Inside New Hampshire Mushroom Company | MycoWizards S1E2

0:10 hello everybody my name is eric lohmann your humble host of the mico wizards podcast welcome to our second episode ever today on the show we've got eric milligan of new hampshire mushroom company eric's been a long time friend of mine i think he started new hampshire mushroom company a year before we started Cap N Stem and we've kept up pretty much ever since the day we met he's a true blue mycological mad dog he is full of failures and successes and explanations and he doesn't hold anything back the dude is one of the funniest dudes that i know and i am just so stoked to be able to call him a friend and have had him on this podcast um i really hope you guys enjoy this episode if you made it through the first one with sam and soraya of nearby naturals i was about an hour and a half this one's a little bit longer i think eric and i talked for about uh about four hours on a sunday uh a few weeks back and we had a blast we didn't realize in the dark studio that it had been uh four hours but uh there was a moment there at the end where i think we both had rising vibes of paranoia like we were missing something or forgetting to turn a boiler off or throw wood in the fire or whatever the needs to be done at our respective mycological locations so without further ado enjoy the episode we'll see you in two more weeks talking about podcasts yesterday they're like oh yeah interlude music and then there's editing and then there's weird spots oh yeah like anytime you hear something that's on there they're like unless you've got like the team of people on like rogan's right you'll be able to like quickly look up stuff and be like oh yeah doing his own fact checking in between yeah and it's you know that's like a portion of this if it gets to that level that'd be kind of cool but like this is just us sponsoring our own thing to basically have conversations we don't usually talk mushroom farmers are notoriously like but when we talk with one another it's interesting yeah talking shop or yeah yeah that's when i screwed up this week just talking to you oh yeah yeah yeah taco shop we're like yeah oh dude it's so it's well it's interesting stuff and i think that that's what a growing number of people kind of want to hear i mean if there's anything more fluid than mushroom farming yeah you know i could say 20 20. it's about as structured as you could get mushroom farmers that's totally true man i know you and i have had that conversation a lot lately is the people who are just getting into this don't realize that like i think 2020 for us was a challenge just to to work with customers but that was pretty much it you know the rest of time you're used to just like hustling and trying to figure it out you know and now it's i don't think i have ever worked so hard to produce a little yeah at the end of the year right right you know i mean i'm used to you know the crap hitting the fan yeah but at least i'm not throwing at this time which really puts a whole different dynamic yep i think mushroom farm you know i'm at a size farm where you know i'm not just farmers markets right you know restaurants and then wholesale yeah so all of our business focus was on you know i know 150 200 restaurants yep and um you know wholesalers that sell directly to restaurants right so i mean the farmers markets and then all the restaurants and those closing down yeah it was all right well now what right you know i'm a size structure where i've got to produce a certain amount to keep the lights on right which ends up being more than say i was just in a garage and doing a pop-up market and i'm selling everything that's the interesting the best thing that i've seen with farms that are of that size like the garage size is they can very easily like shrink they can contract and expand on a given notice as long as they call us and they can get blocks they're they're like if it's in their garage they're not really paying rent you know they can just make it work even if it's their own farm and it's just an extra building yeah they can just expand and contract expand and contract not everybody can do that but it does lend itself to that concept lends itself to the sustainability of this like super fresh and volatile product you know so it's interesting to see more and more of the small farms staying small and not going anywhere and you and i have talked about this a lot over the years i mean you reach a certain cusp and my experience is all new england yeah you know so you reach a certain cusp of what you can sell retail right and in order to continue to sell retail your distribution network becomes larger than what's sustainable in regards to time and ability right and so i'm a huge fan of having lots of small farms that can purchase blocks yeah

5:10 you know and and and have that diversity because much smaller distribution networks grow a higher quality product yeah for sure yeah you know i mean what was it eight years ago eight years ago i'm like i'm gonna take over take over the world well i remember you know everyone's grown up to you we were like trying to figure out where like you know i came out with john and elia and matt for that like sunday tour yeah yeah because you're like whoa this dude does tours i don't think we if we talked before then i didn't i know i recognized you because i was about halfway through the tournament yo we can't be nice ginger viking and when oh and everybody let's make sure i say things not made up today because we have other mushroom farmers in the house you immediately i think recognize this and we're just like on that level of like okay i'm like oh well what's what the hell is he why is he looking at my numbers what's why is he looking at my co2 why is he looking at my humidity i hope he's not taking that down because those those sensors haven't read right for over a year i hope he doesn't think that those grow rooms should be at 63 human to be oh my god yeah it was more just like fascinating to like enter that world and uh and the conversations that i have now with farms that were either at where we were at then they've never even visited a mushroom farm so like yeah and i don't know if matt and john and elia would have gone out to you if i hadn't been like let's go let's just check it out he does tours the is he gonna do turn this away right i didn't know you you know so i was like oh dude this is how we figure it out this is how i employed this thing well my the other owners because i mean so you started with dennis and you and i've got eight owners okay all right you know i have no collateral no equity yeah so i had to sell the idea yeah you know and i had investors that that put money in under the idea that you know they would be completely silent yeah in regards to operating the business as long as i promise to stop talking to them about mushrooms just and so some of the owners that were directly involved at the time that you would come out for the tour yeah were like hey don't give away all the secrets don't give all in my mind thinking i don't know any of this stuff right we're gonna share some information yeah and you're like so i employed this technique of well i i have been known to be a chatty cathy and it's it's it's you give out all the right information yeah and then so much other right information it becomes overwhelming like i the dude talked like four hours i have no idea what he said yeah yeah that's totally true this is the business of variables nobody listens half the time either like if you ever had a consult with a smaller farm or something you give them all the you're like this is the gem this is the stuff this is what gets you going and they're like yeah i'm gonna do it a different way and you're like man you know and like not in a defeat level but you're just like i'm trying to share something that i think is really going to help you that's been the hardest part for communicating with newer farms it is i mean one of the keys to any sort of the success is literally doing something how you think it should work yeah for so long yeah and making one little tiny tweak and a change in the entire game changes it all and being open to like adapt and evolve yeah yeah you know i mean we go up and down up and down up and down do i get the yields i want yeah well i mean this is a podcast i'm going to say sure yeah sure i get all these i get all the yields yeah i get about you know eight pounds on a five pound block you know first flush first blush and i only i only flushed nine ten times i get so many eye rolls when i'm like nope i turn and burn turn and burn turn and burn because i've only got so much space yeah real estate is everything um and then when your compost has a higher value margin then then you'll finish anything else you do well it's true man and then we just took the concept and turned it on its side and out of you know sort of a reaction to the number of forms growing we were like why don't we just why don't we just supply people you know and i think a lot of farms didn't want to take that approach they didn't want to incite competition but a lot of the people who came into it didn't come into it like buying a mushroom farm like your your farm was a mushroom farm wasn't it no no okay you did you buy it so i didn't start in the garage you know i well my background of course studying theater in college yeah not having a face for leading roles thus the sunday tour i know well no they people ask me all the time what what got you involved in you know mushrooms to now my answer is just like drugs and alcohol mostly i needed a way to pay yeah drugs drugs and alcohol mostly but actually i really think that the answer has changed over the years because i mean having that theater background wanted to

10:10 be a performer but wanting to make money and then i spent several years traveling yeah and then when i came back from traveling you know i wound up in new hampshire grew up in maine and you know i read an article about this mushroom farm and i'm like that's cool and showed up with work boots on and worked there for like six months yeah and learned how to do it i mean we grew this was in i don't know 2000 1999 2000 was the name of this farm it was white mountain mushroom my mouth mushroom and um you know he was an interesting dude uh i mean he had been in business for about 10 years and get started by growing shiitakes in his driveway and scooping damn and me and one other kid we did 900 six-pound bags a week in a little tiny basement and we grew lion's mane and blues and chestnuts how old are you then this is 90 99. yeah 20 earl mid 23 yep yeah 22 23 and that seems to be the entrance age still unless you're like a farmer getting into it as well i mean it's past college i'd spent all this time traveling and realized it you know whatever i was searching for wasn't gonna happen you know searching for because i always traveled alone yeah you know there you are in like some really cool city like hey look at that oh that's right i'm by myself i remember yeah you and uh frank and i had a conversation about this in that bar when you came up to visit one time or another because here and i spent a lot of time traveling separate and together and it was like i remember you saying that it was it's hard to travel alone well you know there's pros and cons yeah and in the pros being that like when you're hungry you eat you know if you don't want right yeah if you want to go to a spot i mean there i am in liverpool yeah hmm and this is when i was traveling with my friend mary you know we were in liverpool and like well where should we go next and she's like i want a spanish guitar like oh for 99 euros we can be in barcelona in an hour and a half yeah off to barcelona we go and so i really my one of my last trips to europe literally i stayed on a beach in holland for like two months yeah because at that point i mean it's exhausting to travel yeah and i snore so loud i got a whole room to myself for like 10 euro a night they're like we'll pay you to go in the other room i got to see uh kirkanov which is where all the tulips you know like four foot high tulips i'm like oh wow and like i was walking through an impressionist painting for the entire day yeah and people like oh why are you staying here for so long i'm like well i really like talking to people from around the world but i'm sick of wasting the energy to go and meet them myself they're coming i will stay here where i'm comfortable and then it's got a whole new batch of people each week yeah you know and they're talking like oh you know mushrooms and this and that and they're like all theater and you've got an engineering and carpentry background yeah so i showed up at that farm in new hampshire and i'm like i want to work and i worked there was eight months yeah um the guy had a problem with a bunch of things uh one of which paying people to work uh right yo do you forget like six months of pay out of the eight months yeah and i i slipped and and broke my leg there spiral fracture like i went from trying to check on how many blue oysters we had yeah to literally being in surgery having my leg put back together in like six hours yeah and i didn't walk for four months right and here i am a labor i'm broke and uh living right on lake winnipesaukee yeah and we had imported wild mushrooms from around the world so i'm like well if i get to get a job you know i'd call this guy up and i'm like you're gonna pay me the back pay and he's like nah i'm like alright well you know i'm gonna eat and so i gotta drop a job in the marine industry yeah saying boy you know if that guy could be a mushroom farm maybe i could be a mushroom farm and started rehabbing my lake hiking through the white mountains yep you know you you look down and you're like holy look at this shannon ralph just just hanging in there laying on the ground like there's like dollar bills are just sitting there yeah and then you're looking like well that's a that's a matsutake but that's like a hundred pounds of matsutaki and so i spent literally an entire summer hiking four or five locations two or three times a week oh and saying what's this mushroom and what's that mushroom what's this mushroom and teaching myself my ecology start going on four days yeah you know and and i'm you know i'm working at the marine industry saying one day i'm gonna be a mushroom farmer and i'm learning my ecology here eat this you know try this one yeah yeah you know and and i got a call from a guy that owned a greenhouse in that town saying hey remember that

15:10 mushroom farmer you work for and i'm like yeah he's like he got in trouble and i'm like what he got in trouble oh yeah he's out of business he was arrested for selling non-taxable flowers and i'm like non-taxable oh yeah i got you i'm like yeah that doesn't that doesn't surprise me that doesn't surprise me well he was doing that expansion and and unfortunately as the story takes a downturn unfortunately he did pass away he did and i'm not going to explain how but there was a lot of things that had gone on well he was doing a 10 000 square foot expansion which is why you want me to work for free this is near in lake winnipesaukee area within a half an hour this isn't freedom okay so right on the main new hampshire line yeah okay and um he's like well he had all that damn equipment he's like they're having a no minimum no reserve auction and i'm like holy crap so literally that day and nobody knows what this equipment is then i didn't know what it was what some of it was yeah yeah and so there were six people there yeah no minimum no reserve you know and they're like all right well we're gonna start with this we don't even know what it is and i'm like it's a 12 by 10 by 25 foot metal steam box yeah for pasteurization they're like oh solid metal six-inch solid metal door like we're gonna start the bidding at three thousand well when it got down to ten bucks i'm like i'll take it i'll take it and that was on everything i mean i remember like walking around the back of new hampshire mushroom company with norsboro then and being like where did he get this chinese equipment yeah literally what is that yeah and i'm like ah that's a 20-foot double-door autoclave what are you doing with it sitting on it it's there what is this one oh that's a that's a full sterilization hundred bagger and that's another one yeah and what is this damn thing oh that's a big boiler but i think it's fro i mean three or four mixers and duct work and in fact i actually went back to that farm because i bought all the stuff yeah but i still had no money to start a mushroom farm well the guy that he's like oh you're in the marine industry put it up in my back feel and shrink wrap it like it's a boat wow and so i did that i sat there for six years while i wrote a business plan oh well it takes a while if you have no money and you're doing something like mushrooms to sell that idea to people oh yeah you know and and and learning because i wanted with wild mushrooms as well yeah you know having a whole component of it and i'm like wow this is the first time in my life where i'm like not bored in like three minutes dude people with 80d are immediately drawn to mushrooms yeah because there's just so it's just you learn something new every day i mean there you're like you go to a my college like i can't find this mushroom in a book yeah yeah you know i don't even know where to idea and you realize it has only been found a couple of times or it's not known to science or right which in this world if everything's been found you're like oh i'm finding new stuff this is pioneering all the time and especially with going to the same areas yeah for an entire season whether it was wet or dry yeah and seeing that change from year to year for several years yep you could go like oh well i know that you know when angela's variation fruit's there yeah i know that shannarelles are there yeah and then really just kind of like learning them put them in your back pocket so you've got that yeah you know hey when i'm with random people at a rest stop and i'm like you can eat this and you know i mean that's another reason why i say when you know people say why do you mushroom farm when i say because no one knows anything about mushrooms yeah you know you don't have to know much to sound wicked smile you really don't you got some latin down you don't even know how i know i'm not pronouncing it right my still my favorite thing is to like play with that philosophy thing and just say it around people who you know yes that's the biggest one that's the biggest one i'll say i'll say philosophy and they'll be like what yeah so now that's right no it's suicide i'm like you can say whatever you want and do but i mean if i'm looking at clitosc i'm not saying cla toss-up i or whatever you know and and now i've said it for so long you know that that's what you start talking about philosophies i mean well it's actually kind of cool eight years ago you know and we're opening up our doors to let everyone come in yeah after about the first year doing about 11 or 12 tours a week yeah i decided to just do a noon tour you're doing that many in a week oh yeah that was with doing trying to do full production and we're at like 1500 bags a week or so you're one of the only farms in new england to ever do tours of

20:10 your facility like openly i can't think of another farm well i mean you couldn't just go to a store and purchase these things so here i am growing ten right different species that people like well what the hell is that thing is that a snowball you gotta tell them and i'm like so if i can have a conversation you know and have that one-on-one contact with my end user which you enjoy yeah i mean it gives me a chance to vent i can perform without having to leave my house because i live at the farm right um and i'm gonna gain long-term clients yeah because people really had no idea i mean how people show up in the rain and be like hey we're ready to go out and see the mushroom fields they're like where is the cave why are there lights on in here i thought it was supposed to smell like yeah you know this is like sterile and clean i think when we were there there were at least two people who'd been there like multiple times and they just like liked being there whether or not they would bring yeah they were they would bring family members that came to visit yeah because they're like we would try to explain this but the dude just rambled for like he told us the tour was going to be 45 minutes and at like two hours the guy is still talking and he's got his hands up and he's he's j he's animated yeah he's animated but we have no idea what he's talking about and listen it also boosted sunday sales which is a fairly slow day oh but i mean with something you don't even advertise yeah and then you start getting like averaging between like 25 and 55 people on a sunday yeah it's a few hundred pounds of mushrooms yeah you're okay and and i'm like wow so maybe there's a whole thing to this agritourism right well maybe we can start maybe we know enough now that we can start teaching classes yeah you know because you get that you know can you eat it can you eat it can you eat it everybody wants to that's why we call them the can you eat it classes you know i bring a mycologist in i cook up this nice fancy mushroom meal for everybody yeah and everyone has a great time i'm more of a layman side where i know i'm pronouncing science wrong right um you know if you can't eat it sell it you know i'm like yeah okay that's yes that is another russella you know just yes okay that's another russell that's a honey mushroom yeah the amount of people that now like eight years later they're like deep into like this is their hobby mushroom hunting foraging is their hobby yeah and some of these people have gone on to now they're already teaching yep and at multiple oh i saw you speak at this event and i saw you speak at this event and this become this became so much more uh complicated to explain to like a banker because when they ask you like so how does a company find you to buy substrate or spawn from i'm like well you have to step back for a minute and realize that most of these companies started as a guy that grew a block that had an idea that they could grow more mushrooms and then they just kept buying blocks from us that's how it that's how it happens it's not like some company that's in existence called us and we're like hey can we buy from you now that happens so rarely yeah no but it will happen more oh yeah it's going to transition i mean well i mean put it this way i mean limited genetics yeah you know several years ago i mean i grew the genetics that i knew oh dude we stole the best ones from you yeah well yeah don't don't go and publish that yeah i didn't do it intentionally but i remember we knew so little about genetics sort of like yeah what you're supposed to do i'm like can you have some spawn you know you should try it you're gonna love these chestnuts man no one only one place i know of is growing them in california and they don't even call them chestnuts they're cinnamon caps you know i'm like try these things yeah all of a sudden northwest micheladra's calling me out like you handing out bags of spawn no it's just the industry is blowing the up you know right i mean as soon as people started eating those chestnuts they're like holy yeah they're like i want those every week i'm like i wish i could consistently grow them every week i know and that's that's one of the most interesting species in particular because i remember when dennis was dropping off stuff to rosemont and i don't think even billing rosemont this is like i'll drag some of your drama into this because i was in the middle of it i would just see like these boxes of chestnuts and i would just steal a cap and i'd be like cool and then i'd clone it or i'd steal baby kings or whatever you know i didn't know who northwest mycological was at the time i was just i only knew them because that was genetics that was the where we ordered spawn and bags from when i worked at that other mushroom farm yeah yeah you know of course mushrooms farms themselves what was it like when we both started 23 organic mushroom farms yeah if that and i don't even have any idea what it is now oh it's insane well just who cares if they're even organic just the the amount of farms is i can't count them anymore

25:11 every morning if i go on instagram there's new ones and i'm like what in the i'm wondering how many of these people came for a tour i'm amazed that these people know who the you are and know who i are because we we don't we're not talking about tons of people things go online but i'm not online looking at stuff i'm too busy farming like every time i say well you know eric new hampshire mushroom company they're like oh yeah like in there so they you if you've had this presence for a while they know that you're there and there's still this entrance of like how people get into this and for some reason i mean i always boast that despite john john and and uh listen john's been doing this for like forever 40 years yeah it's a different thing now all together right yeah and that's part of the reason that uh i think he he sort of like kind of grappled with like how to capture and hold your own genetics and blah blah blah to which i had a long conversation with um andrew collier read about this and he said like so for so long people have been like preserving genetics instead of creating biodiversity we're just preserving the biodiversity we have so what he's doing and uh and a lot of people are like he's not really doing this i've i had him on we had a conversation he tells me how he does it it's not far from the cubensis thing you take spore syringes you inject them into a media whatever mushrooms grow out aren't necessarily the same phenotype so whatever you clone becomes a single phenotype he's basically taking spores or a spore print from like a 123 lambert and uh 3015 putting them into um like a slurry bath and then streaking that on plates and isolating out genetics and he'll get the craziest mushrooms yeah so like that is something that's new that people are stealing almost back from the the inevitability of the cubensis growing to be able to apply to the commercial world and it's just not that hard but people like john i think and people of that 40 year ago industry they tried so hard to sort of like they grabbed these specifically cultured and adapted phenotypes and figured out how to preserve them extremely well to which we still do everybody still does but for so long people haven't worried about the actual generation of more biodiversity right now exactly well when those were developed yeah 40 literally 40 i'm growing a clone yeah of something that was literally picked in the wild 35 40 years i'm using the same chestnut culture uncloned that i stole out of rosemont's cooler after dennis dropped it off 10 years ago right it's the same thing you know that weirds me out on some level lucky enough that one's really aggressive yeah and really good you know when i go it's very difficult now i try to shy away from social media myself even though there's a presence that looks like i'm doing it somebody else is doing this that's the best um because whenever i see instagram you know i mean like oh my god look at that that mushroom farmer and that mushroom farmer and that much look at me look at how awesome those things are why do i still suck after this long not knowing that like instagram's like the highlight reel yeah of course and then it's like all right well every time that i see you know adipose out there on instagram and and it's being called a chestnut yep i say i know that those are being grown right after right main Cap N Stem and myself were doing them because everyone else would have called them cinnamon cats do you had to push the chestnut thing people are i was like a cinnamon cap is a brick cap is a it's like it's two different mushrooms i was like what are you why are you choosing to call this a cinnamon gap oh cause the little white things on top oh i called it listen i call it chestnut because the dude in freedom called it a chestnut yeah that's how i knew it yeah yeah yeah that's how we i caught lion's mane bear's head in fact i still do it when i called chris from mycopia um about bottle technology back when we were in westbrook and you and i had first met we were we're trying to figure it out because we were doing the sport of store thing and uh and we weren't buying in spawn just yet and um he's like are you actually you just keep saying chestnut are you actually growing chestnut and i was like like foliotipas and he was like yeah and i was like yes and he was like oh that's curious that's the first mushroom we ever cultivated yeah and i was like that's wild they cut it off because i guess the shelf life was and bottles didn't make sense for it i tell you what that's the biggest one where i see like oh great big beautiful chestnuts yeah you're like oh look at those i'm like oh no you're down to like a five-day shelf life yeah yeah pick that six hours earlier damn yeah and they grow fast once they're growing i tell you what though if they overgrow and you dry them it makes one of the best mushroom powders man dude what did uh so a lot of people are asking how to grow chestnuts specifically because we just started offering those kits online and when it's this conversation i had with andrew collier reed he um he essentially had this chef show him

30:13 how they cooked chestnuts and it changed his perception of him because he hated him and in this comment he said one of my chefs salt brine fermented the chestnuts i don't know for how long but the caps were disintegrated in the mixture he then cooked it down to a thick syrup i think either way it was amazing so the fact that like chefs and farmers are strategically in two different worlds and semi working together in these manners just brings to life the mushrooms it's not just like you and i bringing them around i'm sure enough chefs got them and they were like well these are sweet uh was it at least once a year we would do a farm open house yeah and invite chefs yeah to come in because one when people comparing mushrooms like holy you know these are expensive you know when you're like 16 bucks a pound and they're like what oh my i could get a steak for that and they come in the farm and they see the process of it they're like how many of those do you do a week and how many times does it go by hand and yeah oh well no wonder it's so expensive yeah and now you said cook those chestnuts right well i didn't now i got the shits yeah and like i had a farmer's market make me pull chestnuts for a summer because someone you know ate them raw and then he had a second problem because he cooked him yep because he liked them so much yeah and had the same issue well comes to find out that dude ate three pounds of them in one sitting oh my god yeah you know so and now i can't keep them i mean that's they're always gone oh yeah you know chestnuts are always gone yep um maybe that's because i can't grow them for crap actually it's a lot more it's a lot more when you think of folio adipose like if you're in new england you feel looking at the cousins of other foliots squarosa square zodies uh flammans you're finding them on really punky wood yeah okay so a lot when we're using oak yeah and i'm finding the foliage on birch really punky birch but we're using oak and soy or wheat mids or you know whatever um it's almost like fully yoda's a secondary decomposer yeah you know so you know oh wow why is it colonizing better on older sawdust yeah you know and never jump that gun to be like boy i wonder how that would do on so spent substrate i brought that up but it was i think it was to amy and uh and i think i'm gonna blow minds for it in some regard or another the people who have the best luck growing chestnuts in regards like block to block are going to be the people who run them just on kiln-dried uh wood pellets for some reason we when we're using just 100 raw before these combo pellets when we tried to make the switch from five pounds to ten pound blocks it was like a pound and a quarter to a ten pound on a five pound block to just under two pounds didn't make any sense to switch them over to a ten pound block the minute we started switching to kiln dried oak and and the hulls in that combo pellet every block was producing the same as long as you cut into the substrate enough and it's sort of like is that that that well-timed sort of avenue every block was producing like up to three pounds and we were like what in the there's something there's a relation between that kiln-dried aspect like you're saying in this it's gonna it's gotta be something to do with the tannins it's gotta be it's got it there's something in there yeah that's inhibiting that growth yeah and moisture i mean when i was growing it on wheat mids yeah you know and i'm keeping that they took longer to incubate sure sure you know and and there i've got my incubation offices and yeah i mean i was incubating those 55 yeah to 60 days oh yeah and i mean i'm getting a big thick mass of my psyllium on the top and yep all of a sudden the radiant heat system freaks out i've got 1500 chestnuts and variations of growth in these two offices yeah and i'm like oh my god it's 85 degrees in here these blocks are going to explode i'm like well it's 40 degrees outside yeah let me just open these windows cool everything down which worked great yeah so until like literally 18 hours later i walk through and go what is that and i've got like 1500 chestnut bags all pinning yeah from 20 days incubation to 60 days um what are we doing today i think we're loading some freaking chestnuts and so now like literally like i just like well that was a mistake yeah but now the mistakes are now called serendipitous moments because now i get the damn thing to grow in like 40 days yeah yeah yeah that's awesome but it's still really an inconsistent one i mean you know not incubating it too long and they're not going to pin in the right spot yep the way that i'm doing it the substrate size really has a difference on what the end mushroom is going to be oh for sure and like the colder it is they get like these little tiny needle stems yeah you know we had one winter where like

35:14 literally it looked like i was growing in no keys right i know what you're saying too you know but caps don't even grow up there's just a plethora just yeah you're like oh my it's ready to pick yeah but i've got like no mushroom here yeah i mean we took i mean everything where i had 55 gallon drums where i would take compost yeah and like just fill up 55 gallon drums with like i don't know 40 or 50 spent chestnut blocks that we had just picked yeah oh it took like 60 days but you get like 20 pounds off from it yeah and like literally like half pound buttons you know and they weren't gorgeous i'm like oh jeez you can get these monsters yeah out of these things um yeah you sort of have figured out the like the shocking aspect when it comes to cold and light because you've been doing sort of those like insane as i put it insane spaceship experiments with like kings for a long time like these like cooling chambers with lights and and similar things like seeing that happen uh almost serendipitous accidents with things like chestnuts i don't think a lot of people around with shocking anymore not to the same degree i i needed to because i mean listen i got a 5 000 square foot building right and i'm going from substrate production to picking yeah the only step that we don't do is making spawn because i'm so horrible at it i lose one in four bags it takes so expensive yes you don't mean making spawn in the building that you're fruiting mushrooms where's the idea you know my incubation space is in the same room as the grow rooms i mean they're separate but and that's fine i've never seen an issue with that lots of people will say that's an issue and i think when it comes down to it if you're using um you know an appropriate amount of spawn your substrate actually is sterilized and you're not crossing error in between the knock process then you're fine you know if i had and i know that there's a lot of debate between pasteurization and sterilization and yields and all of that sure and it's i think it's individual yep i mean you guys pasteurized yeah i mean if i tried to pasteurize a 10-pound block and my farm's not really set up for 10-pound blocks because we built everything you know on the idea of having a four to six pound block yeah shelving and spacing and all that stuff yeah and i'm like man if i tried to pasteurize something and of course i tried to pasteurize about 18 different ways most of which being a failure i didn't start not seeing contamination in my farm until i started sterilizing right yep you know and i still think i stare i think i sterilized too long now yeah but i mean i mean you know we used to do what 2 200 bags a week and we'd lose half of a giant concrete bunker dude i mean the amount of heat loss that i had from that and you saw my great big giant boiler that is overkill but it works every time yeah you know and and so since we started sterilizing it really changed i could start focusing in in realizing that wow a one percent moisture change is causing this on the back end or you know that i the best yields i've ever gotten at the farm was when i thought i was messing up yeah when i went and purchased all you had what eighteen thousand pounds of soybean oh yeah that were loose and not ground yeah because you're pasteurizing there was soybeans still in it yeah i couldn't and they would get all bacteria yeah yeah yeah you needed to get rid of it i needed it yeah i'm looking at the mix saying this is freaked up yeah and like two pounds on a five pound block yeah all day long yeah every like didn't even have to freak around with kings and i'm like well what did i do and i tried to go back and do and mimic exactly what i did yeah yeah i'll let you know when it pans back so you were sterilizing and you were just using the the like uncut up holes or on on ground holes in 2016 and so four years deep into the business yeah that was when i had made the change that i don't have any desire to go on a national level right i mean that was the summer we had an outdoor fine dining restaurant we were writing an 85 recipe cookbook i remember all this i had five contract growers yeah that were purchasing blocks from you yeah because i couldn't guarantee the yields yeah and then the problem there is that they're all growing these beautiful shiitakes yeah these beautiful blues because i think you were just starting to get into like the lambert yep and all of a sudden like wow i just guaranteed to buy like a thousand pounds a week of mushrooms and my sales drop off yeah and i'm like so that's about that and and i've got 16 employees we're doing 2200 bags a week that contaminate half it was expensive yeah man i was also living like an hour and a half away from the farm yeah it's hard to do a seven day oh you were dating uh what's your name with the kids right yeah yeah so you were i remember because you would

40:14 call it like i'm dropping kids off or i'd be like what in the yeah dropping the kids off for the school and then i'm going up to colebrook yeah from kohlberg i'm going to drive over to gardner maine it's only like 14 hours of driving today we're gonna be fine we're gonna do the mix we're gonna do the mix when i get back it should be done around one o'clock tonight it's not that bad yeah yeah yeah not that bad yeah you're running steam dude that was like that was amphetamine fast that was too much you did it's great for weight loss yeah it's the worst for you you slept 9.2 hours a week and you lost 75 pounds in three months what are you eating right right i think just adderall and air i don't know that's one of those things when you think back on it and you're like boy boy the lab would go great and then you like note because all of a sudden yourself pops into your mind yeah when you said to it it's not worth it it's not it's not worth it it's not worth it you haven't slept since tuesday yeah it's not worth it the kings don't need to be picked at 4 00 am they're gonna make it till seven it is the hardest thing for me to step away from this and like spending so much time with a podcast all these other projects motorcycle shop building out old equipment and like continuing to do stuff in the background conceptually for like where this is going aside from spawn and substrate i i have to like i have to step away so being able to step away i mean that is really what my goal is this winter i mean all that stuff from 2000 let's see it's literally been seven days a week since 2012. yeah where are you at now because you called and you said we're going to slow down we're going to take a break and i was like thank god believe it or not actually believe it or not today and tomorrow i have to make a huge decision yeah because i the state of new hampshire because this year is just it was a show from day one and we've just been trying to maintain you know since day one uh this spring yeah i've spent a considerable amount of time utilizing programs that are available in my state to get funding sure as we all have and and it takes a huge amount of time and i've built up these relationships with people at the unh cooperative extension and those sorts of things and been able to receive funding yeah to stay afloat yeah but still looking at the numbers you're like okay this is the amount i'm donating and i've got no problem donating mushrooms but when you're getting into like that places you know when it's a couple hundred pounds a week yeah that are going out i mean i would be more happy for people i'm just happy that people are being able to eat sure sure and so yes we're gonna donate those and the state has been able to fund me back yep um and i won't give all of the numbers but because if any of the owners here they'll still be mad at me because i might have a big mouth you and i talk about it all the time oh of course of course yeah and there's things that can be said on record yeah they're right notice that we haven't rattled off latin other than you know foliota well it's just because we're the uh it actually oh it's lintanullah idot is no i'm just joking i'm just with you oh cakes tanks actually a lot of people i always say shitake and people like why do you say shitake yeah and i'm like because there's two eyes in the middle they're like all right well is it pluralist orinji then or a rangy eye all the eye i's at the end so it's you know orangey i i i i don't know all right keep going i'm sorry which yellow do you grow i don't know who wrote us cornucopia cornucopia i don't know like salmon something dude we're we're reverting because you might i used to when we called lambert like norseport be out of spawn we'd be you pick up and i forget her name there i think dawn is her name she'd be like yellow brown or blue what do you want you know i would be like oh what you know the first couple times i called i was like man i gotta get used to this hostile burrito ordering environment what do you want rice beans rice or beans you're like i don't know i know i'm just can i get both actually listen i i was growing the columbine which i would call the true blue yeah um completely different flavor profile than all the other blues that are out there absolutely really tiny stem but it has a certain size cap the taste is way better too and and um you know then you have you got chefs that are like no i want the blues with the smaller caps yeah you know so then you're growing things specifically because of yourself the light in the cold in that particular one the colder you grow with the darker blue the casket yeah and of course it you know it cooks away but i mean in regard to like box appeal chef's gotta like what they're chopping up and um well i was gonna make a point earlier now so no you said you were so you have to make a decision you're sorry oh you're going after all you know if i

45:16 continue on doing the amount of bags that we're doing right now yeah servicing um a small amount of core yep customers farmers markets and our core customers not knowing with uh covet growing rampant again yeah we were when we were shut down doing nothing the numbers aren't anything like they are right now right and and not when this airs but i mean like san francisco new york yeah shutting down restaurants again yep and emotional people don't understand that you've got to simultaneously know what happened 12 weeks ago yeah what's happening today and what's going to happen 12 weeks from now yeah and well 2020 was hard to do that yeah you don't want to lose customers but on paper if i keep going with doing the amount i'm doing with everyone that i've got at the end of the first quarter of 2021 i already know the amount of money well that will be a loss right no matter what yeah sometimes it's cheaper to stop if i halt production for 60 days yeah the end of quarter one's a break even so you're the issue becomes like well am i going to lose my customers right you know there's a lot of new mushroom farms am i going to have nobody to sell to when i start back up again yeah the in you know the other side of that is like wow you know any time you're trying to make adjustments and you know this yeah to a working mushroom farm yeah and i i give the analogy all the time it's literally like changing the wheels on a car while that car was rolling down the road so i'm like boy if i halted production for 60 days yeah you got to think i could do this project in this project in this project i mean because when you're producing every other day yeah you know my laboratory literally needs three days of work yep but i've got eight hours every other day when it doesn't have bags in it cooling down yeah you know so all the logistics have to pan out to be like all right well i got everything set up and well now i gotta clean it all up because i've got cooling down bags to put in here yeah i'll worry about the fact that that light fell apart later listen next year you've been there listen you've been there people look in that laboratory and they're like what is that is that a table like that it's just some aluminum and like some what what's holding it together well it's a mock-up yeah you're like how long have you been using the mock-up i think it was a year now like two and a half years i'm still using the mock-up for the table i mean it's held together with z clans dude you just have to keep going sometimes like what's up with that wall what do you mean what's up with that there's nothing on it but like two by fours and some hanging wires i think the most successful mushroom farms like uh longevity-wise not financial-wise not struggle-wise are the ones that uh really abide by if it ain't broke don't with it like just keep going yeah well it gets to a point like our infamous scoop table yeah oh yeah yeah yeah because we we all saw far west fungi you know age old video i don't even know what i and then it was like i'm like you got how many bags you're producing and you're scooping them suckers by hand 18 listen we used to weigh out bags yeah and i gusset folded okay yeah right right i mean when you're gusset folding 2200 and bagging out four and a half pounds to a bag every bag yeah but then we set up the scoop table and i got this farmer handyman guy that like just shows up the farm every day because i don't know what he does i forgot about him you you every time i've been over there you're like i actually have no idea what he does he just fixed this and he's gonna he's a great he's got a degree in chemical engineering but i think he hates i know he owns a lot of goats yeah um he's really smart with mushrooms he's got like a hundred hen spots he picks great mushrooms wicked smart dude helping with all this math a son of a could scoop 800 bags in an hour 800 bags an hour that's some old man strength right there that's just like you don't even yeah you're going so fast right now well instead of doing 2200 we do 300 per run right like if i'm gonna scoop i'm not warmed up right and i've got all my new hire i'm almost everyone that works for me right now has been there less than a year yeah so i am constantly still teaching mushroom 101 yeah because as we're going into season transition like oh well i'm like why'd you pick that well i'm like it's going to be ready tomorrow well in the summertime yeah it's you know 50 degrees in that room now and not 60. yeah not to mention the amount of well geez what like when you like what did you make yeah oh i made my own homemade geothermal system oh dude i was blown away i was like so christopher because he didn't come to that first store i was like he's got like geothermal under some portion of this

50:17 slab coming from some spot out in his field for fresh air i was like it was the first time that i despite whether or not it works or not on your side i was like we have to think about like structure more than anything else you know because structure is inherent to like the success of everything if you don't have the infrastructure and you don't have the whole thing figured out listen according to paper the geothermal would work because it's not even real geothermal it's just a poor man's heat pump yeah and the entire idea came from the fact that grow room four right was always too warm well i also had listen the room is eight foot by eight foot by sixteen foot yeah and i had eighteen hundred fruiting bags in it all right how much air can you move through okay we call them spaghetti spaghetti blues yeah you know a half inch cap with like a 10 inch long stem yeah and i'm like well it needs to be colder well damn it that walk-in cooler is making all kinds of air listen if you're a farmer out there never take cold air from your walk-in cooler and pump it into a grow room i know a couple people who do that it freezes up pretty quick yeah it freezes up real quick i'm like well damn how the hell am i gonna i'm like i've got a 60 000 btu ac right and i'm like but if it's warm and humid out i can't blow air cold enough yeah i'm like well how am i going to take that heat in the air you know heating the moisture out of the air yeah and that was the simplest thing now it costs a lot of money mostly in the dirt work yeah with not knowing if it was actually going to work yep but when we fired that up and it was 90 degrees out yeah and the air going into the air compressor i mean into the air conditioner was 63 and dry success you know it's 95 degrees out and it's 58 degrees in the grow rooms yeah and the whole damn system runs on 81 watts of electricity i haven't i've always been running for five years now i don't think i ever shut it off no i pulled heat out of it in the winter yeah um that's wild man well it's one of those things that worked but i mean really everything from mushroom farming is really necessity was the mother of invention yeah yeah you know like when you had called up and said dude i gotta come over there and look at that tumbler oh yeah yeah you know the culvert which is still our tumbler for here dude you know how long it's been since i've used a tumbler well you know to be fair it's a placeholder for us and like and i think that most most companies don't know that right away they're like what do i need infrastructure-wise i'm like i name everything but a tumbler i'm like unless you're getting to the point where you need a placeholder for bags so they don't spill out and crack and break one another i would still use the tumbler if i was listen the motor that we were using was found in a barn it was filled with cobwebs and it had one of those wires or like rubber or something wasn't invented so it's just got like an asbestos wrap yeah yeah around the it's like a crutch well that finally fried when that fried like i'm like oh i'm gonna get enough fancy new motor yeah wow that fancy new motor literally tore the whole thing up in like a week and i'm like you know what we're really we're doing 300 bags it's it's out of time yeah you know two people shake them and stack them it takes an hour yeah you know and so there's me and a couple other people that have been there so long like doing 2200 yeah it's been several years now that we're doing 300 every other day yeah and it's like that's an hour it you know it's an hour just shake the damn bag you know what's really funny is i'm like trying to figure out how to forward integrate farms into their own production now yeah and we have so many farms that are completely disinterested in that and then another section of farm that is actively trying to do that and we're trying to get them to not backward integrate we're really trying to get them to do stuff going forward and i think the the number one thing that i keep having to like bring up in my head is like these customers get 160 to 300 blocks per week that's not a lot like that that really isn't a lot you don't need a tumbler you don't need a you really can negate a lot of things and still have the same level of efficiency and that's something i keep forgetting doing as many bags we're doing a week i'm just like i don't you know we need so many things to speed things up and make or make our margins make sense as we grow and they don't need that at all i mean that this entire model of like being able to purchase a bag yeah at least in new england didn't exist no before you were doing it right you know i remember having a conversation you me and frankie went to lunch yeah that's yeah and i'm like dude you're not gonna fruit them anymore yeah and you're just gonna like i'm like son of a why did i come up with that damn idea i'm like that is smart it was another you know necessities it was like doing the doing it all the steps like that's

55:18 freaking that's a lot that's uh listen i can't i'd still do all the steps other than making spawn so yeah but listen i had the equipment but i don't think that's a bad thing to do those steps and like us doing this was never intense intentionally um sort of uh aimed at getting farms to not do their own because i realized that like past the point you need that level of control what happens to my production during covent times when you say i just need all shiitakes to backload just in case you know and you're like okay you can do that my farms can't so our orders have to go down everything you know contracts and then expands and contracts and expands so justification for like getting these farms to do things in a more efficient manner to save them time gives them a huge amount of onus on the production side you know we just have to make sure it's certainly never clear listen never put all your eggs in one basket now because he does i've sat down with financial advisors and things like that yeah and they're like okay with the amount of production that you can do and the amount of contamination that you get the yields that you get you'll only be successful financially if you make blocks and also purchase blocks yeah yeah and i'm like yeah but blocks are expensive right well if i can make them for this and i buy them for this yeah you know and you're like well but then you go and backtrack and do the numbers like well those ones aren't contaminated and i know i'm gonna get this yield you do the actual math bags cost a lot to make and i use tough pack bags and i you've used them and you're on to different bags now yep and everyone's ah tough back bags are expensive and they are expensive yeah but they're really consistent and it's about 15 miles from the farm so we can just pick them up on the way by so i have no shipping expense yeah and that makes a difference i i think that's that's everything and part of the issue with the amount of small farms trying to justify like bigger companies growth margins and profits and everything like unicorn their xlsa bag has gone from 25 cents matching basically john donnie's bag all the way up to like what it is now 45 cents if you're buying just a case now we have to buy 45 cents a bag yeah oh jesus is that crazy that's without shipping that's without shipping yeah if you're just buying like a case you know so in this 500 bags in the case no i think that i am well like i don't know if i listen i got two numbers one of them's right i think that i i i'm ordering enough at a time i think i'm at like 22 okay or 27 cents per bag yeah that's pretty good yeah yeah 27 cents a bag all these farms what i mean to say in that are leveraging their own cost per block on the bigger companies that have to raise their price because their overhead's going through the roof go for this go with that blah blah blah and it becomes really hard to justify what the cost of a block is and it's it varies farm to farm so much it's crazy everyone goes out i know what it costs to produce a block i'm like yeah but you don't not on this level and not on that level you only know your level you know when i mean when you're getting blocks in the mail yeah and everything's nice well you didn't know that you know there was a bad bag of spawn right well now i'm eating that hundred bags right right you know i'm eating that that's why i don't make spawn yeah i'm crappy at it i know i'm crappy at it i have no desire to make it we would never have made spawn if it wasn't for tyler like no win no no he was the one who was like i can do this and i want to do this and i was like go to my celia bring back the goods man i i can't i can't even justify and we were doing that when frankie got sick and it was just like i couldn't even think about it you know i was just like you to do what you got to do and i'm all supporting of it because i think it's necessary and there's only one major spawn producer in the east coast more than necessary the amount that i've learned from him and you just on the stuff that you've never even considered no that's because he's thinking about it all day and you know how it is being the flagship person for a company you and i are the innovation the like survival minded like keep going putting the wheels on the running car thing and that's a very hard job no you're not in the lab dumping spawning bags anymore i am sometimes oh yeah somebody somebody calls the out and i don't answer my phone if i don't answer my phone it's cause i'm in the goddamn lab you know where i'm shaking bags i am so happy now wasn't back in the day i'm like man no one calls me and now i'm like son of a why does my phone have to ring every internet it always rings when i'm in the lab the only reason i'm in the lab like why didn't you answer the phone i'm in the lab yeah i don't answer the phone when i'm in the lab there are rules why would you don't answer the phone in the lab you can't even have phones in the lab you don't know farting in the lab it's really those two things yeah yeah that's when we had three people in the lab now we have one right and it's just me yeah and i hand pour

1:00:18 yeah i i've been doing i am the best hand pourer and i suck at it and if there's any idea like you go out into the incubation you've got all this you know you've got the variations of growth and you can see like oh well because i'm going from winter rye yeah then i'm going with you the winter rye and millet blend right and i'm going from like a tall sacko two bag or whatever it is yeah yeah and then i'm going back to like a northwest bag oh god i mean once you do like four or five hundred thousand of them your muscle memory gets pretty good but you can you always see like oh there's the first few bags pinning yeah all right well there's the middle 50 bags they're not they're about starting to colonize yeah oh look the ones on the end those are pinning too yep and so just when thinking and back when i was getting like 50 contamination yeah you wouldn't be able to see that now that i'm not getting that contamination yeah it's like wow it's a whole different issue i suck i'm not good at this at all you must have been thinking about like cocaine and waffles in the grocery like i'll blame it on co2 of course of course that's my favorite excuse in the world the two o'clock slumpies oh dude but you know you and i have done it and we're still doing it and i think that there's a balance to like how far you can stretch stuff out like what we have 15 employees right now so you've you had one more at the height of your sort of like uh setup we can't like we can't justify not growing based on the growing demand and it it's still i have to pack block some days still i have to pull racks still you know it's really hard to figure out how to manage those models it is crazy like the pros and the cons i mean yeah like there is no question about well next week's a vacation week you're producing next week yeah yeah you know and and i can't wait for whatever christmas is on a saturday oh my god right it's gonna be the best um well that's i think that's what new mushroom farmers need to understand because when i had the contract growers they're like oh well i'm not gonna be able to produce for the month because we're going on this boat trip you ain't going on anything we're going on that's like like if you were married or in a relationship that person yeah male or female or whatever needs to understand that this comes from they are as important like the it's listen the mushrooms don't wait the argument you were going to have over the toilet seat i can't wait you know like sorry i'm missing that wedding or well yes christmas is gonna happen when the farm work is done right farming is ex i mean i remember when mark learned that about his pigs after we killed his three pigs he was like i'm done with farm animals man you can't leave your wife's like hey i'm gonna go down to my family's for thanksgiving and you're like i'm gonna throw cupcakes at the pigs faces i don't know what else to do like you can't leave and it's in it and listen i don't i don't want everyone to cry at my pity party but it does make me feel good i have a really low self-esteem yeah with a really big ego so that's really it but that's uh that's the thing oh god damn it curse of the virgo jesus i got that on top of it uh it's got any social problems i can try to fix without you asking yeah exactly well here if you look at this i know i know that the only time since 2012 yeah that i have been away from the farm for more than a 24-hour period yeah was august 11th 2016. yep and i was away from the farm for 36 hours yeah and you know people like oh man it's so great you know like your grow rooms are your living room because i built a studio apartment at the farm because you really need to have that farm steward yeah but then you know you're like oh like what was your commute well it depends am i in the living room of the kitchen because it's a difference of like four feet that's true man but then the other side of that coin is is that you're always at your farm you can't shut off yeah you know at least you go nose blind and can't smell it yeah you know speaking of smells the i still associate mushroom farming with the chestnut smell and everybody knows what it is but i first smelled it at your farm and i was like that's it that's the mushroom smell it it's weird because every once in a while i will catch it yeah most of the time i can't smell it most of the time i just smell like old winston lights and shame so it's gone the other way it's just gone the other way actually what is weird is because when you're a farm steward like it's yeah you're like oh well i'm like yeah my last farm check of the day is 1am yeah and they're like well what do you do check i'm like i don't look at numbers i don't look at the temperature i just walk around the farm something's not going to sound right yeah and something might not smell right yeah when you're walking past a thousand bags and then stop and go oh we got a bad bag and they can pinpoint it and out goes the green bag

1:05:19 yeah you know in in in the people laugh when i'm doing that well i mean trying to multitask there i'm doing a tour yeah going through the grow rooms checking me you're just doing your rounds you know checking miss size and people are hitting buttons like i'm gonna dial this in real quick yeah because i use high pressure mist and for like three years i thought i was doing it wrong i'm like no one's doing it this way oh it's the best way like no one's doing it everyone's got like these ultrasonic things it just looks like a bunch of wires and like things fry all the time yeah i'm like that or re-contaminate rooms but yeah spitting dirty water over mushrooms and so i you know i got two grow rooms that one was a laboratory and one was just an empty space that i run with hydrofoggers and greenhouse controls yeah but it's chestnuts and shiitakes you know like keep it under 100 and keep it somewhat wet yeah yeah um and then everything else is all these computer things yeah and i'm like i wouldn't do anything other than the high pressure mist no unless i could utilize steam in winter yeah uh norsport tried that i remember i went over one day and we sold them our grow rooms from westbrook and uh john had like wired a hose in uh from like one of those china sauna steamers into the fruit room and i was like this is not gonna be good it's too hot wasn't it way too hot yeah it just it's also not the same saturation level as steam versus mist you know two different humidity levels entirely and so it's going to condense yeah and just make everything super wet exactly yeah the condensation factor is insane so it doesn't work like you think it would but it's i remember i remember when northsport came once and they really wanted to look at kings and what the hell i was doing with kings really and they're like well what what's this with kings well mark said it once he was like you're the king whisperer yeah i'm like dude i did better when i thought i was messing them up now i got blocks in the farm and it's always a constant battle with blotch yep and inconsistencies yeah in the room because a little tiny change and then they're freaked out till the end yeah and people like oh you know the king room is really dry why do i need to go down with the humidity in the room right and they're like what that makes no sense at all and then you start looking at what's happening they're like well what do kings need i was gonna ask people ask me all the time what do kings need i said they need to be super wet but dry like what you need to have a very high humidity with zero condensation there's two different forms of percentage of humidity relative humidity is not just zero to a hundred yeah but i mean i don't even look at the numbers anymore yeah you know i've got one grow room that consistently reads 138 parts per million of co2 that's awesome 300 points less than outside fresh air yeah yeah uh let me see i got one room that reads like 3 000 parts per million but it's got like 60 blocks in it right now i'm like they're like well they're like well what about the co2 i'm like you know i know look at the co2 i don't worry about it they're like why i'm like well the mushrooms would tell me yeah you know if the co2 was too hot you've been in it long enough that i believe you whereas most people say that but they don't know what to do if they see one thing or another there's not enough experience involved because the one thing that i tell farms to buy is a co2 meter hook it up to your goddamn exhaust fan and let it do its thing because otherwise you're not gonna know you can't go in there this is what i say to people that have asked me questions about it yeah they're like well how much fresh air and how many air exchanges or what co2 levels and this and that listen co2 might be really really good for you at the beginning of the fruiting stage right really you know 95 percent humidity might be really good yeah but if you're growing multiple days yeah what's great for a mushroom on the first day of fruiting is going to be horrible for the last day of fruition right that really if you've got like three weeks worth of blocks in one room then you've got to find that spot in the middle yep and you're like well how much fresh air should i pass through how about this since everyone has so many problems maintaining temperatures move the amount of fresh air that you can move through that room the most amount you can yeah while maintaining your temperature yeah if you follow those criteria then you're gonna get what you're gonna get it's true you can't really it you can't it up listen i'm going with information that's in new england yeah yeah oh and everybody's different you know everybody's rooms are different so yep everybody it's that's the that's the most challenging part in working with these farms that are just getting interested in it and they're they wonder what they need first and foremost now and you're like i just say a co2 meter because it literally takes the question out of it and it automatically kicks on your you have to compensate with hot or cold air and it automatically kicks on a fan to adapt so you're creating this like lung effect and you don't really end up with issues

1:10:20 that you really have to worry about if you do it's because something's not working right you know something's i mean yeah when i get back to the farm this afternoon like something some fan i have a fan on my exhaust that's down right now yeah and the only reason why i know that so i've walked into one of the groves like something doesn't smell right yeah and i'm getting all the the brown spore gunky water went from my exhaust back into the grow room yeah and i'm like all right well someone unplugged something or i've got a fan that's now frozen or something winner oh as soon as people are like oh well i'm like i got 12 seasons yeah like what do you mean 12 seasons i'm like you got the four regular seasons and you've got cusps on both sides yeah you do you're like well what's the hardest cost i'm like usually spring like really they're like why i said because you go well i have a wood boiler yeah and i've got radiant heat which is critical for me with incubation sure 14 foot high shelves you know i want to have high you're right up and down a lot happen down the ladder and um i'm like yeah you know in march and april i'm going out and filling the wood boiler yeah going inside making the acs making sure the acs are on no it's so true yeah you know and i'm like and but then you've got like and you've got two times a year where you got like eight weeks yeah we're like okay the systems right now are not combating mother nature right you know they're you're not fighting mother nature and then all of a sudden the mushrooms just do what they want well that's that's a really so i've been trying to figure out how to explain this to farms that want to take on their own production and i was i was like think of an incubation room because they're asking about heating and cooling this one person and i was like think about this like line and this is uh 66 degrees in the winter you're always cooling or you're heating so the temperature comes in hotter to bring it down in the summer it comes in colder to bring it uh uh yeah up basically so you're starting it too high and too low to get to that same point what would you do in that situation one you take a sweatshirt off one you put a sweatshirt on it's the same thing for a mushroom and same thing for a bag you have to you have to like balance that so that it's the same each time so you go a little bit lower in the in the summertime and you go a little bit higher in the winter time just so the the differential the balance i mean think about moisture content yeah okay so you've got you've got this patch and you're like okay it's one way out one there's a there is respiration that occurs whether it's a gore-tex patch or a tie-back patch it's you've got to have that respiration yeah well in the summer time you're dealing with an average you know relative humidity of like 50 some odd percent and a base right well in the winter time you're now operating with you know a relative humidity in your incubation of about thirty percent yeah oh well maybe i should enjoy you know adjust my substrate moisture in the winter time yeah yeah yeah you know like oh my god i never even considered that i mean there was something you were telling me last week i've never even considered of course now i forgot what it was that you can see like oh my god that makes so much sense and just forget it yeah no there's so many things like that and you can't keep them all it's the homer simpson thing every time you learn something new put something hold out of your head it really does it really does this proves the point you know i you know to like briefly touch on that subject with new mushroom farms though that are coming up you said it you have to you don't want to be an about it when you're explaining this to people or to people you care about family loved ones but the reality is at some point your farm comes before everything else in regards to uh it and in yourself as a person and your farm that demands that and if you're not prepared to do that you just shouldn't do it like i and i i bring up the two-year battle with frank being sick i was still here every day and she didn't say a word because she already knew it she knew that was not a winning battle you know and there'd be no sense in having that argument she was just like this is what we do you know well we had talked in 2016. yeah yeah you know like if you know if you're going to have a partner yeah you know that the farm threw a huge stress into our relationship because of what we were supposed to do this yeah i understand that we're supposed to do this yeah but the bearings fried on the ribbon mixer and it's a 40 year old soil mixer and you know the shaft which is hardened steel yeah is now it's not a round shaft and it's off by a 16th on one side and a 30 second on the other yeah and i need to spend the next 18 hours doing that grinding this hardened steel shaft of course i've done this a thousand times right i don't know what the i'm doing it still doesn't speed no it doesn't like it the ribbon mixer isn't magically going to fix itself yeah or like i can't come home the some part of the steam boiler has broken and it might break again and

1:15:21 i've now had two hvac guys yeah tell me well i don't know what's wrong with it yeah to have one of my owners come and take it down completely apart and figure it out and then put it back together and test it which you shouldn't do because we had like a 12 foot flame for across the freaking room um you know and then simultaneously know that you i'd only gotten about two hours into pasteurization yeah and then thinking hmm well do i try to re-sterilize those 2200 bags that got up to 114 degrees and now have been sitting there for two and a half days at 114. yeah oh my god 2200 bags of moley wood though yeah you know like oh that's an expensive fix it is um it doesn't leave room for uh for a particular relationship i think that as a new if a person is just going to farming because i've got a lot of people that come to my farm yeah that want to start mushroom farms yeah like with you like oh i get to walk around this mushroom farm for free and this guy's going to give me information totally i say you need to prepare to work seven days a week no question yeah you need to prepare it in your spouse or partner needs to be prepared that the farm needs to come first yeah it's almost like pre-marital counseling we had to have a conversation where i'm like do not ask me to put anything below before the farm yeah yeah because my future is hinged on this and there's you know it's directly linked yeah um yeah so i'm single now oh listen it's fine yeah listen um you know if you're happy lonely is it really called loneliness yeah you know like yeah people say why don't you date i'm like it's not my fault most people bore me right and that's it with mushroom farming you know what i mean i got bored being an engineer yeah i got bored just doing one thing it's yeah it's critical to have a million irons in the fire for a lot of people and that you and i are that person sort of like okay i'm gonna do this for a minute like what the is eric doing now oh there you go yep oh yeah let's go build a dark room yeah i wish i knew how to work on a motorcycle oh god dude i can't stop and then it gets even to the point of the petty like motherf i look across as a good chance he hasn't showered in a week because he's crazy can you see me now i can see i'm like okay well i'm writing this damn i wish i photographed half as well he always looks like he's about to go on a magazine cover of like a motorcycle thing i'm like i'm not that cool dude i'm not that cool well you play that on tv i can only respect that now goes back i mean you started what 2013 yeah right and i'm 2012. i mean there were times where you're like dude you got to give me some money today i'm like i know another thing i know well this is a working relationship right and i feel like you and i have mastered it in a great way that i cannot say i've mastered with anybody else it's so hard i try so hard to like give everybody the most wiggle room i can and for the most part a defense is always put up immediately especially in professional settings understandably so i had financial advisors say hey listen you can get out of all of this debt that you've accrued just go bankrupt just go away just go bankrupt yeah what the what are you talking about like i owe this vendor they spend it like yeah i'm like okay i'm like oh yeah by the way i know i owe you a set amount of money but i'm going through bankrupt hey can i get 150 bags next week yeah because i'm not going to pay you the money i owe you but you're the only vendor that i can use yeah yeah but you're going to go it was a winter arm like well that winter where i'm like jesus i know you guys have been itching for that autoclave yeah i like i let jason from motown use it before he disappeared well he did the bankruptcy thing right like so he's still on paper up until two years ago this like 1800 bucks or something that's what happened at least that equipment came back yeah yeah absolutely what had occurred with him i love jason i haven't talked to him for several years yeah yeah um he hasn't reached out or anything and i'm busy it's on his own level um talented mushroom farmer yeah work very hard oh yeah he's a scary type of gear grinder though like the one who's just like the determination far exceeds the ability to keep up with zone determination you're like oh slow down and it was the classic let's go from the garage yeah to commercial cultivation yep and i think that that is one of the largest hurdles yeah because i get oh do you have this as a hobby and then you got into

1:20:21 this bigger place i'm like nope i started in this space yeah yeah you know this is my small space i want to go to a bigger space right and making that transition from just being in a garage satisfying a couple of restaurants in a market yeah to going oh my god now i've got all these employees and oh my this is what it cost per month just to keep the lights on yeah like that's how many pounds i need to produce okay well i need to get this amount per block yeah and i just saw six you know get composted right well there goes that mark you know you know yeah and so he brought that back i went to i'm like well i know you guys really been itching for that autoclave yeah i said why don't we and i said i i want to sell it for this and you and mark were like well we want to buy it for this and those numbers were really far apart from each other the thing is that we were both right yeah yeah because you guys wanted to pay what it was actually worth i wanted you guys to spend what it would probably take to go out and find it somewhere else yeah and we came up with a compromise where you guys sent me blocks yeah for an entire winter yeah and that kept me in business yeah because in that august of 2016 when we had four catastrophic failures in one month i remember i had the boiler go down and i lost 2 200 bags um i had a bag gusset issue all right and i had like 5 000 bags with bottom gussets that weren't sealed and you didn't know it until you were shaking them up and the bottom would blow out yep um and then there were two other things that like basically there was zero income and only loss for a one month period just jamming for a one month period and we were at the size of the volume yeah that it was literally three years it was until 2019 to come out of that one month era in the hole that was made yeah and i think that's one of the thing is being a like it's a new mushroom farm we're like well how much is it gonna cost yeah and i said well here's the thing figure out how much you think it's gonna cost yeah and and multiply by four and then think about the amount of time it's going to be are you happy in your relationship double it yeah yeah yeah actually so many people are gonna stop mushroom farms come to me like well what do you think i should do to start i said see all this crap that i'm doing don't do that i said i said why don't you go and call up main Cap N Stem and just to start so you can learn how to fruit mushrooms let's start then start that i said but also understand that you know you're gonna think about your cash flow yeah i say you know to people i'm like you have got to have three months at a minimum of operating capital yeah because i mean okay so i say i get blocks from music i get 100 blocks from you yeah i get them on a wednesday okay my deal my bill is due the monday before i get them right which is fine now it wasn't um okay so now i've got that much now i've got that block which i ordered two months before sure now i'm gonna fruit that and say it's gonna take anywhere from like six to 13 days yep all right so let's go on the far end let's call it two weeks to grow yeah and maybe it took a week to sell it yep okay so now i'm two three now i'm a month yep okay so it's a month from when i paid for the block four weeks that mushroom then gets delivered to a restaurant yep okay that restaurant might be on like 30 day terms yeah okay so now that's another four weeks yeah okay so that's literally somewhere between eight and 12 weeks yeah before i get paid for the block yeah you know and i'm like oh that's all right well no because now i've got eight weeks of where i purchase blocks yeah in a row yeah so i mean you could have three months before you even think about having a penny coming in yeah yep and we try to prepare people for that and that's part of our motivation for changing up that structure was like too many people didn't realize that and inherently in the back end of that you start from when you get the block we start when we source the raw materials by the boxes by pay the employees everything and incubate the blocks so it goes from anywhere from two weeks all the way to 10 weeks or 12 weeks in some cases before we even get the block out the door to get money in so there's that

1:25:21 break point on both sides and that's where i forget if it was christopher and mark i brought that up a long while ago and i was like okay you know fair enough like let's see it's it's reading it's getting it in the middle is what it's doing yeah yeah yeah you know because it's almost like you're selling a person something yeah if it's longer than that you're selling it to them on credit yeah you're selling it under the assumption that they're going to fruit that successfully yeah and be able to sell it for a margin that's going to generate the cost back to you you know how many farms have started and then ended up with 300 pounds of mushrooms and no uh they just lose their phone number and we're like we're out 1600 bucks or whatever it is it's like that happened up until that point and we were like okay across the board this isn't because of anybody this is just because we're not meeting anybody in the middle they don't realize they're meeting us in the middle and we're meeting them in the middle it's like if you had to do all this production you know there's that and that's a hard thing to explain to people getting into the industry i think because at first they're not going to collect cash cod from a restaurant they're not going to be like check for mushrooms so they're going to have to chase down the chef you know and you also have to be prepared that that chef might say hey sweet yeah you know i want 16 pounds of these every week right and so you're like all right i'm going to grow these 16 pounds and then you you call them the next week yeah and you'd be like all right i'm going to show up tomorrow with your 16 pounds you know it was slow last week i don't need them yeah what but i got those 16 pounds for you now instead of it being that customer say it's not um you know a restaurant and say it's a wholesale distributor yeah say it's a very large organic distributor yep that says we want 250 pounds a week every week yep and you say well all right well that's a lot of capital for that 250 pounds yeah you deliver you deliver what do you mean you don't want any of this week like okay i'm gonna eat 250 pounds because everyone else got what they wanted yeah what am i gonna do with that 250 pounds i'm not gonna sell it to you next week because you're reselling and that now has a seven day you know it's already seven days old right and like wow the amount of money i just spent to lose these 250 pounds was everything i gained for the last six weeks yeah it's going backwards it's it always meets at the beginning and at the end and it can definitely ricochet in between i've been trying to work on some large national distribution things yeah yeah you know because um the lion's mane that i grow yeah i'm really consistent with that yeah i don't know how many people are growing that specific genetic the 120 129 yeah yeah um thank you john donahue uh somebody else is i forget who it is somebody's growing it uh leap foods in new york i really i thought colombia was growing that was based on what i could see yeah it looked like columbia was growing that oh they might be yeah cool cause they're right there right now yeah yeah i actually just had a conversation with him um some beautiful mushrooms yeah yeah he's neil is like a genuine dude and uh yeah for some reason he strikes me as like an east coaster oh really so this i've been talking to him for years now and he called me out of the blue one day and uh and we've been working with one another ever since then and he's just a quick learn and i think he reads people well enough to be able to adapt to whatever speed they're at he's from socal and doesn't have that like whoa oh really yeah no he's like see you talk to so many more mushroom farmers than i i i'm making it my purpose now like and that's part of this podcast some days i just i don't even want to have a conversation and i feel bad because at the end of like four hours of talking to somebody i'm like why do we even talk about like i'm exhausted you know like i forgot you're recording have you been recording yeah for sure yeah what the hell are we supposed to talk about yes see that's what everybody says and you're just like dude this is it this is the this is the stuff that people like you're gonna go into your grow room when this thing comes out if you give a at all who knows i'm not banking on this thing making money or anything but the conversations haven't been out there yet people just rely on like hearsay and book knowledge and whatever they've learned but i feel like there's so much to learn from that sort of like you know continuation of experiences so when i started talking to like neil before he really had gotten into it i couldn't tell what level he was at i thought he was just starting out he'd been in it for a little while brooks i didn't realize brooks had this whole uh brooks warden from forest i didn't realize he had a whole experience with john holliday and made his way i had no idea you know like so these conversations are indicative to where we've all come from and sort of like where we're going in it despite if we know or not it sort of it can't it's like there was there was a surge about 35 40 years ago yeah with all these people really getting into it yeah and you had some people go to europe and somewhere in california yeah north yeah and then it was done that way for a really really long time and then you came into the 80s yeah and

1:30:21 in the late 80s the button industry which is a whole different beast altogether yeah took a giant dump yep and so now you've got these 500 million pound a year producers of button mushrooms with all of these groceries yeah with like well what are we gonna put into here well let's you know just bang out some specialty mushrooms yeah great but my concern with that is well you can eat the cost on specialty mushrooms and sell them for cost to produce yeah and now you've got market share so immediately coming into this entire game yeah you know eight years ago like you want to sell it for what it's even weird i'm like i want to i know i want a contract yeah like i'll give you a contract if you can get it at this yeah and i'm like what the hell are you talking about at that i mean that's my cost to produce yeah like what the am i doing wrong yeah like how can i make this go faster like i'm already at breakneck speed between like this and safety like my yields are there what the what am i doing wrong yeah but what you don't realize and this is i always have to drag people back to this go into a grocery store and look at the you know uh sea creature crustaceans of the oysters and the stockies that are there versus what you're offering a chef or a person that's there's value in the timeline there and if you are selling your for four five six dollars a pound at a farmer's market you are losing the value of that fresh product so like sell it for 15 dollars a pound people will pay for it how do you deal with that okay you say five bucks a clamshell the people give a what a clamshell weighs no because it looks like five dollars right and that's we always set it up yeah everything's 16 a pound now yeah and it's gone up you know we were at 12 a pound eight years ago yeah i remember being eight in portland then we left and you and norsport changed the dynamic and we were like wow we were being we didn't even know it you know we had it at eight bucks a pound for no apparent reason you know i had set the prices uh on what we had sold before and what the market could bear okay but then you really do have cost of increase yeah yeah you know i mean one of the giant issues that i have and we haven't even touched on this part yeah is that like when you're selling to places especially like groceries or large wholesale yeah that deal with very very small margins yeah because the money is coming from volume yeah okay so are you dealing with a small margin well it's hard to deal with a small margin with mushrooms so you've got to go to the farmers markets yeah and be like hey you know those shiitakes that you're buying pre-sliced in the store yes it's three dollars and 48 cents for the package that you bought yeah okay but do the unit on it you're paying 29 pounds yeah you know and this is where melson figured that out very quickly that's why they're doing what they're doing i'm like you know john right i'm like uh i would do a couple but everything's wholesale i'm like oh yeah there's something to that you know there there is but like i had i was in we were in like 185 whole foods for a little while yeah um until i got mad one day and pulled all my product whole foods is notoriously rough to deal with past the point they're easy to sort of start working it was right it was no contract in like what if i mentioned okay well i spent this money and now you don't want them because you're going to buy from somebody else but you want them next week yeah um the distribution to drive them to connecticut every week and things like that was it was difficult to add that in yeah and i'm like boy i went and and i went to a couple of the places where my products were being sold and there's my name and there's some high school kid yeah that's putting out fresh specialty mushrooms into a wicker basket at like 68 degrees yeah well all right in about four or five hours that's going to look like well if i walk into a grocery store and i see shitty looking produce i don't blame the high school kid i blame the farmer yeah like wow you grew some shitty oysters right they were probably fine like it's never gonna look as good like i hate looking in a box like after the fact it's like oh i don't wanna look at these damn things now they they look good i don't know what the orange spot is i heard you can eat it it shouldn't kill you well you know and that's like that's that's part of the issue of the sort of globalized food world that we're going towards and when you look at what people have done for the distribution of fresh foods in terms of like these like you know meal kits like my girlfriend gets these meal kit things and like you know her and her kid go to town and they have a great time cooking them and enjoying them that wasn't that didn't exist before us you know before um before you know and and now amazon's

1:35:22 sort of picking up the pattern distribution comes in it sort of changes the way that food is moved and how fast it gets to you so you know andrew collier reads partner ben pointed this out that like distribution is going to become the king of like how this stuff operates in the future but fresh mushrooms unless it's going direct to the individual it's always going to have that 68 degrees in the high school kid who doesn't give a with the wicker basket always and you can't help that oh i've got an invention yeah oh yeah you want to share it of course i do all right i'm not going to yeah well there's like no it's it's not an invention though it's using existing technologies yeah yeah yeah however it needs a about a four foot by four foot footprint footprint in a grocery store yeah but it does well you'd have to professionally do it but it does tie into existing refrigeration systems look at what smallhold has done just in the interim right yeah right there that's a very bizarrely interesting model you know which one which one is that one small holes in uh new york in there is that where they make like you're a restaurant like here we're gonna build this little mini grow room yeah a restaurant and then like pick your own damn mushrooms no so they pick the mushrooms they pick them too yeah they pick up all they do is sell fresh mushrooms they're just changing the way in which you go and approach a farm no so like they're in whole foods or in you know all these different places and they basically have their custard uh employees come in pick the mushrooms harvest them sell the fresh mushrooms to whole foods they just asked for that square footage to be able to justify the education level and the freshness level so that's that's one step you know towards whatever people are going to push towards you know with the retail purchasing you know those small standalone units too yeah i mean think of how the technology has yeah sort of succeeded and a lot of a lot of like these controls yeah fans oh yeah you know sensors and things like that you know you have the cannabis industry you think oh man yeah we we wouldn't have hydrofoggers we wouldn't have timers cycle timers and it's affordable now i mean i mean we built our own yeah well it just so happened you know one of the owners was a computer guy yeah and the guy that like designed and built the whole things is a you know electrical engineer i heard keith right so is that it was his idea okay i i went to keith and i said listen i i need a sensor that's going to tell me my co2 yeah my relative humidity yeah and my temperature yep i've got to be able to operate all three of those things independently yeah and with each other yeah and with three other grow rooms because there's four of them all hooked together yeah i would also prefer to have lights and buttons i got all this cool i got all of that i remember being amazed by when i first saw it and um it's just really simple yeah yeah you know it's not like a vacuum sterilizer with all these things and you know um no but that stuff is key because you know keith is on cmgn before uh joey schlegel disappeared and uh joey was the one i talked to joey briefly yeah i was on cmgn for a week but then i just dumped facebook for like three years i didn't even log on i got kicked off yeah i'm i'm uh i'm on the terrorist watch list you are yeah i started food nope i started uh almost 10 different food not bombs chapters while traveling when i was in college and uh nobody tells you that that's a it's on the terrorist watch list as an organization and when you're a spearhead of that and you have conversations with keith mchenry and any of these people who are sort of the uh this people rolling it out they don't tell you that all your mail is going to be searched from here on out oh my god so like i love getting from Cap N Stem that it comes in Cap N Stem's name not my name and it's never searched if it comes to my name it usually has a little search by usps on it really yeah jesus i can't fly without being hassled i'm like all cause i was just distributing you know fresh food so i wasn't using my real name on there and uh facebook made that huge push where you had to like scan your license and and like prove your real name you're this is probably when you were out of it and uh i put my real name on there and they wouldn't let me in so it was a huge thing i i dropped out probably cmg in the same time you did and then that transition is when i think tr took it over from joey enjoy went into banking land or whatever but what i was gonna say leading back to it was keith posted uh these amazingly cool circular graph charts of your sterilization temperatures and that big ass concrete bunker based on whatever he had and i was like this is interesting this is cmgn this is like what we were sort of after this guy made this for this company or whatever and the graph shows you time and temperature in a way that you couldn't really get until this point what did you do what were the thermocouples a set and the other those

1:40:22 questions started to be answered before that nobody was really talking about that stuff on cmgm keith put it out there and it became a conversation it was pretty cool you know so i gotta give him credit for that because i was like okay now we can talk about this stuff it becomes into the okay well what are the actual i mean if you think of okay i've got point a and i've got point z yeah that i want to get to yeah and you know in a person with you know no experience with it all is going to think about point a and think about point z without all those letters in between yeah you know now that we're fully sterilizing i ran i mean we went with timers and probes and like for the first two months i would turn the boiler on and off all night long every five minutes reading a magazine by putting the button hitting the button and turn the button hitting the button and then we had an arduino that keith had done so it did this because we were burning a lot of propane i mean eight inch thick concrete walls of a concrete ball i'm losing a half a million beat to use a heat energy in an hour and it takes 72 hours for the bags to get below 100 oh yeah no when christopher first saw a picture that being the architect he was like what are they doing you know i was like i don't know listen the first steam box i had and made out of walk-in cooler panels yeah i added just a whisker of pressure and blew the thing apart like literally blew a wall out 18 inches and went well there's some steam loss and then i'm like and then and then i'm like well you know maybe a little steam in the lab well yeah there's a little wood what the is this looks like cotton candy yeah what the contamination is this start reading oh oh here it comes oh yeah yeah that's a bad one and neither one of us because we both pronounce it wrong neurospor neurospora yeah that building holy that neurospora i told the story with sam and soraya on this about uh eating some funky mushrooms and going there uh late one night on a saint patty's day uh and this is the thing you can never get away from the farm so no matter what recreation you choose to take you're gonna be there so like i'm like coming down from this little bit of a buzz and i'm just looking at the bags and i just see like specks of green everywhere and i was like you just like have a meltdown you're like and then you have to figure it out so you just keep going so you're high out of your mind and you're still tearing bags off of the you know shelves and putting new ones up you're like here we go listen i'm pretty straight edge i live in a conservative state um yeah live for your dive there has been a lot of time when you think about extra curricular things that you want to do then the first thing you think about is okay well how will that affect what the farm's doing absolutely you're like oh well i don't drink but if i drink yeah and i mean like no i'm running steam tonight i can't like i turn that steam on at five it's amazing i know in 22 minutes whether or not i'm gonna spend the next hour because the seal didn't hold yeah i mean when we were when i switched over to sterilization yeah you know my autoclave had a two inch hole in the bottom yeah and i was just burning that well it's a 25 horsepower you know 16 boiler and you can sterilize six thousand pounds with it i'm sterilizing 300. all right so it's 880 pounds of steam an hour yeah and people like what does that mean i said it boils 121 gallons of water in 11 minutes yeah and i only know that because jason from motown was like oh yeah why this pipe in this p-trap thing and then off he's gone for like six hours looking for a bowl yeah and he's like i've got a figure i'm like well i'm running i'm like the perfect description and i'm like i'm gonna run these probes because i've always run probes yeah and so we did this thing and i'm running the probes and i did it like six times that way and and then jason had come by to grab mushrooms or grab some equipment or something or anyway he had showed up at the farm and he's and he's like all right he says well this week i went and took that and i put in all the data that you and i gathered on the front end of things yep and he's like are you consistent on when you get the temperature and i said you know what's odd i said my center bag each reaches an internal temp of 230 fahrenheit in exactly an hour and 37 minutes every time and he goes you got to be kidding me i'm like why and he goes and he hands me this piece of paper and it says one hour 37 minutes

1:45:23 the actual formula it worked i don't know okay i'm not math yeah i looked at the formula the higher glyphs that is you know all i can believe is what i can see yeah yeah and i'm like the probe's telling me that the internal temp on my center bag because i'm trying to like sterilize 1500 pounds of sawdust hey you know it's one of the best insulators let's cook it yeah you know i came up with that concept and now i don't run any probes nothing i mean you and tyler went out like what the is it you got going on i'm like oh i turn it on and then 22 minutes i take this valve and i shut it most of the way oh we were like but yeah we were trying to figure it out and that was that before he went to he was gone he was gone okay yeah yeah yeah so that was that was an interesting sort of time we were trying to figure out if we wanted to employ that and then we came across this one for pennies on the dollar california dude we got lucky that's nice you know like there's these great podcasts that uh uh what's his name does i'm blanking his name he does uh how i built this it's like an npr podcast this business owner is talking about how they made it and he always asks like you know what percentage is hard work versus luck and success of a business it's all luck it is no listen it's not you have to wear concrete so look this is what the last year in 2020 is showing it's like and also you and i have been going back here now 12 years or whatever it is yeah and i've learned from the things that you've done i've learned from your mistakes yeah you've learned from some of my mistakes and each one of our directions because just keep you know i'm a mouthpiece that talks and loves talking with large groups of people and educating them yeah you know so in the future my farm is moving more towards agritourism yeah and teaching people yeah maybe value-addeds yeah you know that sort of thing because the grind of the restaurant and the grind of all of that because i'm one individual yeah and you know if you're at 15 people now yeah you know a lot of time is being spent by one person managing that yeah even with five people a good amount of my time is managing inexperienced people oh my god and yes they've been there almost a year yeah but the seasons vary so much that you're constantly in a teaching moment yeah and i'm one individual i have eight owners but i'm the day-to-day you're the dude you know and i'm not a dude man i've had investors over the past i want to come and they want to invest money yeah it gets almost to the end and i could never answer that question what happens if you get hit by a bus it does you know they're like can the farm operate if you got hit by a bus and i could never prove that it would right and so then everyone would always back out yeah and for you know i was pissed then but now i'm like oh if i was you i wouldn't i wouldn't invest in it either no no and that's part of the the like that you have to have you have to have anything over like 100 pounds a week you've got to have a team yeah of people in each aspect of that business yeah because any one thing you know you as a mushroom farm owner yeah you know you're wearing about 40 hats yeah you know there's 80 hats to wear though yeah you know if you're even like that if i'm at like the five to a thousand pounds a week yeah and it's just one hat yeah you know you're switching hats so much during the day that every time your focus gets pulled yeah you know like what can you put that time into yeah so i mean when people are thinking about starting a farm really realistically think about not how long it should take you to do it yeah how long is it going to take the person that you employ to do it right and you've got to think about the fact that in food yeah the ability to pay a living wage yeah okay is almost impossible yeah you know we had a conversations before where i needed to hire people oh yeah and i'm like on the down low i'm like dude what's your starting rate yeah and you told me i'm like you gotta be kidding me dude that's our main goal you know what i mean like i can't pay that yeah mostly so the people like my employees if they did not have a spouse with a second income yeah or they were not living with family yeah i i in the state of new hampshire which is a higher you know a higher cost of living than around the country and new england is very expensive cause it's cold you know and it costs money to warm up yeah um literally uh you're in a certain age demographic yeah because i've got a lot of people that are very qualified yep saying that's what you can pay me no i need to make this i'm like i can get i can pay two people that can't do that yeah you know so what is the knowledge level or the work level of the

1:50:23 team of people that you're going to have based on experience on what you can pay i'd love to be able to pay you know a living wage for sure for sure i mean i'm selling to people that have a one percent margin right right you know if i'm selling to restaurants in grocery stores yeah which have like oh my god i got a five percent margin i'm doing great this year yeah well i can't survive on a one percent margin right you know i can't pay on a one percent margin yeah so it's finding that x mark that in between well and that's what speaks to why i think so many people um came into supporting us as a business uh inadvertently you know is because they realize that you cannot do the sport of store thing um if you're lucky you can and it's possible but it is damn challenging to work seven days eight days ten days a week it's really your time management yeah like i am the busiest person i know that gets nothing done yeah seriously oh during the week i get nothing done that's why i'm here on the weekends you know because like i was supposed to do stuff today but then you called me up i'm like oh i'll go over and shoot this with you for a while i haven't been over for a field trip look at your inoculation machine yeah for sure yeah you know so yeah um like oh you still use that inoculation machine you got from john because i suck and i need to have myself not do it anymore and what it is is that i'm trying to set the farm up that eliminates the the because as you get into this you know that every single step of the process has dozens of mitigating variables that are going to affect your outcome which inevitably is your final like per block yield yeah that is what bases off from everything yeah okay and so with one little tiny mistake you know people are like my employees are like why are you bitching at me because i folded the bag that way i'm like well it's step one yeah i said you don't understand how many things that's going to go on and freak up that's step 13. you know you got someone coming in for a tour they're like oh look at all the bags i'm like like how do you get them up there yeah like we mean how we would walk up a liar and put them on there brad coons first asked me that down in westbrook he was like so what automate automatically puts these bags on these shelves and i was like these fingers i was like what are you talking about two weeks ago i'm here i am i well i went and bought the rest of the equipment from that farm that was still out in storage at that field sure and one of those things is a semi-automatic bagging machine oh the the like car no i've got that one that one went too fast that's 22 bags a minute i didn't have a half yard picking mixer like oh there goes the mix yeah you couldn't even put the bags on fast enough and it's for bottles it's for like a skinny bottle i still have it because it's equity yeah and it's fun to play with every once in a while yeah no this was a weighted one and so it's a it's a screw auger yep and it it fills the bag and when it gets to the weight it shuts it off and you shut the switch and and so i was working on that scale basically sort of like that it's a it's a fulcrum yep yep and you know it's always on yeah but then when it gets to that weight it comes off from the button which is very it's like you just you just flip your switch and shut it off yeah yeah and then that way it might eliminate a person that's pretty great you know when i got the employees saying like oh my god why do you want us to do it like that it's only saving two seconds per bag right i'm like two seconds per bag when you're doing thousands of it makes a difference huge yeah you know i mean you and i were here once talking like oh i'm going to put this in i'm going to put that in i'm going to put this in i'm sitting there scratching my head and i'm looking at you and i'm like dude i think if it that might put you at like 800 bags an hour yeah and you're like holy yeah that's exactly what i was hoping to get yeah because you think so much about yeah it like right down to the second you have to yeah you know and and and all the employees wonder why when you're like starting to like chop the gun like let's go yeah let's stop talking about you know farts and what you ate for dinner last night you know let me like let's talk and work at the same time yeah it's a hard thing to have a variable schedule too and you know your your experience with employees i think is very similar to the majority of mushroom farms that i've talked with and consulted with or whatever um worked with in some capacity and i don't have a complaint about my employees at all like i i feel so fortunate like tyler and kelsey for instance speaking of wearing the hats or like they've just met me one day and i've mentioned this on other podcast recordings they're just like these are the list of things that we think we can do without asking you can we do that without asking you i was like yep thank you because like that takes those hats away and like during the week i can't get anything done you're exactly right you're the person who does so much and gets nowhere because you're just like yeah you're pivotal all of a sudden the phone rings oh that was somebody and all of a sudden now my insurance company calls me because they want to go over this and then then a person's on the phone asking if i

1:55:24 sell kids and why don't i sell kids because i don't want to be on the phone i do sell them a little bit but no one out there who listens to this podcast nobody calls me for a kid there are people out there that are call captains call eric call north sport i don't know who they'll sell kids they're plenty there's lots of people it doesn't have to be you yeah i don't want to sell kits because i mean for local people i do yeah you know um yeah we're all doing it for schools i mean all the kids at schools in the area they always have like some kids gonna do mushrooms that year yeah i think what a lot of people getting into like oh my god this is so cool i want to work here and then after like two weeks it's like they're like like we're picking again today like we just picked yesterday you pick every day bud you're like well i i can't i gotta leave at one i got a thing yeah yes and like and then friday's christmas like what's up with christmas what what do you mean it's friday yeah live working lab is friday in the morning if i can load this this and that i'm like i just kidding yeah because i mean my family they don't even ask me if i'm going to be at christmas anymore they just know they're like we're not even going to ask you anymore because it's a holiday and you're picking mushrooms i'm like well you know i asked politely hey can you just not grow today my mom gets real excited now because uh i've i've been dating this this girl down in long island new york which a long distance relationship is actually kind of a pro to the whole holding a mushroom party because it forces me to go away yeah it's amazing it's actually a benefit and like and she's she's extremely respectful as was as was frank you know about like this is going to take a lot of energy and uh it's so hard to be upfront with people about that and not try and like set a doomsday clock and um my mom's just excited he's got she's got a kid and uh and like there's just this version of of how to like have holidays minus kovid with a different sort of orchestration frankie and i just worked yeah so like no we did not take holidays you know and they everybody understood to a degree but it was because we were so headstrong and just so busy that it was like what we have to harvest we have to pack bags we have to pack blocks whatever it was we give people the vacation in order to do it ourselves you know and that was okay for a while but yeah like i said my mom is like so envy that like ability to have something to lean on yeah like i can i lean on stephanie who does the sales yeah you know dennis is retired and moved on to doing me but he just came by the farm the other day mead he's selling mead for south house meetery oh cool well he we needed to transition to like digital invoicing yeah yeah using credit cards dennis was very much old school yes a great sales person but not willing not getting into the newer way that we needed to do business he's the funniest person i've ever talked to well he was at the farm the other day he's retiring in in uh next october okay he's gonna find his wife is retiring in march okay and um there's the farm the whole beginning of the whole fire like it's he was absolutely integral to making it happen oh yeah you know if right now you needed to go out there and and wear all of those hats that happen on a weekly basis we certainly wouldn't be here just shooting the on sunday no like i was here an hour late yeah because you know i needed to make sure what needed to get done at the farm today is done when i'm not there today yeah oh i woke up i think i text you like seven or something but i woke up and was like what if he's already outside i just like had a moment and i was just like i've gotta figure this out real quick i was like you know and then i was like i gotta go yeah i know i don't text you and i was like but we're all in that same like mind frame of like we have a lot to deal with yeah and trying to fit in these like extracurricular i mean when we scheduled this i'm like i could probably make sunday work let me get back to you yeah it was an hour later hey i can make that work hey i'm not going to hold it to you i'll text you in the morning i was out filling the wood boiler which should never get below like 174 and it was at 125 yeah um which means the wrong wood went in last night which is probably my fault but um but that's all right because i've got a lot of extra mushrooms and if the grow rooms cool down 10 degrees then that's great for a couple days yeah yeah um which is hard to explain when you know cooler's full of clothes empty yeah because what you're doing is you're simultaneously running plan a b c d and f yeah with all the mitigating variables yeah constantly yeah 24 hours a day seven days a week where it just becomes part of that i mean i met frankie a couple of times we had the lunch and all of that i was oh man i was going back i'm like man i could i need a frankie to lean on like someone that fully gets in in my relationship at the time i mean it put so much strain on it my girlfriend at the time she was in radio right so i

2:00:24 remember i would get i would get back to the house around 12 30. yep i would get into bed at one yeah and she got up at three yeah to go do radio yep and so i would sleep from about 1 30 to 3 and then i was up damn you know and it was a seven day a week sort of thing and you know you'd be like oh thank god it's friday what well thank god it's friday i mean i have never hesitated like i'm like oh i gotta call loman yeah and all of a sudden i realized it's like 10 o'clock on a sunday night hey dude what's shaking you know what i think the easiest podcast to do is because we're all up at that time so like i'll call some are you awake dude what the are you talking about my way to 7 00 am dude like you sleep in today like i heard the backup boiler kicking on i gotta go get some heat in this thing yeah yeah and then make sure like oh this gets loaded today and this gets loaded and someone find out where this rotten smell is coming from what did alex from cascadia say to tyler if you're going to start a mushroom farm never live above it because he does the same thing and he's just like that's your commitment level you know and it doesn't have to be by any means but like to the degree at which you're starting something as vulnerable and volatile as a mushroom farm you have to be somebody i think if a person is starting out to do mushroom right and they're gonna be in this career and they want to be a farm and absolutely that's great yeah but understand automatically that it's going to take more time and more money than you expect yeah um also know that it's going to um completely utilize all of your time and you've got to be able to make that commitment yeah and it's not a matter of if you fail because you are going to fail and you're going to fail a lot in fact you're probably going to fail most of the time yeah stop using facebook and instagram pictures to base the success of your farm yeah on what you're seeing on people's highlight reels yeah that's a hard one for me to swallow because you know i'm funny and charming and so petty deep down let's be honest right right yeah um and so i'm like wow what you know what are they doing and if you're thinking hey a person's doing that and i should be doing that because it's going to work out better because it worked for them might cost you a lot of freaking money it's amazing how many people that just you know pull the trigger and shoot at the hip and just go fast in this industry and they all up and fail well there's some there's some farmers in tamworth right and tamworth's a little tiny small town for anyone that's listening it's in the white mountains um it's south of conway yeah you know uh near lake winnipesaukee in mount washington to give anyone sort of an idea of what our demographic is it's a beautiful spot it is a nice area and and so we're equidistant between burlington boston and portland maine and it's where we play yeah you know i forage in the white mountains yeah you know so why i mean every weekend you're seeing a million cars coming up to enjoy the weekend i'm like i'm already here just go outside yeah yeah and there's some old-timer farm like we're far enough off from route 16 that we don't have to worry about tamworth gentrifying too much yeah um other than when i moved in and like whoa weird mushroom dude what are these guys do you're the genius but now i've got a huge amount of town support yeah um and a lot of regular customers from that and they all know about the mushroom farm yep and um i was talking to one of the farmers because the tamworth farmers market uh right now we've been doing it outside yeah you know at least we've been having some mild saturdays yeah but there were some rainy ones oh god well i mean the last concord market on halloween the last outdoor one yeah people like oh look at the mushrooms and i got display mushrooms in there like ding ding ding ding ding it was 16 degrees out in every mushroom froze they're like these gonna last in the fridge but if i could cook them today yeah just quickly let them thought and just just just cook them real quick you'd be all right oh god and so i'm talking to these farmers like oh like how's this mushrooms doing i'm like how is this and i call them i call some of them gentleman farmers but they've been doing it so long that they don't overdo themselves yeah and they do the things that are making them money and they're like hey and everyone's always hey how's the mushroom farm going you know because you've got an entire like i always make the analogy of potatoes you know it's a year-round thing if you're doing potatoes but you've got those sections like okay now i'm getting my seed stock now i'm doing my fields and now i'm planting and let's hope for rain and this now i've got to distribute like package distribute and market yeah well that's the same for mushrooms but you're doing it every seven days every seven days but at least it gives you time to bounce back when you it

2:05:25 up yeah you know and i'm like yeah you know it's doing all right i said not financially of course because you know we're a farm and all that he goes you know what successful financial farms say i'm like what he goes we've made enough to farm another year yeah and i'm like wow that's kind of an interesting thing i made enough to farm another year yeah because i get asked all the time like well what would you be doing if you weren't doing this well people i'm like i don't know like this is what i want to be doing like this is it it's hard it's every day yeah but i don't want to not do it yeah and i want to do every like that's the that's the crazy part about owning a business in this and continuing to go on is like i have all these other real burning interests and desires that like i do on the peripheral i don't have enough time to do it as much as maybe social media makes it look like i do but i try so hard to like stay up at late at night instead of like watching a movie or something just to like just clean a mill or clean a lathe or build a motorcycle or paint a tank or whatever the it is and uh and that's the stuff that you don't have to make money at if you can find something that allows you to just keep those hobbies going and then get you through another year of farming you're doing good that's worse as far as i'm concerned that's where i've got to get to because right now it's mushroom farming or i play with my dog right right oh yeah you still have a dog it's now 11 months wow in january of last year yeah right i love her she's high maintenance yeah she's i love her uh she's the the best little mot that has ever existed yeah and so people like what do you do for fun i'm like i mushroom farm i play with my dog yeah man and i'm like oh maybe the dog doesn't like me today yeah and someone goes uh dude i can guarantee you right now i don't play fetch with my dog two and a half hours a day i'm like well that's what she wants i know that's part of the prerequisite to hire here is like you gotta throw the ball for edna she's hr and she's also like throw the ball it's awesome she's gonna she's gonna know she could probably give you that hairy eyeball oh yeah i mean if you just see a picture of her you're like man she's gonna and then you just meet her and you're like okay no you're not gonna do it yeah you make enough money to farm another year yeah and in in successful farming really doesn't have to do with finances at all but really your ability to persevere through adversity yeah yeah you know like can you continually and repeatedly lose all of it yeah and then reinvent and rebuild it back again yeah you know you and i have both reinvented the whole business plan of each of our companies still doing it it's it's on like when i was writing the business plan i'm like why would anyone need to do more than one of these things maybe once a year i go back and read the original business plan oh god and i'm like do you get anything out of it i do okay good like man you were so dumb but you had high aspirations and some of the things were very right and they hit right on the head sure you know because especially mushrooms that had existed at one point but then were and there were some mushroom farmers that are doing very small scale in new hampshire and in maine yeah and we wanted to go to that next level of production yep so you're like all right well working farmers markets are the most expensive but you can charge retail and you're actually having conversations with the people that are going to re continually buy your products yeah it's not about all like hey guess what i'm making this you know custom motorcycle right this one-off thing that i've you know fixed up from the junkyard yeah and now i'm going to sell it and it's a one-time sale now no i want that person to come and buy mushrooms again next week yeah yeah yeah and having those custom i'm like well it's a totally different people don't even know what the hell it is like oh you grow mushrooms well yeah we're growing 10 different ones why would you do that because well this one's like crab and you know this one has a lot of protein and yeah this one's mushroomy you know something really in that regard so i mean when you're trying to you get a lot of pros and cons to building something from nothing you do yeah so true so going back to the to the original business plan is well here's the thing we never anticipated because it was a pipe dream yeah and i think it needs to be in business plans what are the plans in pay place for the potential for exponential demand yeah and a lot of places like a boy i really just hope i sell something right and you can produce a certain amount yeah what happens if you go out gangbusters and you get like 100 clients right and then all of a sudden now you

2:10:26 can't fill that order yeah because you're going to have a glass ceiling of what you can do how do you i mean that's so weird okay holy you know i got you know i got someone that wants a thousand pounds of shiitakes a week yeah you know what i mean i'm gonna call you up because i've been getting like 10 blocks a week you know yeah i'm like all right well next week can i get you know a thousand yeah you're like no you can't get a thousand they take 60 some odd days to to incubate like yeah yeah what do you want me to what do you do at least you already know the answer you know well that's the most interesting part uh like we all asked ourselves i don't know if you asked yourselves but the the thing that like christopher and i asked ourselves and then i asked myself when i was out in arizona doing this the first time i was like why are there no mushrooms at farmers markets but there's fresh you know butt mushrooms everywhere the other question that i continually ask myself now 10 over a decade later is why haven't the bigger farms gone towards specialty mushrooms and it begs the answer that i'm assuming is correct it's that the infrastructure is so god damn different and so large that they're not they're dinosaurs they can't just reinvent that wheel that big so take coven an example yeah okay so you had there were several companies of like csas or or fsas yeah yeah farmers or or farm alliances yeah so there's a farm store but like 20 some odd farms yeah and it was maybe oh geez probably maybe 10 years ago now less than that where the online infrastructure yeah for ordering from these these distributors that are buying only from local farms because they're distributing what those local farms have yeah to restaurants yep and some would be on board and some wouldn't be on yeah you know there was one in the state of new hampshire and i was going on these zoom meetings and things every week because everyone's like up in the air and everyone's got a lot of questions and yeah how am i going to get funding and where am i going to sell everything yeah and then you talk to a guy like hey listen we had an online infrastructure yep and we were making say 30 home deliveries of fresh produce a week damn okay and all everything else was to restaurants and some wholesale from these 27 farms in the month of march in a four-week period they went from 30 home deliveries a week to over a thousand and i think the only way that was facilitated because that foundation infrastructure with the online ordering yeah you know was already in place yeah it's safe and so a lot of people sell for farms that go into that alliance yeah you know there are organic farms and vegetable farms a lot of farms had banner years you're like oh my god everything was gonna be dude well march like hit and everybody has said the same thing i don't care what business you're in if you've been in it for a while everybody was like march was aiming to be one of the biggest months ever for us everybody has said that that i've talked to and uh and very few people in very few industries except for food have been like kovit has been good you know we've survived it and actually thrived in it and i thought a lot about that like what the hell am i doing wrong did i get into the wrong things you know because we had six or seven or eight or nine or ten different new avenues to sell product yeah a bunch of the ideas panned out and some didn't like when farmers markets closed yeah but grocery stores could be open well i have a huge parking lot yeah so i'm like well it i can't have a farmer's market because of the actual wording and the laws regarding around the word farmer's market jesus said but if i call it a pop-up market i don't have to follow any of those rules listen we only had a couple of vendors but the fish person yeah wouldn't be no restaurant they would have had no sales because everything goes to restaurants or wholesale to restaurants or at farmers markets and so for like a six week period you know there's a maple syrup and there's people doing val you know prepared foods everyone's like 20 feet apart and it was from like 1 to 7 p.m show up if you feel like it don't come if you don't feel like it leave whenever you want there's no table fee right just come and sell your if you can the more people that want to come the more mushrooms i'm going to sell yeah after that first weekend i'm like well i was dumb and and stephanie my chief of sales looks at me she goes do you want to know how many pounds we sold today off from my parking lot and i'm like i don't know if i do or not maybe i'm like i know we have a lot of mushrooms in there referring to the walk-in cooler and then she showed me the numbers and i'm like no

2:15:26 really she goes you don't know for like four hours you kept running back and forth right you know filling orders and i'm like well i guess we're gonna do this again next week yeah and a lot of people were new customers just because they were looking for some other way to knock out somewhere in my store right either or i'm not sure why it's a virus but then people start putting more thought into where their food's coming from and what's in their food well you know staying healthy is sort of the uh it's the best line of defense for most people and it's the easiest to accept so i know a lot of people specifically on a personal level who have benefited like uh emotionally physically health-wise from covet from staying at home they're just they've changed their lives around like in a huge way because they don't have the anxieties of going out and sort of having to deal with everybody else's assumptions about how they're trying to go about their life which is very very strange the pace at which people are living gets to a point that's so fast yeah i mean if you go back and read um brad berry's fahrenheit 450 watch yeah i mean what is that that's written in like 1951 yeah and like literally reading that about how they're driving and the billboards like 140 feet long because you're driving so fast that's how long they have to be to be able to read them and then like a wall that's a television where you're actually just looking in at real life it's like yeah what in the were you smoking dude like yeah you were like some spot-on futurist you know the the the what do they call the the tissue society yeah where every human life or whatever it is is like a tissue where you take it blow your nose wad it up throw it away right you know and and using this sort of example of people having that opportunity to slow down yeah and sort of hyper analyze the situation we're in you know how many people have gotten off of social media just based upon the last year you know like because you realize that what you're doing is recycling things you don't even know are true anymore when you start when your lizard brain becomes desensitized yeah you're to the point you know like oh yeah like i mean are you reading a meme like oh man i want to go back to like uh no um what is it joe exotic quarantine and not like nana died quarantined you know like i want to go back to like tiger king like when everyone's indoors like it's like an adult snow day for six weeks that's what it was dude that's what it was it wasn't for you it wasn't for me i know but like i'm an essential worker you know i'm in the hospital i'm doing this and yeah and then you've got workers that want to work like dude i realized that i make this but like i'd be a lot better off if you fired me because i'd make like 80 of what you pay me plus 600 bucks yeah like my buddies at home right now making like a grand a week yeah just doing nothing and here i am doing this like i don't want to work yeah that's why the next stimulus bill is what getting people 600 bucks like you know it's 600 bucks i mean unfortunately for me being out of watching the news yeah you know what i mean and and then because of this situation yeah having to get back into social media yeah yeah having to be one step ahead of that pulse to see what's going around the country oh dude i mean january 1st right i mean everything closed down in mid-march yeah january 1st i ordered six months worth of ppe because i knew that rubbing alcohol and gloves and suits yeah and were gonna be tough to get yeah in fact i told tyler about it because we came out here for a field trip so yeah you go gosh all over you're sterilized oh yeah and he went awol buying stuff you know we didn't run out and um you know so we're trying to so having to read the news yeah every single day oh it was so happy it was like oh my god you just see that karen video and you're like oh my god and it's going here and it's over there it's going there and now it's like yeah karen video just carrying number four in video the house you know well what it is is this dichotomy of like oh my god of like we talked about hurt immunity yeah or heard like two-thirds of people like are being controlled by the other people like they're just following what's going on oh yeah and you're like oh well i've got time off they're like oh things like business must be good like i mean business is good like every person i sold to closed yesterday right and they don't know when they're going to reopen yeah like oh we'll just stop i'm like what the do you think i'm gonna do for the next 12 weeks that i'm picking mushrooms right if i stop production today yep you know i've still got mushrooms yeah for 12 weeks

2:20:26 so i mean you just try a lot of different things and some things work and some things don't well well that was like an interesting point to what you were saying about the farms and like uh their like csas just going sort of through the roof was very indicative of who survived that first wave of the pandemic for us buying blocks in it was the farms that initially called and said i don't know what i'm gonna do less than a week later they were like can i get more blocks everybody else was in the same spot that you've been in it's just like yeah i've gotta close for a while you know but the the ones who are actually part of that agricultural community growing other stuff they were they knew what to do right figured it out and we never stopped yeah we never stopped production yeah right now we just stayed doing production um i think i i skipped like two yeah um you know two days of production yeah which doesn't sound like a lot but it's five to seven you know 500 pounds it's a lot yeah it's cash um because then you start thinking about all the things that you like well boy if i had this sort of thing because you know you take like uh you know take dunk yep you know dunk is part of his facility has that commercial kitchen yeah he has the ability he's got the access banging jerky recipe yeah you know and now he's got these prepared foods going on i'm like son of a man i want some lion's mane pot pies he's been working on that for so long it took so long to get the licensing and it's not just like oh i know i'm gonna have a shed and i'm gonna have a commercial food license no like he that's part of the interesting thing now is to watch people who are coming up and they're they're looking at doing the value-added stuff and uh what they don't understand is all the stuff that he had to go through and is he gonna share that no you know i mean he might share like on one platform but not like he's going to share the struggle in the development not the like recipe right and it's because people don't even understand how long things are in the works so if you have that in the works you're good if you're a farmer that you know entered march you're good but you didn't know you were just like oh i guess we're all right you know if you're trying to eliminate variables that are going to affect sales yeah and you're dealing with a product that has so much perishability yeah then it's just common sense that if you can have a shelf stable product yeah why not you know yeah that's what we're after in this industry but we can't ever get to i mean i can think of some sort of use of like when it's springtime yeah you know when someone goes out back and goes oh my god that's like 2 000 pounds of mushrooms on your compost pile right now do you pick those no no what do you do i said i'm letting them rat put it back into the compost they're like but could you eat those sure you could eat them but you don't pick them and sell them yeah or the hey trim all the sauna stuff or hey don't trim right to the block yeah if it takes you you know five minutes to trim every piece off yeah you know or if it takes you so long they don't like employees don't understand where it's like okay you're taking so long yeah that's actually would have been cheaper for me to just have you throw that away right right no no but you sell these mushrooms yes i do but if it takes more time you know then to have like this is learning that difference of when is it cheaper to just shut down i would spend a lot of labor in the spring in the fall bagging yeah and loading compost up for people because as you know and i know you know the mushroom compost is bananas yeah i trade probably over 75 of it now with a compost company no because they also have wood and i get wood back i don't i don't pay for firewood and i burn 44 cord a year that's great because i mean i had people show up for tours and they're like oh you've got wood all over the place i'm like yeah i've got deals with these are these people are paying to get rid of wood yeah arborists the town and the state they're paying to get rid of this stuff yeah i'm like i burn wood i'll take it drop it off afraid yeah so i'm about 40 dollars a cord to buck splitting stack eh for comparative for anyone listening you know cheap is like 300 bucks a chord yeah i think the first time i saw that shack i was like holy this is around the corner that shack that you saw with the wood in it that's that's uh two weeks worth i burn well if i'm below 15 oh i didn't even mean the size of it i just meant the fact that that was heating i was like oh wow well see when we talked about heat exchange right yeah and i need to move a certain amount of air yeah and my grow rooms aren't moving enough air so in the winter time yeah in order to keep it warm don't run electrical heaters everybody it's like i'm running a laundromat with no one putting quarters it's true um i burned through a lot of wood because i i had an extra zone for the radiant heating yeah and so i did a closed-loop heat exchange system in my intake air

2:25:26 that's all thermostatically controlled so i mean i've got air coming in at 2 000 cubic feet a minute at negative 10. yeah it's that 400 000 btu heat exchanger that's tied into my radiant heat zone comes out 90 degrees damn so i use waste heat from the wastewood boiler yeah to heat the grow rooms eh it's easier to do that than it does make it cold makes sense of course if i get like three or four days less than 15 because the building i'm in was a concrete company's building yeah i mean it's 10 inch thick concrete walls yep but very little insulation in the ceiling yeah and you know it's a if it gets below 15 i get about a week yeah of stored heat energy yeah yeah um and i start losing it as we get like a two week stretch of below 10 degrees yeah um fahrenheit and it goes in it goes the other way too yeah it's starting to get cold but around christmas i mean around uh halloween you know when it was like in the single digits i still have the wood boiler on no and my mushrooms slowed down like i was behind a week yeah but we had a lot of mushrooms at that point so slowing it down was a bit okay because if i had turned that wood boiler on the next week it was in the 60s it would have been even worse you know to have everything because now i've got three days they're you know worth thermal energy stored in my concrete these are these stretches of timeline that are so hard to grapple with you know so it's like ah son of a you're like well why would the mushrooms look good oh it the boiler don't blame blame mother nature nah you're enough i don't get upset like when i first started people like ah you're into you're a gentleman farmer yeah oh that used to piss me off so bad yeah yeah i'm like no just because we're indoors and it's like computers and it's like and it's not a lot of space yeah i mean the entire farm is literally less than 5 000 square foot of space that's the hardest part about being at farmers markets when we were doing them was the farms that would set up next to us with carriers and veggies and the whole nine yard and you were like this looks great and they'd be like what are you doing here you posers you know is immediately what people look at and you're like dude you don't even know and now it's turning around i think a lot of those farms are pulling in mushrooms and they realize it is a cash crop and it's hard as a lot of farms that this year that are small and have their own farm stands yeah that are just had a banner year yeah like we would sell mushrooms to those folks yeah literally ordered like 10 times the amount but inversely you would have say a restaurant that would order like maybe 100 pounds a week yeah just disappear and then when reopening down to like one or two cases a week yeah yeah yep yeah i i've heard this argument and uh my girlfriend's uh kate she she has a friend who works in the restaurant industry down in uh somewhere in long island i can't think of the name of the town off top my head but um uh basically she said that the majority of restaurants including theirs that are operating there have realized in this like uh close reopen close again that if they stay open with limited dining they actually lose money yeah if you just stay closed and do just take out and sort of like develop the sort of you know orientation around your customers coming and pick up and get the out you can make money and that's like i've forged like a lot of rest they just aren't set up for that no they have these huge dining rooms and they've got these kitchen views yeah and things where it's not lending itself yep to that and if you're not into the thing is it's fine so you have these huge dining rooms right yeah like oh we'll just do takeoff right a lot of places did take out for like a month yeah well and i'm like well why do they only do well because they did it till they ran out of food they had right you know and then it makes sense because it's not just like oh we'll just have the chef and a sous chef and you know a server and then just have jacob yeah well the building cost a lot you know if i'm producing zero mushrooms at my facility yeah i still have a figure that needs to be paid every month whether one mushroom is grown or not or four thousand pounds of grown in that money it's true yeah and i'm surprised that more restaurants haven't tried to quickly adapt with things going out and get those more like uh take out specific spaces but i guess you know it's hard and this isn't something you can just like or or they were looking at the numbers and said boy we could do this we could right or i'm going to be working this hard to do that much to lose still lose this much right right yeah and that's the thing where a person from the outside looking in doesn't understand and especially if it's a new mushroom farmer yeah there are going to be and i always do this when i was doing estimates as an engineer sure something i called the tim cost yep and tim just stands for the things i missed yeah yeah

2:30:26 you know what is my tim cost yeah you know like oh well i said it was going to be this amount of labor it can be well i didn't budget for like three out of nine people not showing up or the snow storm or the pandemic or like oh you didn't get much done oh yeah what the hell did i do yesterday yeah oh that's right i was shoveling snow for six hours we're throwing a ball for a duck it's coffee and it is and she sees great at night because we played fetch at night and i can't even really call it fetch because like huck in a no i got one of those well no i'm fat and out of shape so i don't want to be a shape-shifter in two months you'll be a skinny again i do that yeah it has to do with the fact that sometimes i eat and sometimes i don't yeah i feel you because i just it's like ah it you know it's 11 o'clock at night i didn't eat today but like if i want to eat i'm single so i actually have to make something right right and i'm like well it i'll just eat tomorrow i eat like a bachelor up here when i'm down with kate i eat so well i'm like god in 2016 when i lost like 75 pounds i lost in three months oh mark was like what is he doing meth and i was like i don't know no it was math prescribed math prescribed myth okay well i was oh it i was being treated for adhd adult adhd and that was just like you don't know yeah you don't eat it all on that you're just like ah no i would eat i ate a half of a protein bar a day 300 calories a day and the thing is i didn't feel like eating and i had this and this is how smart i am this is awesome when i would start blacking out from a head spin dizzy the third time like oh that's the third time i almost passed out i better probably eat something holy listen i would have in that summer um this is i was still driving like 1500 miles a week as well delivering stuff and i had a two and a half hour window a week to forage and it was always a wednesday afternoon it was about 3 30 on a wednesday afternoon and i've got into this wood spot way up in northern new hampshire i've never been to this area discovering a new spot i'm gonna go forage for something yeah well all of a sudden i got i'm dizzy right and i'm like oh well i should not sit down for a second i sit down for a second i open my eyes and it's darker i'm like when did that happen i passed out for three and a half hours in the middle of the woods holy and i'm like oh this isn't good this isn't worth it so i just i just cold turkey i said all right this stuff is me up yeah and and i didn't know about that it was gonna be like i'm prescribed this right like look at me like i'm wearing my skinny clothes and right like i can see my pecker again yeah but it ain't worth it dude if you're sleeping in the woods and not knowing it that's crazy yeah you know because i mean you know you're a fat kid your entire life and all of a sudden now you like way less than you did in high school yeah well there's something to that like wow i can move without being sore right like oh people bend at the knees oh my god like you can that's how you put socks on when you're skinny that's a louis ck joke he's like uh he's talking about granny's probably not pc to talk about louis ck anymore oh that's fine that's fine this is what louis ck got in trouble for like hey i'm gonna jack off everybody so if you're in the room and don't like that get out yeah oh you thought i was joking no but he was like i think he said something like you know you know you're getting old when putting your socks on is a chore like it's just like you like don't want to put them on you know you're just getting old and fat i think he was talking about masturbation it was all euphemism anyways it's like oh my god i don't need to take the time i'll just uh okay yeah no louise he's still one of my favorites despite whatever you know you know he's listen anybody that deserves or has treated people yeah you know they're good with their no matter what the media i can't take what the media says about any of these things with a grain of salt no that person's actions after the fact yeah um you know if the person deserved it then absolutely sure you know and and as a political i try to stay as a business yeah because i sell to i sell mushrooms to everybody yeah so i can't really rub you know anybody sort of like as much as much political as i would like to be yeah with my own views i'm not in a position not because i don't want to but because i cannot financially afford to do that no you know i can't financially afford to

2:35:26 lose any customers based on mine that's a good word political beliefs yeah it's a good way to put it you know and it's amazing how many people in the mushroom foraging farming whatever are one way or another and there's no you you would assume most mushroom farmers or people into my college in general are just like libby sort of you know uh democratic happy whatever they're not you know like there's a lot of people on the spectrum of the you know uh of the whatever political rainbow and uh yeah living around this country i mean it's a different demographic everywhere of places you know i've lived in texas yep texas is a different country than new england oh yeah oh pete dude being in arizona where am i i've never felt more claustrophobic yeah than when i was living in west texas for a year yeah i'm like where do people go outdoors to like hike and have fun they're like oh out there i'm like go outside and you die it's like so hot is it like mesquite no the thing was no matter where you went yeah like there's a fence around it yeah that's true i mean here and there's usually people that live there they come out i'm like oh let's go mushroom hunting park oh we're we're behind somebody's house that's like and they're like can we be here and i'm like well it's not posted what do you mean i'm like well it's not posted so i just go i can go yeah you know mark had a i think an argument with like uh what's his name he did that uh ominito nightmares chanterelle dreams book uh yeah yeah wow i'm really bad at names on sundays um anyways he was like on on air with him and a couple other people and mark said that oh if it's not posted you can go and he was like that's not true you should ask permission and mark and mark was just like okay he got like really quiet about it was like i'm just not gonna go there well that's where some of the things come with like having a because i mean like in the state of new hampshire yeah uh no um was it 19 2009 yeah fisma food safety material act yeah yeah i think was the first time a food act had been written uh for like 37 years yeah yeah i remember there's a whole section in it about approved foods yeah right because at the time they didn't realize that there was no state expert yeah so wild mushrooms technically are not legal or illegal for me to sell in new hampshire yeah you know i've had chefs buy literally 400 bucks worth of matsutakes that you know you know department of health and human services communities one of those oh they're wild matsutake mushrooms well that's not an approved throw away yeah and all that stuff so i mean with the state rep came in and i was talking to him about it a couple years ago and he wrote a bill yeah and then they were trying to mask what maine was doing and this or that and can you forage here and can you forage there you actually have to go it's like like in new hampshire in 1989 you could forage and keep mushrooms in the white mountains no but the northeast isn't like pacific northwest you're not getting volumes compared you know you're not getting shocked for going into somebody's mushroom spot no it's not a it's not the wild west there's no murder mountain anymore but here i am selling wild mushrooms when technically i'm not supposed to yeah but it comes to a point of food safety where if i have a name of course because we name it new hampshire mushroom company you know if anyone types in new hampshire and mushroom there i am number one on google however if you've got that sort of exposure and then you read an article about somebody getting mushroom poisoned yeah by association like did you did you poison them or i have had people show up to sell me stuff wow and then get in you know get into a debate or argument because they don't actually have the species that they think they have right and they are selling me the leftover from what was already sold to restaurants to which i now need to call those restaurants some of which are my clients and say hey so you know this that you bought that is not that i hope you did not serve people yet well and if it was a one-time thing yeah then okay fine one time thing but it was it's been a bunch it was constant and oh there it was the forging thing like blue it was flagrant wrong like coral some corals yeah and some real toxic stuff yeah and it was like oh someone's gonna get really sick dude there was there was an article that came out in portland um about the time that we were still growing mushrooms and uh i don't know if we were selling them at the time or what but it was basically like it was a commentary from maybe duck fat or one of those like you know restaurants that have been in there forever and they were basically saying you got this dude coming in with like beer on his breath trying to hawk whatever he's found in the woods

2:40:26 i sort of laughed at it because i was like i've forged and sold fresh mushrooms how many like kind of scumbaggy people are out there just doing that and then i walk into north spores one day years later and there's a line of people who look like they just smoke crack and they're just like they got their fistfuls of lobsters or whatever and i was like what the f i'm really glad i never got involved in that that's like that's a different level you have to um i set very very permanent rules yeah um in fact when it comes to like chicken mushroom yeah this past year because it was a drought it was some of the most beautiful chicken mushroom that's ever grown yeah but literally took in over three thousand pounds less and wilds this summer yeah i was buying or trading with up north for shannarals yeah and uh it's a tough year good and bad because like well okay well nothing's open to sell them to anyone you know that's true maybe they knew no but when you do your paperwork yeah and realize how much of a volume you know because i flat out tell people what i'm gonna pay them for it yeah and what i'm going to sell them sell it for yeah i don't pull any punches i say yes i'm going to pay this and if you see me selling it for this this is why yeah liability man yeah i mean i've got that lot i pay a lot of money insurance because when i'm teaching yeah you know or like i give out my cell phone number to some people that are really into foraging yeah there are days where i might get 20 or 30 texts what's this mushroom what's this mushroom what's this one that's one of my least favorite things to answer people is when they say yeah what is this i'm like i don't really even want to tell you because i can't tell from your blurry cell phone picture and you i have to say i don't know yeah i don't know i always say a caveat you know like me yeah you know um but it it gets to the point well i had to change the rules because you would get like someone would send you 80 pictures yeah and be like we went out behind our house what did we find today yeah all right well you know picture one through 60 is all this red cap rusty left you know so people need to say i think that this is this yeah there's enough people that do it now that i use it as an indicator yeah of when i should go check my spots of things like oh look black trumpets are up oh like start up the car like i should probably go check my spot but no getting people to be in that hobby yeah and then some people are completely overwhelmed and some people will take a class being like man i didn't get anything from this class because i thought you know like i was going to come to the class and i could know what i could eat when i couldn't yeah and then you have other people that just dive in both feet yeah and you know like oh yeah me and my wife hike and like with like getting to the summit of something really isn't that important anymore it's just fine in mushrooms you know um i got a t-shirt you might have seen it it says what is it uh mycological hunting club uh we might not get there it's accurate dude it is yeah well like how far did you hike i'm like yeah i don't know i was gone for like 12 hours half a mile before i slept for three hours didn't know it oh jesus that's what's going to be scary dude that was that's scary it was it was stupid oh my god i just remembered mark's saying there's some photo of you and like in i think it's you and jason it's some market or some no we were we taught at harvard that day oh my god yeah i was like what did he is he started did he work out mark's like meth and i was like oh my god i hope not but you know legal meth yeah no we had gotten asked to go down and like do something on critical thinking and how it related to mushroom farms and up-and-coming agricultural programs at harvard yeah eh what it ended up being was entertaining people while they ate their dining commons lunch of course but that didn't stop me from being look my your college dropout kids teach their habit today oh geez second time oh god actually the first time i taught the first time i taught at harvard was part of the bmc boston mycological up teaching people how to grow um uh um wine cap stropharia oh i had never actually grown wine caps before and i'm teaching people how to do it it worked for a bunch of people see this is also another attribute of people who should get into mushroom farming i remember the first person asked me if i could re-roof their house i was like 16. i was like sure never re-roofed the house there's still nails i'm sure in that fucker's lawn you know you just do it and you're like yeah i know enough to be able to just tell you yeah but when you were 16 youtube university didn't exist they didn't dude no i don't know exactly exactly what youtube last night what is welding well

2:45:26 one of my favorite things that i've done lately is uh is acquire this equipment and i i'm telling kate i'm like yeah i'm picking up this lathe she's like she heard labe for some reason and uh and i was like what do you think a lathe is and she was like i don't know i have an idea and i was like why don't you draw me a picture of it and she sent me this picture was awesome it was like her version of whatever this was and it was like basically this motorcycle stand with like four shocks that like riveted up and down and and i was like yes so like there's still some questions even if you mishear the word you can't just search youtube you know and like that's a different form of critical thinking you're getting it didn't you oh yeah i'll show you yeah one of the owners of the farm when he he had a machining company oh and in his garage he's like you know what anyone who needs a bridgeport it's gone it's gone now obviously damn it so close this was the guy that he had i'm like hey listen i've been spending all this money he was one of the ones that invested so i'd shut up about mushrooms yeah and i'm like hey i need to get this a-frame ladder and i can afford it a couple of weeks yeah i know you've got this 20-foot a-frame can i borrow it yeah and he's like yes under one condition like what's that he goes never bring it back to my house because i don't use it i'm like all right sweet and i don't have room for this either yeah have you ever heard of a horizontal draw cut saw yeah yeah i got one of those that's sick i broke the thing but oh come on would you like not it's not broke it had been broken before all right and the person did a good job but no it wasn't it they welded the cast and cast is just so hard to weld that it is there's a little piece but i mean he was fabbing up these pieces and cutting like giant chunks of aluminum with it that's cool like for our shelves i cut all of our conduit with it yep you know like man people like man you got like a mile of conduit in your building and not one wire going through any of it because of all the shelving yeah well i mean take forever but i was cutting like 50 of these damn things at a time yeah you know kind of it's a genius shelving material i know lots of people are using pvc when i see pictures online now i'm like see yeah like i'll see like i'll see i'll see like a tumblr thing oh i miss the tumblr yeah actually i have a new design do you for tumblr it's not really a tumbler it's more like a roller thing okay um it's it's uh not as up and down it's more of a gentle it's yeah well that's something that i think is in integral to like when you shake a bag it's not like ah it's it's about just like fluffing this just perfectly to distribute you know and the amount of compression after the fact yeah yeah you know and and because you know we've got a couple kid volunteers that have come in or people we call it the ski slope bag you know the person that's just throwing the bag on that incubates it yeah the tv bags the tv bags where a person just tamps it and ends up being a diamond like well how the am i gonna roll that thing yeah yeah that's true and so you know of course the fruiting mushrooms people like oh yeah you put them in the grow room you just cut this thing and blah blah blah when it gets down to do it you're like no this is the size x you know you do a long x you do a square x i mean i've called you up before where like it was a 30 second conversation hey them big blues you cut an x or an h h you're like h all right thanks dude talk to your club yeah sometimes it's just seeing what other people are doing try to copy it but like you said earlier like it's some things are going to work for you and not for others see that the best lions man i ever grew was again when i thought i screwed something up yeah um and and now i just keep doing it that way because you know we're we're from lab to picking in 19 days with almost 100 biological efficiency yeah year-round damn that's great but i do not do it how a book or a person would say to do it i don't think you can follow any of that stuff anymore like uh like look at radical mycology that book it's it's already outdated and that's from 2016. yeah you know like this is going too fast and the innovations and the ideas and the concepts that you're coming up with in building that i'm coming up with and building we're just we're just touching the well with those things with the odin thing right with the water and then the pellets yeah like my question would be like all right when you're folding it and then stacking it onto a shelf to throw in like does the water distribute through those pellets enough yeah how long is it easy to fold the bag super easy i'll show you how it does it does it like not like i mean the doesn't come out yeah nope i'll run it for you that's the best part about this that's what i'm saying i mean you just put a bag and you're like damn it just made a block yeah and then i saw what you're thinking like oh well he can do 200 an hour right and i'm like oh well well i'm doing 300 an hour yeah yeah you know when we did it the

2:50:26 other way we were at like it needed to be 550 an hour or it made no sense to the bag yeah 200 an hour and that's like you have to like take into the consideration the size of the crew what it's doing like that's like from we just loaded up the pellets to uh filled out all the carts to put them all in the steam box and we're off to lunch okay so it wasn't 200 i mean it wasn't how it just to do no no yeah and that's something that's really fun because you have that you have the larger mixer you have two of them see with your pneumatics a lot of my thinking was that i don't have the ability to raise that mixer up right and still be able to and still be able to clean it and then also within the welding ability no i gotta move my chute from being uh yeah you know a three quarter open chute to that 90 degree chute yeah it's true yeah you just got to cut a square out weld the plate you know oh yeah yeah simple simple cut some melt weld it up dude i'm trying to make you know one of the person uh people that i'm trying to get on this podcast and he's i think he's like a lot of us we're the hardest part has been dragging people into conversations once they're here it's hours of conversating whether it's through the phone or in person um but they're like you know i don't know if i have much to offer and uh it's i'm calling him out it's brandon janovsky who was originally he put that uh great filipino culture out there brandon's gourmet mushrooms yeah everybody knows him he's like grow some great looking mushrooms he's like i don't know what i have to offer i'm like dude i was like first of all you were the first person that i think i was an to and i was like get a welder and stop being a he bought a welder not only did he make a steam box he made us aluminum steam box i was like i was like you figured out yeah and now you're like oh yeah yeah they're just banging out some aluminum i was like dude my cars my carts are aluminum right because i think i called you to rub in on how cheap i got the aluminum you did yeah you're like i know this i'm like dude i paid two bucks a pound for this right i'm saving 40 bucks a stick yeah and like i'm paying two ducks two bucks for an 80 inch piece me really right so cheap and so i'm like i'm gonna make these cards you're like oh you're gonna weld them up no no i'm gonna make 10 000 cuts and both these and curses dude somebody text brandon and just be like go on the podcast i don't know what i have to offer i'm like who is like less full or less full of themselves like i was like i saw that like i'd be lucky up to that point if i get like two filipinos yeah yeah oh i'm like i'm cutting x's i'm top fruiting i'm bottom fruiting i'm getting i'm soaking i'm yeah yeah yeah i i have i haven't failed are the only species i failed that more is hens oh yeah hens are tough dude we're just getting people around them but you know what i don't even want to think about hands because like you you've been to my my farm isn't really set up for hens listen i got six grow rooms i might have 12 different species going at once yeah so i'm putting multiple species in multiple rooms and they're all tied together so i have to balance out all of those species yeah and well yeah it's stupid now but it made sense financially when i was putting it all together yeah yeah a six-inch intake fan that's fine also hens have become this thing like people understand that shiitake oyster lions man chestnut even like even more esoteric ones for some reason because mushroom farmers love mushrooms so much they always go towards hens is like the end all be all because yeah they're hard to cultivate they're delicious the majority of the world wouldn't know what the to do with hens if they're readily available they're like the most amorphous shape strange thing ever and they're beautiful sometimes but truthfully most people that's a complex taste it's like an umami-esque sort of thing when you're cooking with it it's not the same as just a normal mushroom so why why are you going after it like it's the end-all be-all you know i don't know the same answer for that yeah as it is from my response usually with medicinal mushrooms yeah right okay so if i'm any if i'm uh i cannot deny anecdotally uh literally hundreds of stories i've heard where medicinal mushrooms have helped a person sure and they attribute the entire health that they've had either for cholesterol cancer aches and pains inflammation lyme disease migraines anxiety depression all of that yeah i can i'm not a scientist i cannot say because the fda does not say that any of those mushrooms will do any of those things sure okay so me as a business person right so well now if i can't say that those things are going to do anything

2:55:26 cure prevent or diagnose any disease yeah how should i handle that look at the other side of the coin i don't need to yeah because whether or not it does anything yeah and i'm a firm believer that it does yeah and we just don't have the research to justify it at this point correct mostly because i probably believe that you know mushrooms are sentient yeah and they operate without egos and you know we're never really going to truly understand them because we do have ego yeah you know and they just do their thing and they could give a about us yeah at all we're just helping them out they're like ornery teenagers awesomely yeah all that being said does not change the fact that people want to buy it that's true that's very true okay placebos have a 33 percent effective city you know effect efficacy of like actual things yeah it's it's unreal man i'm all about the placebo effect and i i think that's a dangerous avenue to go down as a person as a single human to accept that placebo is a functioning thing because it means you're never going to help yourself out yeah otherwise you're like no it actually does work you know i was humans and mushrooms what we split like 400 million years ago right you know and with all dna and things coming in names are changing like oh you got to use this guidebook in this buy book because this one it's got that four name changes yeah yeah you know in in the last few years i i just had a conversation with my friend mike about this but i'm wondering if angel of death came before uh the world war ii guy uh hitler's crazy torture guy who was nicknamed angel of death forget his name but that would have been like you know he was named that after like in the 40s and i don't i don't really know when that quick terminology like those ridiculous names that like the audubon society book comes up with with these wild mushrooms if those came before or after okay set autobahn society assad sure because i asked gary linkoff yeah about some of those names like i'm like gary you know that some mycologists laughed at me when i called amanita flaviconia yellow patches right because they're like what the is that and you're the only person that has ever called that yellow patches and he looks at me and unfortunately gary has passed away a couple years ago i know he looked at me and he's like you know i just if it didn't have a common name and i felt it needed one i just i just kind of gave it all patches you know one of the very first mycologists that i met yeah um it was my first mushroom foray right i was still working at that other mushroom farm and the the northeast big mushroom foray every year was you know across the lake for me sure and so i went and i brought like 20 pounds of edible mushrooms because i didn't have anywhere for them to go because i wasn't selling them and then um let me see i got ridiculed by larry millman because i pronounce pluralist wrong i said pluterus and he's like oh well that's a different species you grow in bubba i'm like oh yeah i screwed it up but i kind of raped but karma was awesome because like we're standing there on the lawn and he's chastising me and i'm feeling like an idiot and then he's talking about how the fact that they were out there and and then black trumpets hadn't come out yeah and he was so odd that he didn't find any black trumpets that day and i said um larry what about the ones you're standing on oh he looks down and goes oh there's some in the lawn of the place and i'm like there we go comma is a oh yeah it is we've gotten going back and forth well i was able to meet um at that foray sam ristich really do you know who's here and i bought his journal and he had this i mean it was his birthday he was turning like 90 something i think yeah that's right and wow he had this sweater on it was like 50 some odd colors all died from a different mushroom and i sat down with him at lunch and and they were talking about like you know uh ami the blushing amanita and that was a favorite mushroom for this person to eat and i'm like i'm gonna touch that i still won't touch her name uh blushing amanita just leave it to dennis you know this is the first year i sold jacksonia wow really yeah yeah i wouldn't even go near that nope not selling it i'd eat it you know it's it's a you gotta like knock its horns off flash it and then just eat it you can eat it huh i don't like to say that on like thing there are a couple you could eat raw yeah that's true but actually i don't know what a real name is uh our insta leah somebody or other yeah um leah my cilia yeah there's like i said this is specific this is oregon whatever i'm following those people that like teach mushroom foraging yeah yeah

3:00:27 oh she started women in mycology or something or it's in the group or yeah i know i don't know if it's the person that like uh the mycena lately was named i don't know if it's the same person or not okay she had just posted something last week that some people actually have different levels of chitinis so chitin actually some people do have the ability to digest to digest chitin huh and would be able to eat mushrooms raw that's wild no i'm not going to go up like all right go ahead and eat those raw did you ever read the book uh sapiens i forget i'm going to butcher the author's name he's like uh he's a jewish author uh like read all this in the kibbutz somewhere but he basically wrote this like uh very well adapted book on the evolution of humans and uh he goes way back but you know he basically he tries to get people to understand like hey let's bring up the importance of columbus like not the individual but the fact that he like bridged the gap between two species that would have speciated if you think about the time that those people had been separated if it kept going that would have been you know that was that was a 10 000 year period you know where those two species of the same thing basically or the the same species had never seen one another you know so there was like this split where they would have gone and speciated he goes into the whole idea of like we're not all homo sapiens you know we definitely carry these lineage and split differences dna wise where some of us carry these other things and and on a timeline there were multiple you know types of humans existing at the same time so the fact of the matter is is yeah it's so it's super easy to just say somebody you know can digest chitin and somebody can't because that dna is so convoluted going backwards to a time which there was a large portion of you know different types of humans interacted all right so given urine eyes lineage which obviously came from a colder region yeah yeah with uh you know fairly burlap burly features uh great beards yeah fairly round shapes a lot of inner core strength large gnomes low set low uh 40 degrees is still t-shirt weather yeah yeah i'm sweating yeah you know what do you mean if there's no snow on the road you can ride a motorcycle i don't know what you're yeah stop complaining not the ones that i ride because it's going to break down but oh i'm sorry but it's true i know you look at my like oh you know listen you i love the looks of your bike i mean i'm driving my stock 1996 kawasaki vulcan classic 800. doesn't matter it's as stock as it was when i bought it off the showroom floor in 1996. you know there's i i don't i'm not that type person who's like you gotta have this you gotta have that i don't give a what you're riding man just ride just up and then and and i did not ride it this summer even once i wrote it around the building yeah and i put it away the year before i wrote it twice yep and i think i took it up to like kangamangas highway hell yeah that's a great ride though it is a good ride oh yeah because it was almost like riding it was like almost when you go riding the point of what you're doing is that ride yeah you know that is the point yeah for me the ride was like all right i'm out here by myself what am i doing what the am i doing it's like owning a boat yeah like hey i'm out in the lake i'm gonna say i'm gonna sit here relax you know i'm gonna sit here and relax it's like all right so i'm basically like sitting in a wet parking lot now what do i do like i don't i can't handle the idle time yeah you know so it's like all right well i'm going to go mushroom hunting but i'm going to bring my motorcycle yeah well it's only looks like get when i've got a wicker basket bungee cord around your neck and you're just like no no i put it on that two up and i i bungee strap it to the seat behind me oh hell yeah yeah no you know what's funny is i'm fat and like i can't lift my leg up high enough to get over the basket so you got to put it on and then turn around and hope you don't dump the bike yes there goes my channel that's why i manipulate my frame so that my balls don't take beating on the bikes you know my tailbone take it or leave it i don't care my back gets progressively better as the winner goes on because i'm not on a hard time i'm sure there's been times you've been riding that and being like why was i so hard up on having a hard time yeah oh totally dude number six going from jackman down i use my life dude that's a good ride though in a car on a hardtail you're like

3:05:28 you're like you did this is terrible you're like those are yeah there were chats where i was screaming i was just still like teams up there that you're gonna pay a toll just to get out of and they don't even go down to like mid-august maybe they're only down for like a week yeah yeah yeah and then up there too you'll only fix bridges up that far dude they don't fix roads no and like you really gotta pay attention because there's like like oh did you see any wildlife and you'd be like no like i almost hit four moose we went up uh we did that north run when my nephew came up this summer and uh we went up to jackman came down around over to 11 up over it was like a three-day trip it was so much fun dude just outlaw running none of that comes back down through neri down where i grew up dude it's beautiful and there's some wide like highway roads like you do have to watch out for moose but there's some great like it's the habitat has changed the trees are different yeah yeah um it's undeniable beauty it's sometimes the year you're just when we went it was like right that peak of fall up here oh no dude but we we came up into jackman and the only moose we saw is a dead moose but we look over to the right all these cars had pulled over somebody had hit it and it went off into the woods this thing is as big as a room we're in right now i was like what the all of us like slowed down and just got the fear and then just did 60 all the way to jackman instead of 85. we were like oh of course it's maine so something recently just got hit there's probably people lined up to grab a chunk oh totally they're like savagely cutting the legs off they're like we're making ham hock tonight bob good god jesus so what is like uh aaron and i have talked a lot about about this and and i think from massim and i think it's important and like you you've brought it up a number of times and it's something that i try to instill in whoever i'm talking to cons consolation or whoever i'm talking with about starting a mushroom farm or what they want to do so if it's a consultation if it's something different what's your exit strategy especially if that farm cannot exist without you from a financial person's perspective developing that extra strategy is everything right so like you said it's a hard thing to do so going into it it doesn't have to be one singular thing yeah it can be multiple things to say what do i want from this right is it financial is it some sort of sense of i'm producing food am i producing educational opportunities am i putting myself out there to better what this know what you want from the beginning yeah because if you don't know what it is that you want yeah how the hell are you going to plan to get there right be absolutely realistic yeah you know shoot for those stars but be realistic without what your options are yeah never operate on an assumption like i'll get that money when i sell the wild mushrooms that may or may not grow yeah see what i mean yeah that's sometimes why i shy away from csas of individual csas i'm like i might be selling mushrooms on credit yeah what happens if i have a huge failure yeah don't put all your eggs in that one basket you know makes sense not to knock you down but get into your program of making your bags yeah yeah you know because then you can incubate and you can control when you're fruiting and when your fresh products coming out yeah and that's that's a huge thing too but learn what it is that you've got to learn first so fruits and mushrooms and know what your tolerances are of your products and um time management yeah from the get-go you know because if you're burning that fuse you've been there i've been there yeah i'm still there christ i'm still there i try not to be this has been the most chaotic week in the world man and it finally just ended this is the first two day period i've had where i've just done nothing i went out and hiked around with edna yesterday and came back and hit up a bookstore and then just just laid down for the night i was like i'm it's been weeks in a row you know what was i yeah i was spending ice well let me see yesterday oh saturday's and early morning i get up at like four yeah um package the drop off because the winter farmers market in concord new hampshire isn't set up yet yeah our old indoor one we can't use because it's too tight yeah and drop off pre-orders yeah for them

3:10:28 and then come back and and help with the tamworth farmers market then i'm in production in the afternoon yep and then my one of my longest running employees have worked for me for six years he just took a new job yep um and he gave me like an eight week notice this is the skinny talk zach zach um him and his girlfriend they couldn't find a house they had one built and they bought land yeah but he's gonna work a lot and i can't pay him enough yeah so he he's you know the labor i can you know rely on the most he's gone yeah um and you know how am i gonna fill that right and so i've been doing a lot of business thinking this last weekend yeah and then i got heard from you yeah you know and i'm like oh sweet this is fun for i mean we're talking about mushrooms you know i mean but like today's yeah well i don't have to do any farm work today other than like well i mean it's not not farm work you know like nah but this is this is like the esoteric fun side when you've been doing it for so long you can you can think back you can think forward and you can really like conceptualize while trying to to maneuver through the conversation i think that rolling with the punches yeah because as in i struggle with this daily is that you are never ever going to get everything done no in fact if you even get one thing done a day yeah call that a success it's a miracle because if you're the owner of a farm you're going to be busy all the time and not get anything done and not living in that headspace of failing yeah because you're going to be failing right and it's not like you're unique in that i mean if you were a muslim farmer that was not failing yeah there's something up something it's coming 10 times it's going to hit pretty hard and and just know that um you know at the end of the day if you're living true yeah and you're have a good heart and you're being kind yeah nothing else really matters right at all i agree you know you don't you know living this altruistic lifestyle um the eric milligan story altruistic and they're going to get really quiet and then you're good enough here comes the mushroom you're smart enough and gosh darn it you know people people like you the god damn it you're many famous i know i think that my goals have changed that's good because i thought in the beginning that you know uh like i'm going to be a millionaire by 45 right and now at 43. millionaire i'm like at 45 i might be able to go to the grocery store without a calculator that makes me happy you see what i mean yeah yeah yeah um the adaptations that you go through in this industry in particular do not ever you separate yourself from business and personal as much as you can even though you've got to do it every day yeah because if you don't shut it off and you actually have to train yourself to shut it off and i don't you're gonna forget to turn it back on right it's almost like when you eat a big lunch but then you gotta go back to work that's true i'm so nervous where i might you know halt production for a minute yeah um not because the farm would be failing but it's better in the long run yeah um which is seems odd but oh but it's you have enough of an acute vision of it right and and and being able to look at it treat your customers with respect yeah um and and keep your word yeah and and it'll work out i like it and and and if you can um think faster than everyone else prescription methamphetamine listen i i come out and i say that to people all the time yeah i made i was doing what i thought was right yeah at the time because i'm like here is the i need to work 150 hours a week in order to make this work because i'm only one individual yeah and i'm not making money here is something where my doctor is giving me this because i say i have no energy oh my god of course you have no energy right you're no jesus christ you never like listen you're like wow and when you look at it you're like i still got nothing done but i got nothing done a lot faster yeah that's true and i'm out front with that like yeah i made some mistakes yeah um i i try to get too big too soon without having consistency in regards to yields right because i was trying to match exponential you know demand yeah because there was

3:15:28 no accessibility to these things from other mushroom farms yeah on the scale at which we were trying to produce yeah yeah you know and that completely changed everything around to like well what am i doing this for right yeah we all got into this because there was an excitement nobody there are people getting into it now who are making a financial like move but they're making the wrong move they're like oh this will make me money i would recommend that never ever buy one book on how to be a mushroom farmer all right and then use that like the bible yeah of regards to how you should operate your business yeah because when you do that and i've met and talked with lots of people that have done that yeah but i forget their names because they mushroom farmed for six months yeah yep okay buy all the books about how to be a mushroom farmer yeah get into it all right and and and then read everyone what worked for all of them yeah and then see what works for you and never be afraid to completely turn everything on its ear and do something completely different yeah that is integral to like our position of still being around if we didn't turn stuff 100 upside down we wouldn't still be here and i'm in a cusp transition of well let me turn it up again right let me turn it around again and re-evolve and redefine what my company is going to focus more on yeah because now with a lot of other mushroom farmers yeah being able to supply regional markets and i'm talking about like 50 miles away regional markets yeah well that's great now i don't have that on my head well they wanted something they wanted something they wanted some yeah this wholesaler will buy this amount but it's for 75 and what i could do here like let me grow why grow this weight yeah for this percentage margin yeah when i can do 75 at this margin yeah yeah you see so work smarter not harder absolutely and i think that getting into education that's a huge i remember you and uh and you myself and mark had a conversation once yeah and of course i'm blah blah blah blah blah talking a million miles a minute i think i came to pick up something you slowed down incredibly since then yeah like you know it's still chatty yeah yeah but still it's it's like yeah after a while you were like about six or seven different trains i thought all yeah at once yeah trying to be an employee but like i asked you a question you talked for six minutes and i don't even think you answered me i've had to slow myself down i tell them i'm like i'm sorry you don't think faster yeah like why think faster what a great dick move yeah think faster i'm sorry hurry up and someone's like no he's talking he answered the question from eight minutes ago while he's talking about the thing you got to follow like i got a diagram i'll show you how i got a diagram i got a diagram i'll show you what the did milligan just talk to me about well now i lost my training so you mark and i had a car and it was we were talking you guys had to go do a talk or something at mafka oh god yeah and you were like oh you keep talking about these classes and this and that and like him and i had to go talk in front of a group of people and were like me it was like this huge thing i'm like ah it i'll talk to i got i mean i was in front of 500 organic farmers once yeah and they're like oh you didn't tell us you were certified organic i'm like oh well i probably won't be because well we don't need to get into mushrooms and organics that's another whole podcast and i said oh well organic is just for marketing anyway yeah and they're like what and i said just because this is in front of 500 people i'm like listen just because you're certified organic doesn't mean you can grow a carrot or yeah exactly and people are just like and i'm like oh it's like the time i tried to get a free 120 foot long greenhouse because i it was to extend seasons in north in new england yeah and you're like you don't qualify for this i'm like why why not they're like because you don't you grow inside and not outside and i said i know it was to extend it was exposed to they're like it's to extend the season of crops i said yes i want to go from zero to some uh but actually next summer i'm actually um and i don't know what the rules are uh we have a spot though is that i would like to be able to grow some hemp yeah yeah you know because well dude like you and i have been talking about those pellets for what yeah at least six or seven years oh yeah you make those pellets i'm like fire you know finally these pellets are being made yeah and then we've talked about it briefly and they're probably doing it in canada and bradford's probably already done it oh yeah um that um i want these hemp stocks yeah

3:20:31 yeah i have heard him stock him like components are interesting because of the less dust for one oh yeah and the fact that it retains water so well yeah and the fact that it the ignacious nature of it oh yeah but breaks down faster and has those nutrients and makes the protein the peptone protein and the soy more available yeah and one acre of hemp is like 11 acres of oak yeah and it's you know annual it is the sustainable thing a lot of people say what happens when your sawdust runs out and i'm like well we just better hope we're grown enough weed by then like to be honest because if we can match that industry we're fine and the truth of the matter is is that's sort of where we're going based on a lot of different things and it it just it's all about timeline and seeing how these things shake out because all we do is rely on waste streams that's it what would industry be like if we didn't take a sharp left-hand turn okay in like 1937. yeah yeah you know here's henry ford oh yeah here's a car i made out of hemp yeah runs on weed runs on weed it's like 70 miles an hour and you smoke mushrooms now did you know that right it's just crazy we have a uh i think that would like deregulation on on on active species oh yeah yeah the the relationship let's just look at the whole conversation starting maybe we'll end here yeah sure listen in the beginning yeah you know it's eight years ago literally almost everyone that came through the door especially on tours hey you got them funny mushrooms every day everything at the farmers market you got their magic mushrooms to the point where you're at the farmer's market being like yeah how much would you like yeah it's a thousand dollars a kilogram usually a hundred kilogram order yeah you know and then just blow that and just just like your dick it was big because yeah you just give it right back and because you're hearing it so often yeah yeah yeah and you're like no we grow mushrooms for the belly not the mind blah blah blah blah yes this is how it works because you've got to do the research because you don't want to look like an idiot no no no and there's been so much newer research oh yeah on the actual thing which has been done in basements and things but not like with johns hopkins and burial college and right these sort of things um we're kind of getting out of the tune in and drop out let's not party people that make rules oh we could make money on this so let's hear about this uh anecdotally yes absolutely i've talked to people that said if i did not micro dose i would have committed suicide yeah i'm not denying any of that nope i think that that deregulation of course is going to happen faster than cannabis did oh wait because that stigma is now leaving oh yeah and we're now coming into the age of people that you know so i still get the question eight years later often not as much but it's not in regards to like hey you know we're going to see you know like a a grateful dead cover band this weekend now you make a mushroom so we can party yeah it's have you heard about mushrooms being used for like anxiety and depression and things like that so enough mainstream media is getting that first article out like hey did you know that which never happened with weed no we'd had to fight the uphill battle if you think about it well you don't see a mushroom article that's like demonization demonization demonization now that devil's lettuce yeah man jazz cabbage baby speaking of with black lives matter i mean with making weed illegal i'm like oh here are all these jazz musicians yeah yeah you know let's make that illegal yeah yeah it's nuts it's stupid but i not that everything has a reason yeah but think of the amount of research and um genetic development talking about well this is why we talk about mushrooms being sentient or a plant being sentient yeah like give credit to this plant that has gone through so much genetic manipulation in the last 40 years yeah you know and like oh yeah like 15 years i took this nebraska ditch weed now and basically it's just like one trichome crystal now i just grow one giant stalk with a ball on it dude i i bought some clones when i was growing weird for frank and we were doing the whole i was here okay you're going to do your shirt laundry and do you need a hand yeah there's this and i walk into the office there's like 20 18 inch clones i'm like what the are you doing you're like listen frankie's eating like two ounces a day so i gotta do it i gotta just throw my own weed it is ridiculous no but i was uh that's hilarious you hear that day so that dude brought weed and he texts me like i don't know a couple hours later after i thanked him and he was like welcome to the 30 over club and i was like i was like i'm not 38 or i was there i don't remember what i thought but i was

3:25:31 like all of a sudden i was like what are you talking about i just asked him he was like 30 thc bub then i was like what there's 30 t what i was like i just didn't even like you know i don't know i'm a stupid person all right compare that to the the stuff you had in high school in early college yeah that just happened like oh sweet i got a corner piece you know it's like a yeah yeah it's a nugget dude 90 degree corners on it yeah and you never knew if it was just like some other crazy does that taste like lavender yeah oh no no no that tastes like oh that tastes like 10 seconds yeah yeah exactly it tastes like diesel yeah you're like oh it was only half the bag with seeds yeah all right so that was at like maybe one percent or less yeah you had to smoke a lot i was just re-looking at because i mean i've been out of this state for a very long time yeah and it's very strict in new hampshire and they don't barely have medical unless you're dying mate doesn't give a yeah down the road now yeah i mean literally 20 minutes from where i live you know and i'm like what if i'm looking at all of like the different types of concentrates yeah and i'm like what the this looks like styrofoam and then this looks like oil this is pressed this and solvent nuts terpene this and terpene that and i'm like you have all these people that have been doing literally awesome scientific research in the background at home yeah and now they have the ability to share that information yeah and i feel so behind like i don't know what the this banner is that's rosin i think my mom was doing dabs before i was i was like what's wow excuse me do does anyone have an extra set of lungs around that i can really like oh gosh no dude i can't handle that much and i call myself a stoner because i smoke weed maybe every day but it's not like it's just just not just just at night just just at night and then all day uh every day every day kind of like occasionally around the clock no that guy that died an uh that was in that was a quote from uh that movie knocked up oh yeah seth rogen and uh catherine heigl it was the one of the dudes that was in the ghostbusters sure sure and he's like i didn't smoke weed that much he goes just just at night and all day all day every day on the weekends that's true it is nice that even with our older customers that come in yeah you know and and i will have this conversation with like 40 or 50 people on a tour yeah and as long as there aren't like under 18 because they aren't quite developed enough to understand with philosophies and things like that yeah i have the conversation and the science about it yeah i say we don't grow them if you have questions i will answer them i'm not going to teach you how to grow them no of course you know you have the internet yeah figure it out you know and it's coming man i mean it's coming fast i have been actually getting i have gotten calls from cannabis industry people yeah in the state of maine reaching out for consultation yeah because they are already investing or putting money aside to invest in that yeah and these were guys where they're doing medical in the in the mid their mid-90s yep you know so they see where that stuff's going and yes that's where it's going it's huge we've gotten a call we've gotten i've gotten maybe half a dozen calls in the past month like right after that uh uh it passed in oregon or wherever it was or california the the decriminalization specifically of cannabis or of uh uh philosophy not just philosophy but ethnicities yeah ethnicities in general right just for therapeutic use blah blah buy it out of a vending machine and sort of trying to drum up the conversation of how to how to go about uh helping this industry grow and i was like you know i haven't put much effort into it you really should be talking to the people who have been yeah there's a lot of those people who are just like the underground weed people they're amateur mycologists who know everything about it yeah and then some and then they are getting into the wow okay so people say you can't make mushroom hybrids but you're doing it at home in your basement right like the people that are doing their own biotech stuff of course you can make hybrids oh yeah i'm gonna put microchips in my arm and everything like feed some like elephant dna into my you know i mean like i can do this on my i got youtube i got this information that i can just do what i want to do and i can educate myself how many of us made dmt by watching youtube videos just i was called something else and i won't say what it was but you just watch the youtube video and you get an entire no no you can do these chemical uh extractions basically at home with like homemade chemicals to extract those crystals and and preserve them smoke them it's but you know when you look at how youtube and other things have changed that dynamic

3:30:32 it's already happened with the mushroom world you know yeah it's there like i mean when we started yeah you know what i mean like literally if you wanted to talk about mushroom cultivation yeah you went to the shroomer yeah dude i've had this conversation with a number of people who are newer in this industry and i'm like roger rabbit and they're like oh jesus like he was growing shitake in like a a tunnel with like a rock floor yeah see you remember all this not a lot of people who are getting into this evening dude i was a member of the shroomery when it was called drool donkey yeah yeah oh my god and i'm like yeah as soon as this modem kicks on i'm gonna be able to read that comment yeah dude dude i did join posted i won i haven't been on that in 15 years or more somebody oh it was brooks just told me that i think it was brooks maybe it was somebody else maybe it was a neil from columbia he said roger rabbit uh mark keith is back on there and i was like no way i was like how do i get his information because he has no idea how he spurred like my sort of like uh timeline and getting into that world as well as everybody else around 2008-ish that was like the liftoff point for people to be like oh atmospheric oh barrels oh shitakes oh containers like the whole thing for me it was him doing it from me it was 1998 98 well that's probably when i started like i'm like hello jesus i'm like so i can order this online and this online and there's a spot in that closet you know there's a spot in that closet i had an account on there yeah and i was posting when i was teaching myself mycology oh and then i would go on to the the the cultivation aspect had just gotten on there yep yep and i'm talking i remember i went back once it looked like i did this entire rant like i'm gonna be a mushroom farmer this and that and blah blah and i'm like posting a picture of a steamer that i'm gonna use this steamer and i'm gonna do this and i don't care what people say i'm gonna do it and i just went off i wonder if anybody ever was like i wonder if that ever went to data what was your username on there was it on drool donkey or no no i wasn't i just looked at jewel donkey was like way back when the kid was like 18 yeah like yeah yeah um what was my name on there oh social norm social norm yeah cool that's awesome social norm oh my god yeah dude that that yeah somebody might listen to this and be like i saw your i wonder what happened to you i hope so you did it were you successful yeah ah i'll let you know my website says so yeah if you look at all my social media i'm doing oh great yeah i know i have to say in like and i i haven't talked a lot about this to a lot of different people but i do believe that the psychedelic side can help people and uh and it's all good like in you just have to do it in an intelligent way i'll never forget you know the story of uh i don't know if frank ever told you that when she first ate mushrooms was like she was already we were already married was this the time where you had left a bunch of mushrooms like on the counter yeah she and she ate when she ate and she was all the chocolates and she's supposed to eat like one square and she ate the whole thing well yeah because they came in for like 12 hours yeah so we did tell you this you had a her she had like a hero dose for the first time yeah i swear to god if she didn't have that she would not have died the way that she did because she her whole life battled the catholic sort of like you know god heaven devil whole nine yards and for some reason that that transformative thing she never really talked about but i know that that was a contributing factor because it stopped a lot of the questions she was like struggling with past that point because it helps you get to that point where your brain can process information in the present yes which is why you're like focused in on something and then you pull out of it and you're focused in on something and you pull out of it yeah yeah yeah and then people at retain that after yeah it doesn't do it's allowing the brain to use different abilities of processing yeah information through sections it doesn't always process information through yeah so like it didn't have to pass through that gate so it's not got that on its back yeah and being flooded with all that stuff i mean i took a hero dose once in a country where it was legal i was in holland yep i remember buying streams with a credit card in amsterdam dude that was a night and i'm like well jesus these are copalandias yeah and they were legal there and i'm like what are these these are truffles but they're fresh like here's some fresh ones here's some dry ones and i don't know between fresh and dry it was like 60 some odd grams yeah i just didn't want to eat that many fresh i was sick like oh my god people don't all per like i purged i was out the front out the back i don't understand anybody who jumped into the fresh thing out there my friend that i was traveling with was eating fresh left and right like they're

3:35:32 gourmet slices of caviar and i was like dude it's like i actually the first time i went kayaking at all yeah was in the ocean on a boat i was on the ocean in a kayak um and i decided to eat what was i don't know i didn't i don't never weigh any of that stuff out and for anyone listening to the podcast no i don't have magic mushrooms i don't eat magic mushrooms none of us do i don't know um yeah so i got about 150 yards out and just ate this giant handful of fresh mushrooms and drank like a half a quart of orange juice and decided to paddle around this island yeah well it well i've never been on a kayak i don't know how like how fast they are i made it around this island in like two hours and then i i it comes to find out the only beach i could land on was right where i had first started yeah i got onto that beach and um for the next seven hours was too scared to get back in the boat oh my god i'm like and then at that point i'm like okay all right well this is life now i live on this island it's funny how quick you can accept it and i'm gonna like i'm gonna forage and like uh this and i should have brought sunscreen my legs looked like fried chicken for a week yeah and i'm like that's enough of that that's enough no but in holland i mean it happened to be like oh it's a full moon and the phytoplankton like every four years like clothes bioluminescent yeah so there i am like playing in this glowing ocean with a full moon oh man and then i wind back up at the hostel right and they're like you never feel like dude where's your pants and i'm like well i'm swimming in the ocean man like i put a shirt on because i'm fat and i'm uncomfortable they're like dude where are your pants i'm like oh jesus cold out too like okay they're like okay so you're embarrassed because you're fat so you're wearing a shirt but that's it dude it's like wear your pants and shoes and everything i'm like i don't know they're in the oh man i i don't know i'm like notorious for never knowing what day it is what time it is like i i have a very hard uh i've it's just very hard for me to like gauge reality like timeline reality and i blame it on that one too many and you're just like you know it doesn't displace your ability to do things and focus on things and plan things but it really it inhibits your like human timeline because it allows you to be in that moment yeah you're like oh was it really strong oh yeah you know like like what did you do right well i don't know you know i played with a dog and then we went for a walk you know and then i decided that maybe i was hungry and spent i don't know an hour and 20 minutes carving swans into a stick of butter yeah you literally cannot worry about anything else right that's the that's the one thing i think people with anxiety who are worried about ingesting them fail to understand is you can't be anxious in the same way and it's a and and it's a brain it's a reset button yeah so many people i talked to with anxiety and depression be like i'm in this cloud i'm in this bubble where it feels like i'm constrained and i can't push out through yeah you know this bubble you're like then don't you know and like it allows them and then it allows to throw out all the that's attacking that person yeah and you kind of oh that's interesting so they say it's almost like a protective bubble or cloud no it's like when you're suffering from like clinical depression anxiety and things it's almost like every movement is like attached to a rubber band gotcha any sort of thing you need to do is like you're you're you're stuck in this movement at this moment it's all everything is a struggle from doing rigorous work to like brushing your teeth sure sure and i think what it does is it gives that person the ability to be like all of that stuff that i'm just hanging on to is just stupid yeah it's just and for that moment you just let it go yeah just this and live in that moment yeah and then when you're down from all of that being like well sometimes it might take more and sometimes it resets that person right you know it's like a brain reset yeah i've i've never had a bad experience with it and most people i talk to really haven't either some people definitely do i did a radio interview and i was hesitant to do it yeah because on the seacoast of new hampshire an article had come out saying that um active mushrooms were one of the safest illegal drugs for kids to try oh my god what and because it was radio they knew a connection we weren't dating anymore but they called me and said would you

3:40:32 talk about this i'm like serious what and i'm like i'm like trying anything it was saying that like in regards to like looking at numbers and statistics a lot of hospitals look at all of those numbers yeah one of the safest things was active mushrooms sure and they're like do you a degree or just relax i'm like i said you know and i gave all the pre-emptive oh yes and i said but the article is correct oh god i don't know if i would have been able to cop two and they're like i said for starters magic mushrooms unless you're on a festival scene is a horrible drug for drug dealers oh yes and they're like you're never know don't have people eating people smoke weed every day they ain't eating mushrooms every day no and i said also the nature of hallucinogens the more you eat the less inclined you're going to feel or want to eat anymore yeah i don't think i've ever eaten seen anyone who eat mushrooms more than two days in a row that on the third day be like i feel like eating a bunch of magic mushrooms today i i the only alternative to that that i've seen are certain people who go too far with it and they it becomes so indicative that they're trying to find something in there they're like stuck in the i'm trying to be as intelligent as who i think terence mckenna might have been that they just they do go off a deep end i have seen that to the point where you might spend four months in the jungle eating ayahuasca every day yep for sure okay don't go looking at that to fi the answers are already inside you yeah don't use it as as a yeah anything but it's it is a screwdriver yeah it is not yeah the you know it's so and i said listen i said in all i said i would be less concerned with a child a high school student or a young adult eating an active mushroom then i would with them having ingesting an unknown and legal research chemical right ritalin i mean any of these things that here let's go eat a bunch of cheese let's go eat a bunch of 2ce yeah right and 2ci you know i just i ordered these from china or india or and it came in this powder and you know now i feel like i'm tripping and i ate mushrooms and that was four days ago yeah yeah or the cough syrup thing man that was huge when i was in high school people were just robo-tripping all the time and i just i never understood it to the same degree and i think it was because of earlier exposure to psychedelics so maybe it's not a false narrative i think that people's interaction with using uh like active yeah i say active things either cannabis or that looking for some sort of spiritual enlightenment yeah intellectual enlightenment or do i want to punt yeah i mean you might have a person like hey did you try this cannabis man do you get like a little hint of like soap rasata salami and like mangoes right you know with like a little citrus on the tail end and like kind of hits you in the front of the head but then gives you this relaxing thing and the person's like it's weed dude it got me hot yeah yeah it did the job you know what i mean they're like what are you talking about transcending you and jesus going hand in hand you know talking to a snake in a burning bush like no dude i ate a bunch of mushrooms dude and i i played fortnite i won twice you know oh man that's true i don't i i would have had a hard time answering that question though just being like oh i don't even want to be involved in this conversation they could be both yeah and here's the thing you can find that answer out if you ask a person do you trip with a group of people or do you trip alone yeah always alone for me i would never trip with a group of people everywhere in my life no because all of a sudden actually it was i did in college i ate a gram because i wanted to make sure that the mushrooms that got this person had never even smoked cannabis before oh jesus and they ate mushrooms and smoked cannabis on the same day and i'm like okay i'm responsible i need to babysit this person while they're eating my because they didn't know anything about it and i saw them post i'm like all right i'm in a position of being sort of an advisor through this full moon again middle of the winter up in northern maine oh and it's the type of snow that you can walk on top of the crust yeah and it's a full moon so everything looks like it's in black and white yeah you know and then somebody lights a lighter and that's yellow yeah and all of a sudden you like transport like oh my god i'm in schindler's list and this is the girl in the red dress like oh my god like okay i see in black and white now okay that's how life is i just happen to see in black and white yeah we'll just roll with it oh man um so yeah after that i'm like you know what i think that this would be much more of a personal thing because not all of this is fun now it's it's your own experience it really is and if you're trying to use them medicinally yeah and

3:45:32 and i think that if you need to do your own education i mean i've talked about this with my therapist oh yeah i've talked about it with my primary care physician yeah and i'm like listen i'm smart enough to do my own research i'm going to ask you about ssris and these sort of things that we know we're going to know more about how active mushrooms use the mine oh yeah by like people that have been eating them and thinking about them for the last 20 years for sure even though they weren't in a university laboratory yeah then we know then what like common ssris do yeah well we really don't know what it does yeah you know most of them going to make pp go bound yeah well you can make pb go up viagra make people go way way how's your heart because that's what it was for yeah you see what i mean that's so true man so now that we have this flood of information where and i think 2020 gives people the like you mean just because i read it on the internet doesn't mean it's true right maybe i need to source multiple sources yeah like individuals who have had experience with it yeah you know like who am i getting my information from who the are you yeah you know we've become so trustworthy of strangers in strange media and uh in mediocrity media i started i started in the defense to somebody talking about anti-vaccine the other day yeah yeah they're like we're in a day in an age where a person does not want to take in a vaccine but will literally lick a stranger's yeah it's true we mashed on tinder yum yum yum yum yeah that's so true dude we're pretty stupid like as a species yeah and if the last year has indicated anything like oh god if if it and i'll end with this because it's probably getting dark and i gotta go uh check on the gold check on them is it really yeah these things go forever man okay did your anxiety go through the roof all right then you're like i thought i'm like oh if the boiler wasn't full and then i gotta go get wood but that's gonna be a little different well the work truck doesn't have power steering ranks or an actual ignition right now and all four tires are most of the way flat so it's awesome it's a to try no it's a little switch there oh okay but if you don't hit the switch just right it drains the battery yeah yeah that's one of the work trucks my other one's my little grey chevy yeah that the last time i came here with it like we voted you're like oh no those soy holes weigh like 600 pounds more like they weigh 2 400 pounds and i'm in a shook in chevy colorado like you're like how was it driving back i'm like i don't know i steered every time the front wheels touch the ground i leaned into the corners oh man i drive into my driveway at the farm the exhaust falls up a frame probably cracks oh my god then i had a disgruntled employee get mad uh and and punch out the windshield jesus and then the other employee was backing up to the compost and hit a barrel with the door open and rip the driver's door off oh my gosh so that's a work truck that's a work truck now yeah but it doesn't like to start when it's cold yeah so it'll work again next spring wait so what were you gonna end on oh what was i gonna end up oh you said it's getting late oh there it is it came right back we're we're in sync bro all right here it is here it is if 2020 right yeah shows anybody about the future about how individuals and society would deal with a zombie apocalypse it's true oh my god we're see but we know mushrooms yeah you know at least they know how to eat right i mean if i look in the mirror i'm like holy i'm like six weeks worth of meals for a family of four you know what i mean yeah yeah no i needed to make myself more value being like yes you can eat that yeah you could eat that that's true this one is good for stomach parasites and yeah it's true man i think you're right i we we used to play this game before the pandemic but it's like you'd meet somebody and be like you're on my apocalypse team you know like yeah you you gotta find those people if they don't carry their weight they're as good as dead you know so like find your team oh man oh well this has been rad dude this is fun it is right do you think that anybody will listen to these things all the way god i hope not god no i i really do realize that my employees tomorrow would be like all right what would you guys talk about yeah no we'll see man i'm just going to put them out there and we're just going to find out i don't have a good name for it yet so look at the bra i mean someone could put this on at night fall asleep to listen to it oh yeah we're funny as and your voice is like thorough bread is

3:50:32 a beautiful you know sunset on mushrooms it's fantastic you know you could take this you can take the boy out of maine you can't you take your game you're like you know you've added eight fish to everything yeah you pass on to things like i gotta stop at walmart's after this oh yes no i don't gotta stop it here comes the letter kenny's that's what i appreciate savages i quote that all the time without even knowing it oh yeah it's it that is a show that is insidious it gets in your body in your brain like oh my god that is really really well written i've been offended at like the fact that most people i suggest to won't watch it really yeah it's interesting like a lot of people like a lot my girlfriend's one of them she's just like i don't think she can quite quite get into it and i'm like i've i've turned it around and i've been like yeah it's not for you anti-cannabis no it's the like it's the uber dry really like disturbing humor if you think about that first episode they're just talking about vas deferens and ball sacks for like 20 minutes you know so i get it it's not for everybody but it's hilarious fishing in queen oh my god what i say all the time like when people arrive like all right listen i'm gonna need you guys to take that down about fifty percent yeah yeah yeah yeah i quoted a movie the other day and that's the problem then you try to say something funny people don't and then you think you invented it right yeah um and and i'm like they're like oh what do you think of donald trump somebody asked him i have donald trump supporters i'm like who trouble thin skins and like i didn't make that up all right and you're like oh really why don't you really say how you feel about donald trump i'm like who that human paraquat that's the second good reference what the right they don't get it and i'm like what the is paraquat and so i like of course google it i'm like huge right so this was what what is it oh so this is the chemical that they were spraying on cannabis yeah and where the was it and then i look i'm like oh i quoted big lebowski and he was talking about the guy where he was he called him he was against the weed human pair oh yeah it was funnier then but i still did i just still didn't make it up but you remember it this is uh yeah we're this anybody who's live right now as we get older we're in nursing homes because all we're gonna do is riddle off these things that make no sense to us or anybody around us except for the one person who's like over in the corner shut the up donny oh my god please put my ashes in the tin can and spread it like folger's coffee at sea i don't have a living will but everyone at the farm knows what to do if i die i've made deals with people i said cremate me yeah and put me in a mix yeah and you know what those said they said they were gonna be great they were gonna grow pinks and yellows oh you use my ashes to grow pinks and yellows i am coming down or up from wherever the hell i happen to be and i am going to haunt your soul that's worse than jesus coming back from the dead you grow me into a salmonella pink mushroom i kill you you try to sell pink oysters like how long these gonna last i don't know how long you've got a minute and a half they're like what do they taste like i'm like i don't know they kind of like they kind of taste like dirt if dirt had an oh my god your employees are golden then because they they said that for real that is mean humor that is just wrong right right yeah yeah that's i mean that's pretty that's and i would appreciate the thing is is that anybody listening to this that doesn't grow mushrooms is gonna be like what the are they laughing so hard about if you grow mushrooms and you've grown pinks or yellows you know exactly what i'm talking about you're the most beautiful inseparable mushroom pieces of i grow i did not grow pinks this year oh thank god i grew one batch of yellows dude you had extras and sentiments that's what it was like try this new strain no you just said it saw on the email right before we sat down i saw three emails that i'm ignoring until tomorrow that are like please take yellows and banks off of my order for next week i'm like oh yeah you're still growing them oh yeah no i i would grow those really for the curb appeal yeah that's because and i would bring a display block to a farmer's market because that definitely brings people in oh yeah the rishi and that bring everybody in they're like what the but if anyone's looking for a recipe make a king oyster pink and yellow oyster ceviche oh on like a bib lettuce taco with plantains and like

3:55:32 a ginger crema as your last meal before they cook but you need to use the acid to cook the mushroom which people are a little confused with that's interesting it really pulls all the water out and you got a strain yeah but then makes the kings the really the texture of like a ceviche yeah coming up yeah huh so we're gonna leave it on a positive note thanks eric cool thank you eric yeah awesome my ears are sweating well well well if you made it through that you were a mycological mad dog too you know it's super easy to go on and on for four hours when you got endless stuff to talk about and uh eric's one of those cats for sure but i just bring it out and people i don't know they just want to talk talk talk it's the best it's the best especially when you get to pull some drama out of it add a little bit of cool music and make things seem more important or crazy than they actually are but at the end of the day uh thank you thank you thank you if you made it through these six hours so far in these first two episodes and you want more hit us up you can get the podcast at www.capnstem.com podcast you can find us on spotify or stitcher or itunes or a million different places you name it just search michael wizards that's with us at the end check us out on instagram at michael wizards podcast this episode and all episodes are brought to you by Maine Cap N Stem mushroom company check us out for substrate spawn consultations you name it kelsey tyler myself we're all here to help you help yourselves grow some mushrooms while you're at it head on over to nhmushrooms.com and check out what eric and his gang have to offer like i said he's a real real inventor innovator and should be given a lot more credit than he gives himself in this industry so reach out to him you got some questions you want some help you want some fresh mushrooms you're in the tamworth area he's there he's willing to help he's a really cool dude so once again thanks for joining us and we'll see you again in two weeks later you