms you know we got a hundred cider apple trees we grow a bunch of potatoes and garlic i'm putting in a couple hundred raspberry plants this year we got grant funding to put in a big high

40:15 tunnel greenhouse um through the eqip program the usda xcs program and uh so selling the compost seems short-sighted to me always because it's so awesome you know and we we put a bunch of red wigglers in the pile you know early on you know come springtime you just take a shovel full and there's hundreds in there um yeah and so and for where we're at bringing up material is just so cost prohibitive so we've always just done it and we're like well why not try to do a secondary crop out of it and i know a couple people doing it yeah hazeldell up above us up in fort collins they do it um they're still kicking cmgn that do it but it seems like it's a it's something that people have done at exotic farms where they just pick a very run on the agaricus so why not yeah i think it's it's harder and harder to find that like compost and it's it's harder and harder to set up the things that you don't really know much about that are the the industry norm and people just like generally don't care about agaricus which is interesting um but you know i think that's because of the diversity of other species that all cultivate in the same manner and then you take the mushrooms and it's you know just such a few variety and a similar taste that people are like meh but once you've been doing the the you know gourmet thing a while it's like why not you know it's cool for sure i mean we get lots of people that ask us about it too i mean they would buy the shiitake in the buttons if we had them you know um yeah so plus it's just something i haven't done right it's always nice to tinker uh yeah you know i've toured like ostroms out in lacey washington you know i think they do a quarter of a million pounds a week uh of just the whites right and like looking at a facility like that they're all phasing set up and just like what it takes to run on that scale and they're getting a buck 25 a pound wholesale at least when i was out there and you're like you know for what the size of that facility is like refrigerated trucks in and out pretty much day and night and you're like a buck 25 hot damn so i'm not trying to realize like you have to be at that scale yeah why that'd be a fool's errand man yeah this is the fastest way to lose money around um but you know for us it's a very popular way to lose money right totally and uh you know so just playing around with new stuff uh i'm gonna do some outdoor beds with some wine caps and just i don't know just play around like i said getting excited all over again and now we finally got a lot of production side at least semi-dialed in i'm currently knocking on wood um but i've got a good routine pretty happy with the flow of the space and um yeah yeah just kind of kind of stoked to see what next year or two brings yeah man i mean you guys have gotten to that scale where i think it it becomes predominantly exciting because you have the the flow and the mechanisms down and you've got what how big is your retort now how many blocks can you jam out in one of those so i do 250 10 pounders a run um yep and that that seems to be kind of like the sweet spot i could probably cram a little bit more but i've kind of opted on the non-cramming end of things um and that whole process was like the retorts from 1956 it's number like 430 of all pressure vessels registered with the national board so it was like bringing back to life a relic and uh got a real beefy 18 horse um right boiler that's kind of paired with it and got a little extra accoutrement that probably is overkill but it was fun putting together and uh yeah just like welding the carts back together putting on brand new casters i mean when we bought it the carts had like square casters like it just been like rusted out and just they were done um yeah and just like seeing it alive and running and cranking and just like it feels good because it sat outside for a couple years after we bought it we were just like okay we know this is the next step but how the do we do it and um yeah you know but we were digging the foundation for the house i had a 15 52 000 pound track hoe up at the house and i was like this is the time we're gonna swing that into the barn and it was like a 9 000 pound wrecking

45:16 ball right you're like i was like within inches of each side of the garage bay like i hope i don't take this out um but we got it in liz's in the steer inside the barn pulling it into place i'm kind of flicking the bucket getting it in and then you know yeah it still took us like another year to figure out like all the state boiler requirements and like what they were going to want to see because you know we we did everything permitted and yep it just took a while just to cross the t's and dot the eyes and get the capital to do it you know all that fun it does man and you want to be safe about it too and i think that's often overlooked there's so many like clandestine mycologists in this weird small and big world and they just don't give a but you want to be smart you don't want to kill a whole town so i've been in the game i've seen a number of them at least burn partially to the ground if not all the way to the ground uh so it's important that you know your uh take your time this is a public service announcement take your time you know watching one video on youtube does not make you an expert but dude everybody learns that way all right well i mean don't get me wrong use youtube but just watch more than one right right watch like 10 and then build your whole farm yeah right well for us but i just just worked out pretty good for us and you know for us atmospheric sterilization wasn't going to work because we're at 8 200 feet water boils at like 196 degrees fahrenheit um and so we knew we were going to have to do some sort of larger pressure vessel and what we opted to do was a low pressure system on the boiler which i couldn't be like happier with just i've known people have had issues with regulators you know going from high pressure to their vessels and stuff and the the boiler itself operates as the regulator right so when it hits 15 it basically kicks off 14 and a half kicks on just kind of hits that sweet spot of just kind of coasting there and uh that's great to colorado you don't need a boiler operator's license if you're using a low pressure system so that was kind of like the beauty you know we still have to get the firebox inspected once a year uh but yeah just the county requirements all that stuff's you know just one and done so it just kind of feels good as you should man yeah yeah no i was just gonna say yeah it's like the the sue that we have too that thing you know like blew out the back of the actual thing and uh and it just you know whatever was the fire retardant against the uh against the back thing there just like slowly leaked away from like a slow drip i guess from uh one of the fire tubes and you don't know and like if we didn't catch that and like see it and like you see it acting weird you know that's a meltdown it would have been terrible so getting that stuff inspected is huge man yeah yeah you know i'm like i can identify with some of the libertarian ideals but at the same time like there are some rules in place the can't be total cards yeah and they will too if they get the chance right yeah no so you know it's been just like such a awesome journey and i want to give major shout outs to you and mark and just like other folks that have kind of helped guide the way you know in the cmgn i think i'm more of a sideliner but you know we've had a lot of those guys that are traveling through denver up and just kind of i'm more of like a one-on-one guy in the end you know where i i'm not like a pissing contest internet dude it's just not really a great allocation of my time i'll get on there if something's like oh yeah i'll get out there something's like super funny or something but yeah i can't the fights and like all of the aggravation i mean you just have to go on mushroom growing on facebook that giant 190 odd thousand people group and just see people losing it at one another and you're like there goes my morning i'm just gonna turn my phone off now and call it a day like jesus but yeah people love to fight man right you know you can that's why it's like you know i can sideline it you know and then jump in occasionally or private message somebody but do that then just get this pissing contest especially you know the mushroom industry is so male dominated it's just a bunch of egos just clashing sometimes in your life this is the only way that's not the only way well it is the only way you know it's just

50:17 right yeah how does that uh how does that speak to like liz being in it how is her uh how does her how does she feel her role is in the whole mushroom gamut does she not give a or does she just like straight up just wants to grow stuff and and keep building stuff and doing what you guys are doing i would say more of that that that ladder you know i mean she adds like the artistic touch you know the the barn is beautiful you know we've got like custom wood cladding around the retort door we've got you know like it's not yeah we saw that copper paneling in there it's like like all the lighting is legit like it's definitely a woman's touch right you know you leave a dude in there it's just osb maybe painted maybe not some polly dropped with some duct tape yeah yeah oh yeah our bathroom is you just go in that bucket over there and then throw it back so have that bud yeah no it's true the smartest thing we ever did was like hire more women around Cap N Stem because we were just getting out of hand like it was getting to be like a jailhouse in here it was crazy no offense to any of my employees they're great but you need that balance you know like if you don't balance out the sexes you have just utter chaos and like it's not like it's like going to a freight terminal you know it's the it's the civilian jail-esque vibe that happens because it's just dudes just dudes for days right nobody's clean it's bad news right don't touch anything and yeah it's just like come on guys like get it together right and we respond well to that at the end you know it's like some dude tells you to go clean the toilet you're like you want to fight somebody's like all right yeah disgusting in there yeah he's fine that's true yeah that's that's the that's the way it should be man i don't know there's a it's a fine line for some people and it's a balance for others but you know like that's where uh frankie my late wife there was so like integral into like pushing into those female worlds that were so male dominated industry-wise when it was motorcycle worlds or mushroom worlds or whatever and it's fun i think on some level for women to be in those environments because they are they're stressing that like the norm has to change and you don't have to be just some curmudgeon dude you can be respectful and you can be something other than just the stereotypical farmer dude or mechanic dude or dude who can't clean a bathroom dude oh yeah i mean and like liz turns heads you know i mean she's the first one in the bobcat she you know she's proficient with every set of tools we got she does all of that but then at the farmer's market she's like the bubbly loving presence and i'm like in the back slinging mushrooms all day like you want to talk to me come to the side let's do this let's do this you know and uh it's it's definitely a nice balance i mean we've worked together the vast majority of those 17 years right whether it was in you know home construction or we were both you know working in ecotourism together we've just done so much uh the two of us yeah we're very well balanced as far as you know we know the next step we're very intuitive of like oh you need to do that you need to do that we don't even have to talk about it and with a business partner you kind of need somebody to know the next step while you're working on something you know and that's always been my hardest part with employees is yeah the patience level of somebody who hasn't worked with me for so long who doesn't know exactly how to handle the next thing and i'm gonna have to stop and explain and go through that and um and so you know it's going to be interesting just because i'm losing some degree of my partner in the business business as she's transitioning into kind of more mom you know roles for our household but you know she's still just super integral into it and just making sure i'm checking my emails and making sure stuff's ordered and all that it's definitely yeah it's definitely a multi-person task and she's definitely still in it but uh but yeah i know i mean i wouldn't have yet but it's got to be slightly scary right it's got to be like you're you're it is a huge life change not only to have a kid but to have those parental sort of roles like uh all of a sudden there like at a turn of a dime you have to figure out how to balance that life out and that

55:17 can be to the detriment of a lot of people but i feel like if you've had that basis for like a really solid relationship then you're good you'll figure it out you know well for us you know we talked about this a lot leading up into this season and i dropped my saturday farmers market that i've been doing for the last five years um and there's like a multitude of reasons uh it did not perform very well during the pandemic where everything else was up quite a bit and it was just you know we worked saturday and sunday at the markets and then monday through friday at the farm and you know there's a period of time usually six to eight months where it's seven days a week non-stop you know mornings start at four or five for me and they go till dinner and then sometimes i'm still tinkering with after dinner and i was like you know this is not sustainable and so we we dropped that saturday market this year just so no matter what we're like we're going for a hike you know we're doing family stuff because if not it's really easy just to get wrapped up in the center of the cyclone and you just keep cruising um and so i feel really good yeah well this industry i was just gonna say this industry attracts that personality and that's that's a that's a huge step man so kudos to you for actually like recognizing that you actually have to change for the better of your brain and body and and you know human as a family you know like that's that's huge it's very hard i don't know that i could do it you know like i haven't been faced with it yet but it's uh like i had to do it you know and frankie got sick but to a lesser degree because i'm still like this obsessive figure and like you're saying if you have a business partner versus a life partner who is your business partner you the the conversations are that much more like you have to work to keep them in line with one another and if they get out of line you're like oh you know we're not seeing should i die this is not good you know and then you decide to take on the roles that make the most sense for your business but it doesn't always make the most sense for your lifestyle which is it's a tough one to figure out without a doubt no matter how small you are you're still going to work seven days a week you know yeah no doubt i mean there is some degree of that that you know somebody's gotta pick the mushrooms right you pick the mushrooms every morning right um but i think the the thing that i've kind of appreciated about listening to some of your podcasts actually and some other stuff i was taking is there was a period of time where i was like trying to dominate the market right at least try to get into all the good spaces within the city and then if other market or other competition emerged then they could create their own venues or help to develop other stuff but like they weren't going to take any of mine and i think i've chilled out a little bit you know where i'm like it's okay you know there's gonna be more competition you know when we started there was nobody in denver doing what we're doing now there's easily five or six outfits of some size yeah doing stuff from basement level stuff to people that have small spaces and whatnot yeah you know i've started to look at it it's like well now we've got the biggest sterilizing system in the city it's like well why don't i just befriend these people and say hey you know you're shy on blocks this week whatever like let's do it more like that this kind of doggy dog thing because that's exhausting and you know it'll give you anxiety that's exactly how we got started you know like if if it wasn't for mausom us nor sport all coming up at the same time with eric from new hampshire thrown in the mix and this farm that closed bountiful we we wouldn't have it would have been real weird real fast and that's just because we never not one of us just dominated the scene first it was just like we all had our weird specialties so we really had to figure out a way to to maneuver around that and not just like force one another out and i think when you can come to that realization especially in this industry you realize that there's a beauty in that unlike most other industries where you are fighting to like keep it but you know at the end of the day this is still food and there's like a million small farms just growing weird crops you know and and if you look at it like that they're not competing with one another there's still like 18 vendors selling carrots and cabbage and broccoli at a farmer's market and they all make it just fine you know just fine being relative they live to farm another day exactly or another season you know i mean they say it for a reason

1:00:17 and uh yeah yeah i mean it's just one of those things where that decentralization and that just like and that losing of ultra competitive nature because you know that whole capitalism broker die that's what put us into this terrible periled landscape you know both on a societal level and on an environmental level and it's like can you find a sweet spot and chill or at least find a sweet spot and then work from there uh instead of just yeah you're not in your way to the top and uh you know i think it maybe came with a little bit of age and a little bit of just like you know getting riled up and see emerging what i've viewed to be competitors for a period of time and going this is not the way forward right like do not waste your time like these are all people that are just like you that were interested for the same reasons you were that get bit by the bug and uh there's no reason to to waste your time in that like aggro state there's definitely a better solution somewhere else and that's i really think at this point with the business it's like do what you do already well you know honor all your partnerships your relationships you know do the best you can within all that sphere and then at this point trying to work for more kind of like allied relationships yeah it's a very tricky dichotomy too when you're when you're forced to sort of entertain both crowds and the mushroom world does have both scenes too just like the biker world just like farming world any of that these hyper conservative or hyper liberal and uh and i like i mark it down to like the two quotes that have been like in my head for the past year and it's uh there's just like a sage francis line that's uh he's like this great white rapper from providence rhode island but it's just i think he says something along this is just survival for fun coupled and and drastically compared to like the the crazy mattis quote that was surfing around like during trump land era that was uh have a plan to kill everybody you meet you have those two things and they sort of slam up against one another and you can choose a side and you can make a realization and a determination by who you're around how you react to them and if your heart basically just says no man this is this is survival for fun like we're a lucky bunch of organisms might as well like make the best of it why do you need a plan to kill everybody you meet you know that's the not the way forward at all and that's not like going down some socialistic communistic realm at all even though those might not be a bad concept they're just it's not even that it's just be respectful and help one another grow because at the end of the day food and hunger rule everything nothing else really matters you know 100 you know i mean we're riding the crest of the wave right so it's an interesting interesting time to be alive and it is not worthwhile spending your time focusing on the negativity or what's what doesn't bring you joy right like if it doesn't bring you joy let it go find something else right it's too short yeah and so we're trying to embody and uh you know like i said it's been super interesting for us to in the mushroom world just connecting with more folks like-minded folks people that are doing the stuff and it's i think the tinker builder type is the people that really kind of thrive in this world and and that's what i love again right just some of the people i've met through there were just like people are doing some random like josh saul he came up oh yeah yeah he had met some dude that took like a treadmill and welded up some barrels and made his tumbler and i'm like yeah like this this is legit right you know like i don't care if you're doing anything but just like throwing a rock down that thing it's it's still cool for cool sake and if it can make your car more man all the better right yeah oh josh is an innovative dude man he's somebody i need to talk to on this podcast you know he's he's come up pretty fast and and uh he's got this very mellow consistent personality in the sort of adversity of how quick this game changes so he's well suited for it and he seems to like grasp everything he's doing and he's just jamming on it hard so i'm i'm stoked that he's sort of in this

1:05:18 world and and when you find people who come into this thing and you're just like they're there and you're excited that they're there you know you're going on the right path and you know you're with your people you know and it's that's the same thing it's it's you find these people and they just excite you to keep going and that's that's the name of the game that's the only thing that keeps me in it i swear it's the vonnegut crevasse right you know you you have that that crevasse yes that just brings it together right and somehow us weird michael here uh have found one another in this bizarre digital sphere and and can have that camaraderie and i mean it's helpful i don't understand how these guys are getting any work done because i look at the threads and i'm like this is hours of your time hours right yeah i don't have an hour but damn you know but somebody makes a post and i'll like quickly look at it and then make the judgment call i'm like nah i can't i can't look at it right now it's just not necessary but i remember when bradford was like that you know brad was on there slaying like literature length bibles of uh math equations to dilute different versions of uh you know how much air flow needs to go into certain rooms in order to achieve x y and z and like he would just list it all out and people are like yeah my brain's not that big sorry brad i don't know what to do with that you know and i think he like he peeled back from it but he was so like he was queued the into that cmgm world for a long time and i would pretty much only read his comments and be like oh yeah all right yeah he was like our science robot for a minute you know like somebody post something and it's like boom the actual stats broken down like all right yes thank you brad yeah man no i i definitely feel the tinkerer thing it's it's definitely it's fun to innovate and you know like all these mechanisms and machinery are out there now and you can go on alibaba or find any of these crazy bagging or debagging or harvesting or whatever machines and yeah they don't cost a fortune past a certain scale but it's fun to innovate and it's fun to sort of push your bounds and be able to make these things without a 50 000 piece of equipment you know it's like how can you turn a treadmill or a culvert or you know some cheap random timing belts into something you know and it's that's very exciting because then that whole thing is the crux of what just made your whole system faster you know like most people who reach out and they're like i just i need to figure out how to build a tumbler i'm like well hey you need to remember that a tumbler for your substrate is merely a placeholder you still have to shake the if you're making a 10 pound bag but you still like you can make it out of whatever the hell you want you know just find a way to make it work no and i love that like when we lived on the island i had a jamaican mechanic that kind of taught me everything i know about automotive stuff and you know he grew up outside of kingston and he um you know he would go into the junkyard and pull stuff from cars that they didn't talk to each other but he could make them talk to each other right or like he always loved the toyota parts because the toyota parts were metal right so he'd just be out there grinding a pulley down or something like that right and yeah i loved that right i was like and he was like this is how we grew up right you know yeah you do the same thing right you're just not frankenstein and make it happen right and and i love that that kind of like street degree knowledge that only comes by doing you know you're not going to read a book on how to do that kind of and uh yeah i know it's just it's not it's not going to be a part of a crew of people that that's like that's kind of what gets them off oh yeah yeah that keeps us up at night that stops us from eating for three days that like you know and it's all good in the end no matter how depraved we look when we come out of those like incubation states of like i just spent three days building something that failed miserably or it succeeded you're still better for it like on some level and it's good to find like a partner or business partners who can support that sort of uh degree of insanity because it really it's necessary you know no doubt you know i mean i remember one thing first go wrong and you'd just be like this is the end of the world like should i call somebody i don't think i can call somebody they call somebody and then you get into the meat and potatoes of it and now at this point like literally anything could go wrong for the most part maybe a few exceptions on the farm and we could fix it right and that's the beautiful thing about building it yourself too because it's like i painfully know how this is

1:10:18 put together like painfully yeah yeah but but it's it's so awesome man oh it's so cool there's nothing like riding around and this is like a uh max chef he's a ex pro skateboarder motorcycle turned motorcycle mechanic but he said you know like there's nothing cooler than like pulling up next to a cop and being like don't pull me over don't pull me over but when they do they go what is it and you say a motorcycle and they say don't be a smart ass and they don't know that you've had your hands in every single component of this thing then they have no idea what it is and that's just like people who break into the mushroom farm now and like we'll have a couple we haven't had them for a while knock on wood but people bust in here and think it's like a weed grow and they're like oh and they'll leave all the lights on and the doors open pissed they're like where's the weed you know and you're like that's right you came in here and had no idea what you were looking at like no idea they were just hoping to find something to cut the meth right they were dude i think maine is the new north meth belt so probably no i think our biggest thing i was before we got into the mushroom thing we were like deep in the burning man world and so we were like oh yeah you took a vacation there right i mean we ran like when uh we were supplying blocks for you yeah yeah we were tell me about this uh so you know we converted 42 foot you know bluebird school bus and did like a flame throwing banana split i cut like a pt cruiser apart pyrotechnics light up dance floor like all that and you know it was so much fun because it was it was like an engineering fest right and you would go out there you spend like all year building these wild things and you'd go into the most harsh climate in the world and watch most of it break and then like limp it back together and then you'd have like three glory days before you had to clean up all your and go home and it was like a great metaphor for the the mushroom world it's like have these elaborate things watch them break fix them and then call it a day you know it's just like i'm cool with it that's what i did for vacation right so that's a solid metaphor right it means you're never actually taking a vacation you're just going to burning man to do the same thing you've been doing yeah i've taken a breather from burning man it kind of hit an exhaustive point i was like after a decade run i was just like i need to maybe like go to an all-inclusive resort or something right i've been i haven't never done that right sounds fun somebody's bringing me margaritas i guess you get fat oh lovely hell yeah dude yeah there's there's a fine line there man especially when it comes down to people because no matter how like uh innovative and tinker-esque like these crazy mushroom people like us are we're also pretty reclusive and semi-hermetic in our like concentration so when when you get around people you either go one way or another i know i do it just depends on my mood if i feel like being around people i'm stoked you know and if i don't i'm like give me the out of here i need to go work on something and not talk to anybody oh for sure i'm definitely i'm a gemini i don't know how much creams i put in the astrology but i definitely have those two sides where it's strong like you know i'm either full blown in it to win it jovial hanging out with everybody or they're like he's in a funk and i'm like it's just mainly i don't want to see you you know yeah your face is ugly to me right now leave me the alone and i don't mean that mean i'm sorry yeah i know i feel it dude i feel it and i think it's you know as you get older too and you start a business you uh you get to this point where if it's succeeding and you're still having to work at it you realize the dedication comes in the day-to-day and you really just have to like keep your head in the game no matter what and it's pretty easy to get sidelined and things like you know groups of people or burning man or any of that stuff just it can pull you into a world you don't want to go down and we all know the the shroomy crazy acid freaks who took one too many hits and they're never coming back they just they've gone down the rabbit hole and they'll never come back to reality you know and that's a part of that world too it's overwhelming oh no doubt yeah i still enjoy talking to them but you know they're still crazy it's okay so what's on the horizon though it's okay to move right i just don't like having for thanksgiving every year yeah don't invite them to your mom's house you know

1:15:19 there's a time yeah mom this is uh he got away with it for a while oh man yeah it's hard to keep those people away too and i know there's a bunch of talk on that in cmgn you know of how many people are just boisterous about it now they'll just walk up at a farmer's market and be like legitimately like i just want cubensis and they're screaming at you and you're like what the are you doing so there's yeah i'm like you know what's funny is like you know my own personal feelings about it doesn't matter right but like i'm having this conversation with somebody let's just say we're having a loose conversation at the farmers market person seems nice mid 40s whatever we're having a great conversation and they're like do you have anything like how they're mid-40s so kind i'm like you you just went down like three tiers on the totem pole maybe to the bottom or it's like you had that great conversation on the on the bus and you know you've been going you've been going good at the very end they're like do you have a moment to talk about jesus christ and i'm like son of a this was so good and you just broke you know so that yeah they it up every time those people i know that's how i feel about i mean they're not the fullest low-hanging fruit the the fullest low-hanging fruit are usually like the dude with his girlfriend that are like hey are the fun ones and you're like hmm right you're that guy just like punch him right in the face and you're just like get out of here this is why mark long ago kicked me out of farmers markets because i was such a dick i swear to god like people just came up and asked what it was you're like what is this and you're just like why is that the first question out of your mouth it should not be like my response whatsoever but it was and i will just speak my mind so i was just like it's a strawberry i don't know what the you want me to get the away from me mark was like all right you should go it's like yeah eric not our pr guy right no no yeah not for dumbasses who are like you know playing oogly boogly with every stand at a farmer's market you're like dude just buy it and get the out of my way you know if you want to know about it i'm happy to talk about it but it's the dumbassery that kills me people are just like what is this you're like i don't know and i feel like my uh my tolerance for it got super low when i was in the islands because like when people go on vacation they kind of lose their mind right and i think that people don't really know the right question to ask so they just ask a dumb one so that whole like misnomer that there's not a stupid question there actually is tons of stupid questions right it's like think about it like you might need a qualifying statement somewhere in there like there's there's a lot of elements that go into asking a good question um it's true well we've sort of lost our ability to communicate man it's it's like it disappeared through covet entirely i think but for you to be able to ask a question and get a good response and have a really solid back and forth with somebody without the jesus speak or the acid freak you really like you can judge a person instantaneously by how they use what you're saying and bring it back into the conversation and it's a lost art you know and it's it's getting further away if we don't really try to bring it back to how we communicate it's it's weird no for sure i mean and you think about the markets and stuff i mean some people are actually coming to the market because they're like starved for interaction you know and we definitely have clients that like we know that they're like the hot we're some of the highlight of their weekend right you know and you know we tell them to come late if they want to chat you know we're usually slammed at most of our markets for the vast majority of time which thank god uh i cannot i'm not one of those idle thumb twiddlers um and uh you know we've developed really great relationships for people through that and you know people are searching for community and uh when you know for all the dumbasses out there we've got so many great folks that are patrons uh that it does make it work and the low-hanging fruit is great to make fun of the rest of the day you know so um what cmgn is for it's it's a silver lining right uh it is man like liz had a guy come up look at there's a farmer's market booth this last year in full lace pants no underwear we called him dicks oily for a while and we're like dude you're getting a little too close to the mushrooms man like just back it up just back it up yeah dick doily you know by definition for all the listeners that is the

1:20:19 the low-hanging fruit you're like people are crazy and when you interact with the general public you're like is this for real right now am i dreaming like slap me i need to i need to be dreaming right now what the yeah interfacing with the general public cannot be my favorite but it does have some silver linings for sure so yeah you get the stories you know and the stories are half the battle uh of keeping a smile on your face through the chaos what's uh what are you guys going from here you you have this facility and i'm i'm always impressed with farms that sort of make the full move and they they get to this level of um of realizing that they can do the sport of store thing because it's not easy and it's not necessarily financially solvent right out the get-go and i think a lot of people think that it is and they refuse to look at it in any other realm but i feel like once you get there then the world opens up a bit and you realize that your controls sort of lead you to what's next so what's next you know for us you know having increased block production like i was saying earlier you know being able to offer that more on the local level you know there's enough people that are starting up and beyond just like the home grower kit somebody might want to take 40 to 100 blocks at a time nothing too crazy i don't think at least in the beginning yeah but then for us we kind of want to just like cap mushroom production at x and focus on other stuff right you know like we're we've got you know about three acres of cultivatable land on the property you know i've got goats and a donkey and chickens and you know just wanted to increase the greater homestead um yeah blogging and just like forest management stuff and you know once again so i don't get burnt out on just doing mushrooms and then also kind of trying to build in more of like a holistic approach to land management and just the things that are that i find fascinating right you know like i feel like being a lifelong learner is of utmost importance to me and so you know dialing in the facility there's a a couple value-added products stuff that we're taking this year beyond the cottage food act which we've been using predominantly like our dried mushrooms and powders um and that kind of stuff and having a little bit more like distribution capability wholesale capability in that realm and then uh you know just like i said just the tinkering getting our efficiencies more dialed in here and then having maybe a small bit of time in the in the summer the crazy season to to go camping or something you know like something more like not mushroom related well you know depending on here it might be mushroom related you know we can get a pretty good porcini season or we might have pretty solid burn morels this year so we do make time together so you just slid back into it you're like i'm gonna go camping for mushrooms to get out of the mushrooms for mushrooms it's a vicious but walking around slowly looking at the ground is a little bit different than like looking at thousands of individual mushrooms that need to be cleaned up in the walk-in yeah yeah i know i stopped mushroom hunting for a long time and i finally have just started taking my dog out to like this spot we call the hobbit lands in uh hollowell it's beautiful there's like stone bridges and um just waterfalls it's the coolest spot that really not a lot of people know about and uh and i i've like year after year found mushrooms there almost by accident but now i'm starting to like make it a pattern again to just go out into the woods and like just appreciate mushrooms in the wild again because you really do get desensitized to like your entire surroundings when your world becomes how do i mechanistically make a bigger larger yield or a faster production line or whatever you're turning into your own nature's own worst enemy you know at some level so those efficiencies are fun yeah yeah i mean i like to get out i mean if we have a good wild forage scene happening for the year i mean colorado's total feast or famine right so um semi-arid state yeah last year like it was like a skunk year for everybody but the year before that we had probably one of the biggest bow leaf seasons in the last decade and like when that happens you know we have pickers coming in at the end of the day and we proofing porcini and you know grading them into

1:25:20 bins and and that so that part of it also is a bit fun i think that was something too that was super helpful for us as a business when we were experiencing some crop failure and we were just kind of not sure what to do to supplement and we started talking with some pickers and now we've got a pretty wide spread all across the country and a lot of folks locally that we buy from and that was super helpful and kind of like supplementing it and that kind of got us back into wild picking again um yeah you know it's just it's a good thing too especially for chefs or somebody comes to the farmer's market or something like that and they want to buy the shitake they want to buy your lion's mane and they're like do you have morels and if you say no you're probably stupid because you know there's plenty of field buyers there's plenty of pickers there's plenty of people that are trying to move weight and you just have to kind of get dialed into that network and uh and so you say yes i do have morels and they say okay i'll buy all three um so it was definitely there's a big fire down that way you know just which is nice because it keeps it away from just the growing right like there's so many facets of mushrooms you know i've been listening to that guy darren's mushroom hour podcast and we were just yeah like any blurb and uh in in search of microtopia a book just came out uh by doug oh i haven't read that yet yeah his name uh super cool dude he came up to the farm when he was like i'm writing a book i'm like sweet yeah you know yeah three people say that a year he wrote for like the atlantic the guardian i think and stuff so he had good credentials and then i've been reading it recently and it's just super fascinating so just getting you in touch with one other sphere of the mushroom world um no i'll have to check it out you should check it out yeah super cool dude super easy to read book um packed full of information he's definitely linked with the who's who in the mushroom world and so yeah so like that forage component of it and then just you know not that we've really pushed into that realm so much with the nutraceutical world but just like knowing more about it and just things beyond just straight cultivation because you can get that tunnel vision and then you're like i only know this one little bit about this mushroom world and mushroom world's huge so yeah um i think that was huge because you know i think at that time we we'd lost enough maybe like we bought basically a couple hundred pounds what we thought we were gonna have for a week and i had a buddy that was picking lobsters and he had like 150 pounds of lobsters he was trying to move and i was like we're going to buy them and see how this goes and then subsequently in colorado you have to have like a wild certification expert status which we have and uh we've kind of gone down that road but that was huge for us it's just kind of a diversity of stuff and being able to buffer on bad weeks and knowing enough people to be like hey you know how your basket's looking right and and being able to bring in that way which is you know diversity right just make sure you're not standing on that's like helping to supply places like yeah you know like when places like pop up near you like nap um like i have these conversations with farms all the time who have like impending competition and i'm like well work with them man because it's all you have and at the end of the day everybody's so excited to go to their first couple farmers markets with the that they produced and they have some sort of like ego bending thing that happens and then they finally say okay i can buy in a little bit i can introduce wilds i can do this it the customer wants what the customer wants at the end of the day so like you have to feed that need and simultaneously support your living you know and you can't just be like i only sell two cups that's all i do it right that's not what about coffee no good cups just two cups man you put coffee in this mug i'll kill you i'll kill you yeah i mean i think it's really a terrible example like sustainable egocentric high horse of you know i only do it this one way and blah blah blah and you know for us

1:30:20 we i think drank some of that kool-aid early on um maybe fell into that camp or would judge somebody else and then when i think about it like everybody does you know this aren't necessarily like huge distributors i mean there's a couple contacts we we buy in from distributors occasionally but the the weird network of like random pickers right we work with these czechoslovakian guys uh for quite a while and just like we'd have them up for dinner and just crush beers and talk like random right you know like my life is richer because of you um and my pocketbook is richer because of you so it's a win-win right um absolutely i'll be curious to see if with all the like crazy you know legalization decriminalization of the psychedelic world if it'll start to function in that manner because it's sort of interesting i think we've all not all of us but a fair amount of us have been in that world and it's been a boomer slinging sort of introduction into this because a lot of us that's just where you came from and then you realized you didn't want to go to jail and you said okay i can cultivate other types and not worry about that fact but i do wonder if that that will change you know i guess it depends on how you legalize it how you regulate it it's not food at that point it gets really weird maybe it follows the weed trend maybe it doesn't yeah i'm curious to i mean like you know denver being a hot spot right for the decrim thing and then you know the night it passed right i got like 100 200 emails like we want to invest in your company and it's like i don't think yeah what happened right it just means you're not going to go to jail if you got your martha stewart tent and you're apart right like right right you can chill out a little bit it's not the green rush that cannabis was but people see it as such um and they might not be super far off in the sense that like i think it could push to some degree of therapeutic use in the united states but it's just such a different animal than than cannabis uh you know i i'm yeah it's not habitual in the like random retail stores where you can buy psilocybin all over denver uh i think that's a can of worms that we don't really want to open up as a society now if it was like you won't ever go to jail for possessing or distributing these things right on a person-to-person basis different then that's different right you know um and i think it still keeps it the challenge in it right you know like if it's wide wide widely accessible i think it can like delegitimize the experience you know um not to hate on mushrooms at a fish show or something but i think that set and setting is very important if you're gonna like pull something from it and uh just getting you know hammered on your ipas and decided to eat a couple chocolates or something i don't think you're finding god in a sustainable format in my mind right right what's the uh tom waits line the devil's just god when he's drunk you know i also really enjoy the meme that i saw this morning that said ipa is just uh the white man's version of a pumpkin spice latte i was like okay that's accurate yeah that's too funny man i'm definitely an ipa drinker you know unfortunately super early and uh it's just like everybody has kind of catered to that movement i think because we can't taste anymore um and i just can slug it down if it ain't better you know it's just like what the is that um i mean apparently this is a historical phenomenon i mean when they were using hops to basically preserve the spoiling beer as they were around in the cape you know the british soldiers over there like grew a liking to it and that's kind of how it cemented itself but i think once you're there you might never go back you know yeah it it truly is man it's one of those things i've never uh i've never dipped too far into it i still drink you know the cheapest beer i can find but you know that's just me you can drink that's for sure that's very true yeah yeah you can blow up like a balloon or you know stop drinking and whatever or you just or you're you're borderline alcoholic if you just do too many uh ipa nights it's funny man how

1:35:20 that can creep up on you yeah yeah double dry hop ten percenter you know you're like you have three beers you're like smashed yeah yourself done that's true man well speaking of smashed i think it that like brings it back on this like weird level not to harp at all on the psychedelic thing but it is interesting that the majority of people that i've talked to about it don't ask for fresh mushrooms anymore they all ask for like how do i microdose how do i find how do i eat these things without having them have an effect on me which is like why don't you just eat some lettuce man i don't know what the what are you after that's my opinion about it i don't really get it but if you're not gonna go full on what the are you doing here you know so it's this interesting like uh diversion from the trippy psychedelic psychonaut into the soccer mom who wants to manage your anxiety with micro dosing i don't understand it quite yet no i mean i wish i had like something to offer or help with somebody because you know we have people that come up and they're like i'm a veteran right like i have ptsd or like i have like stream anxiety what can i do i'm like you can go on the internet and try to figure out how to grow them yourselves because you live in denver right and you're not going to go to jail for this right but you know i mean we're based in jefferson county like none of those laws apply to us right you know we're 45 minutes from denver um and you know i think more than anything it was a good conversation starter right and that's really from what i understand a lot of people that worked on like the legal initiatives associated with it and we're the same kind of people that were working with the legal initiatives with cannabis was you know it was decriminalized in denver for quite some time before it went to full legalization and medical use um oh yeah yeah maine has been slow as oh my god you can just now finally buy weed at a store without a medicinal card it's crazy it's been like years it's just slow slow you know right but the thing is you made it to the finish line right you know and it started with you know some pioneers being like we should not be putting people in jail for smoking a joint and then it slowly transpires into what it has become and yeah i'm fascinated with what you know philosophy species can do for people on the like hey i need to quit drinking or hey i haven't been happy in years and they could have these kind of the lack of a better term come to jesus moments um but they you know there has to be like a lot of intention associated with that especially with people who have like you know i don't want to call them damaged goods but people that have major issues that they're trying to sort through those people more than anybody you know like shouldn't just be able to like go full carb launch with you know you know just my computer let's heroic dose on this one you know um yeah yeah no you have to be in the right mindset and mind state to actually do it and i think that's often overlooked is the satin setting thing like you're saying and it's imperative and and a lot of the people pushing it now are just like yeah it'll solve everything and you're like not if you're not ready for it or if you're not the right person you know or do you want to hold that crazy son of a bitch's hand while he's going through this because somebody has to hold his head you know or at least be close by right you know like yeah yeah you know i have a few votes it's also recognizing it can be tragic and you can get something out of that tragedy it's like you don't just mainline dmt and be like my life's so much better now right yeah yeah so i mean i i find it fascinating when the initiative came out we as a company did not say yay or nay in favor of it um right because it really wasn't our fight it didn't directly affect us anyway you know like i said we don't live in the city and county of denver uh i i find it fascinating i think that there's a lot of untapped uh potential in that world uh you know seeing what the johns hopkins folks are doing with it and we actually were working with doing a little bit of consulting for a farm up in in canada that was they got one of the first permits to do a fully therapeutic use cultivation site um which is you know totally fascinating and we had one of their guys come down here for a couple days and um they had chat through kind of systems and what they might need because they were basically going from like a basement level cultivation to like a couple million dollar spot right i'm like that's a pretty big deal guys

1:40:21 uh but it's a heavy one yeah well but they had the backing i think you know not to be in that camp but you know with enough know-how and definitely enough backing uh you know people can pull off do whatever you want um that's true it does make the world go faster it does make the world go faster right you know and so you know just interesting to watch those guys i mean it was completely uncharted territory it was still kind of up in the air and there i mean they had thrown so much money at it before they even got permits to legally do it right like they were building out the site just so that they could be at the starting line when the shot was fired and fortunately you know it worked out in their favor they were given the permits to do it and you know it just uh yeah just totally fascinating that our neighbor country is like we're gonna explore this on a national level right you know like it just seems yeah but um yeah canada has its own interesting components to like living up there like i know talking to brad about it you know he's like i wouldn't raise a kid anywhere else but at the same time they're they're definitely like they have their issues they over regulate things they have a bit of control like on a governmental level that you kind of don't want in there you know necessarily if you're from the states so it's always it's always a question of like how much people can control what you're independently doing not business-wise but just on a personal level if you can be arrested for growing weed in canada just for yourself that's pretty up if on a national level you know it's legal it's a weird weird system they got yeah you know i'm not super verse you know i spent most of my time in british columbia and oh yeah you know living in the northwest and liz's uncle uh honorary uncle might as well be blood who's up there we would smuggle them tobacco and and alcohol because it's very expensive right you know we're like bootlegging across country lines um but you know it was like you know there's so many things you know with their healthcare other things that just were so much better than us so maybe if the grass is always greener there's always something to learn from each other and uh yeah it's always good to have a neighbor to like be envious of or weary of too you're like i don't know how's it up there and i think like that area is very it's it's peculiar like in if you're going into the northwest sort of area of canada it's wild west you know like going up into alaska or into canada or even just down in the pacific northwest it's it's weird man i think that's where evergreen and and the people who've come out of there are just bizarrely interesting people i mean there's people in whitefield like you know town over who graduated from evergreen and know everybody out there at one time or another so that's this is circle and you know the in washington has kind of a bad rap uh because it's one of those without a doubt yeah it's one of the lowest costs in state schools um you know there's not like a typical grading system um so it's really easy for people to be like these idiots these slackers these hippies these whatever you know uh these anarchists the list goes on but uh yeah you know the people you call us we are the people that i know that went to evergreen that did well right it did well in that environment that's self-driven like you have access to all these amazing things and you have these faculty that are going to help facilitate you to do all these amazing things you just have to do it um yeah those people have gone on to do the most amazing things and you know i like to access some small part of it but it's just you know some of my peers have just continued to blow my mind of just like what they've been able to pull off and they're able to pull it off because they don't need somebody to coddle them the way through it right you know that that school really fosters independent thinking independent learning and and if you can work in that environment you can pretty much do whatever you want in this world you know at least in my opinion it's totally true yeah people put on these false perceptions of what's going to stop them and if a school like that can break through to a number of kids continually on the conceptual level that nothing really can hold you back if you maintain your independence you got a world of crazy ass

1:45:21 mushroom growers in 2021 man you know oh for sure there's definitely a few much regrets that come out of there that's for sure yeah oh yeah you know and it's funny because everybody's talking about the mycelium being interconnected and that's always like a big thing that was pushed in this interdisciplinary world and how the evergreen tree that was like the emblem for evergreen state college was drawn on an etch-a-sketch because they wanted to show that it was all connected which i love hippies i love it hippies that's cool man i mean it's good to be part of those crowds like i went to a small art school and uh and it was you know mo i think it was like 70 were like lower socioeconomical blue kill ass blue collar sort of glass cats and uh and there's like a camaraderie there because you do have to survive you know you're not just like paying for school expecting to like you know get handed some and job for 100k a year right out the bat you're like no i just wasted a bunch of money to paint naked people for four years therefore i better figure out the rest of my life you know yeah but the best people are are there and you can you can make some friends for life that are just as driven to do the weirdest and those are the ones that continue to expire inspire me as well yeah you know i mean misfits have always been my crowd and you know if i stayed in maryland that's where i grew up i would have ended up dead or in jail for sure of course you know i uh you know found people that were like super creative and super you know into reading obscure stuff and was i found my little groove out there it was like what you know was i thinking if i was at one point entertaining not going west you know i got it accepted too much colleges in and around maryland and it was like this was the outlier it's 3 600 miles away or something like that you know it was like yeah this is the one this is the one and i'm gonna get the out yeah so what is your upbringing uh sort of in a in a in an i don't know in a brief description i guess is it was it did you grow up poor did you grow up with money was there any sort of uh push your own agenda be independent sort of uh circle around you at all you know my parents were kind of metaphysi type to some degree uh it's kind of a blanket statement but uh we grew up close to the dc area my parents didn't couldn't have like buying power in around the metropolitan area so they moved to the country which was definitely harsh on both my brother and i i think more so on him i was five and a half years younger had a little bit more acclimation time um but you know the town that they moved to from like a kind of metropolitan pocket of dc uh was known as the town of hills and liquor stores and um you know if that is not a place to call home i don't really know what it is and you know we i think probably went from where i grew up to being like total status quo you know middle class blue collar mix to being like relatively well to do because my dad still took the train into dc to work and they had a couple acres and that kind of thing um but you know it's just the area has gotten a lot cooler i will give it that since i've left but it was definitely you know heroin was super big uh still is but uh you know i i lost a lot of friends and acquaintances uh you know even before i left for for college um it was just a lot of like sad stories you know just drug abuse and alcoholism and um just getting into trouble which i got into quite a bit of it myself and uh but i was always just like the kid who still went home and read a couple like random books you know terence mckenna food of the gods and sophomore year you know or you know dad gave me a be here now book you know when i was freshman in high school and some of these like yeah you know kind of electric kool-aid acid tests and uh hunters thompson's hells angels and like that whole era of reading uh i was doing a lot of that and these guys were getting weird but they're smart you guys are idiots and so i was like this is not my crowd like we might have some things in common but i don't think this is the best place

1:50:21 for me to spend my time and then i like i said i've you know went out to the west coast and definitely found a better vibe and crowd and then like i said i've had some friends going on to do great stuff where i'm from and i'm super proud of them and proud of the effort and diligence they put into making this kind of rural community cool and bringing in arts and music and that kind of stuff but you know it's definitely uphill battle and knowing kind of the crowd yeah well i mean it was it was not going to be pretty there are those who like stay where they grew up and they they flourish or they they falter and there are those who just go away and they they make a difference in a different place and time and i think it's it's a lot to like know your trajectory and just follow it through that's huge because you think of all the things you would have never gone through if you didn't just leave you know and i remember leaving home for the first time and traveling as far as i did and it changes you like entirely and then you go back to like your hometown you see the same people doing the same and you're like they never got out like never got out you know and for some reason you're like i guess that's okay with them i it wasn't for me totally you know i mean more power to you you know everybody's life's their own one to live but it was definitely not work out well for me and uh you know i think that just like any biological life to some degree it it strengthens by pushing its boundaries and contracting where need be and you know even see that in the mushroom world and just watching mycelium grow and and if you're playing around with different mixtures and stuff you can see where it's struggling on a new substrate or it's learning how to adapt to it or whatnot you know and and it's a good kind of like metaphor for life in the sense that you know we can get bigger from it in the end but i think it's important to to make sure that whether it's your body and you're exercising or whatever you're just you gotta you gotta push it a little bit or else yeah there's no greater growth right and i feel like we're on this earth at the very least to learn to be better um and ideally learn to to help and what all comes from that so yeah it's true man i mean if mushrooms have done anything they just remind me that i gotta drink more water during the day i'm like those live in that right exactly you know well hydrated yeah and when they're not they're pissed right you know living in a dry state you know it's just like it'll suck it out of you you know right now we're in our moisture gathering time we get you know like last last night i was out working on the container and we got two inches in like 45 minutes right you know just dump right but you know by by mid-july you know it's going to be crunchy out there right and then just the sun and it's like you need to drain or your feet brown and your skin is going to crack and fall off yeah get to it brother yeah man i remember the first time being out in the desert and then subsequent times people are just like you realize like how you make beef jerky right you just put something like that in an oven well you're in an oven now and you're essentially human beef jerky so drink some water and wear some long-sleeve shirts that are white you know like do anything to try to dehydrate don't dehydrate yourself because it's gonna happen all too fast and when you live in those diverse climates that are like really nice and then they're like hostile you forget you know and you're like oh my god i am beef jerky there's like this like zine with burning man and it's called piss clear and that's like it's a whole thing right like you know if you're not pissing clear at least some part of the day you are up like get it together come on yeah is that more of the scene there like i've never been to burning man i've heard so much about it and just refused to go because i i really can't take that many people in one place but is it more supportive in that manner or is it like a combination of the complete burnouts and then the you know the water drinkers so to speak you know i would say it's more like kind of a hessian culture right it's just it's kind of like gnarly like people are very complimentary and loving of each other but they will still bust your balls in a heartbeat like i love that it wasn't like a grateful dead show like give me a hug i love you it's so great

1:55:22 to see you it's just like right you dropped something like you're gonna pick that up right yeah okay cool i don't know that's a little high shoot oh that's great i love it i love that tough love right and there's definitely a lot of heckling you know and you'll have you know one year we'll be next to like the electroshock therapy camp and they've got like asian like tiny bikinis with cattle prods just shocking people that's their gift to the universe right or like the jesus you know there's just such a such a wide breadth of people and they're mainly just building to make each other laugh which that's my favorite part of it right there's like no real point oh man humor rainbow gathering kind of crowd for sure it is definitely it's good you have to have yourself that's good to know man yeah yeah i mean you are like gonna make it out there into a town that doesn't exist before or after you know so it's it has this like conceptual esoteric and and very existential like basis in general so you're just you might as well have that i don't know predisposition to understanding those weird facets and being able to play with them in your head to to get excited out there which is cool that's what i kind of thought it was but i wasn't sure you know i was like i don't know i don't know how many times people have been like you should come out and i'm like no i mean you would love it being a gear head and just like like the the stuff that people fabricate the cars i mean we made it in motor trend magazine uh two years ago for the art car we built we split a pt cruiser in half that was our last one put in like big rear coils we got 26 people on that thing cruising down the plot holy like taking that pt loser and giving it a whole new life um yeah dude oh my god those pt cruisers when they first came out they were terrifying i was like look at that mini hearse man what is happening in there then you try to get in one and you like sit in the back and you're like i'm gonna die of claustrophobia back here get me the out well they've got the same engine as the dodge neon so just imagine a neon with 20 people on it right you know it's impressive with what you can do but you know just it's the scale of the art the scale of the know-how the scale of just like you know a group of people that come out and they go you know there is not a single trash can there but there's no trash right you know there is no restaurant there there's no place where you can buy food but there's abundance of food to eat uh and it's just it's cool how it all works out um you know and it's just a temporary societal experiment i mean it's changed a lot over the course the time that we've gone i think population has more than doubled since we first started going but uh you know for us it was just like a fascinating thing to kind of be involved in and um yeah you know we'd be next to dr bronner's camp and they've got these giant showers right and people like hosing you down from up on top and you're just in the sea of 180 people right you know and you're just like this is weird but i'm getting clean and weird it's so good well i know it's sort of like it speaks to that weird coming from the east coast world and going towards the west like you and i i think have both done like i was blown away when we got to san francisco and there was like recycling it was like paper plastic glass trash compost everywhere you went and i was like what the have we been doing my entire life like on the east coast you don't realize that like uh not that far away few thousand miles people operate completely different you know it's it's like a strange reality shock you know and then you go into these other worlds like burning man and it's nuts that this many people can make this happen you know yeah i mean thank god it only lasts 10 days i think it would fall apart at like that three week mark right yeah yeah i wonder like who figured that out water and they're just like well what are we doing now we're slowly desiccating in the sun is what's happening but uh yeah yeah it's the only place in the earth you could do it though definitely a funny place it is my man well what would you i you know i i hate to make this like generic question but like um what would you offer as just a small bit of advice to people who are getting into this because there are a lot it's crazy and and they all ask all of us for consultations or

2:00:23 hours of our time or emails or whatever and and i can't ever nail it down to one thing that i've learned that makes the most sense but maybe you can i think the biggest takeaway and just kind of like a motto we have around here is just be okay with failing forward and you know it's hard right you know it's like you're gonna get your ass kicked you're gonna think that you're doing great and then it all falls apart but it's it's about perseverance right we're not on a sprint we're in a marathon and um you know not that i've done much long distance running but i hear that there's a runner's high that one achieves deep in the in the flow of the run and i think that you can get to that in this mushroom cultivation world or even just like any business really like you've been doing it long enough like i remember reading malcolm gladwell's outliers and um one of the things that was highlighted in that was just like just time and dedication right so you might not necessarily be amazing at something but if you're willing to just put in the time and the effort and just keep getting up and keep getting up and keep getting up that there hits a point where you like you can touch the magic right and the magic becomes one with you and yeah you're like oh yep you know it's so hard for me when we do bring in staff you know and we're not fully staffed year-round uh because of our seasonality but you know we usually have one to two people helping us for the season and kind of bringing them up to speed but there's so many things that are like almost impossible for me to explain as far as just like the people i check in with and how it all works because it's such an intuitive part of me and i just know how right i know how to make it work like yeah we've got a shortage of mushrooms this week or we've got a glut of mushrooms this week they always find homes or it all figures itself out how does it it's hard to put in the standard operating practice i really don't know how the it happens but i know that i've been doing it enough that it does and very little goes in the dehydrator or nothing actually gets composted and so you know i think that's what it really comes down to in my mind is is just like have the stones to keep going right and grind hard yeah i think that's it just keep cruising yeah nobody likes a quitter so yeah second place is the first loser no no it's it's true that perseverance is huge man and i think that that statement offers up a lot to people who uh you know might think that this is like a very quick way to make cash or start a business and uh it's not it's farming you know it takes an incredible amount of time and dedication and in sleepless nights thinking about how to make stupid things work when they don't want to work you know and expecting there to be only success is just asking for failure so i'm right there with you man yeah i know for sure it's definitely you know the farming world's like the only you know major enterprise that'll spend a million to make a hundred grand right and it's true i mean there's very few enterprises they're like that's a good allocation of resources you know i think we'll do that yeah it's true it's pure dumb mastery but you know it's beautiful it's uh i always um attribute it to being similar to something i'm super jealous of and i always insult these individuals because they never look at it this way but i've come across so many people who are in the um like programming worlds they're in the internet world everything they do in the app ones and zeros it doesn't matter the like literally electricity goes away and it their all of their work has disappeared and it's gone for ever if it doesn't come back so to speak and there's something so beautiful about that you know and it's it's what you put into something like that that really it's just cool you know and i feel like the same thing goes for for how mushroom farms evolve you just have like a back 40 full of failed experiments and uh you'll use portions of that you know you better have some good storage because you're gonna tear apart and rebuild weird stuff into frankenstein equipment yeah the other the other tip is make sure you have a horde make it organized but sure you have a horde of some sort right yeah totally make sure it's covered in a tarp you know don't let it rain on that pile of

2:05:24 ideally but if you don't have a child still have a horde it oh my god well thanks for doing this man i really appreciate it and i appreciate what you guys are doing and you know congratulations on the kid and and where you guys are at i'm i'm impressed man every time a farm gets to this like sort of level i'm stoked for them so i'm stoked for you guys and i'm excited to see what becomes of it all oh yeah well much appreciated you know we couldn't do it without great folks like you guys and we've learned a lot over the years through all the community and there's definitely something to be said that you know before youtube channels were you know omnipresent it's it's nice that we were able to kind of do it by leaning on each other and asking the right questions and knowing the right people and it feels more of a rootsy way to to to make it so it's been a fun journey been a pleasure to be on here tonight yeah man thanks for being on here and uh we'll touch base again and uh yeah we'll talk soon man all right this episode is dedicated to one of our first employees young sheamus or as the adults call him sean mulkern i gotta have you on the podcast one of these days sean so we can talk about the olden days of Cap N Stem stay sane out there on the west coast buddy thanks so much for listening to the show this week you can follow or subscribe to micah wizards wherever you get your podcasts and write to us p.o box 897 in gardiner maine because i like that snail mail if you want to follow us on instagram head on over to micah wizards podcast or Maine Cap N Stem mushroom company hat main Cap N Stem i don't know what it is you'll find us this episode was produced and sponsored by Maine Cap N Stem mushroom company with music composed by damon hicks head on over to captainstem.com for certified organic substrate and spawn for all your mycological needs and until next time later on do so you