Inside Unicorn Bags: Mushroom Grow Bags and Filters | MycoWizards S1E5

0:14 from Maine Cap N Stem this is the michael wizards podcast i'm eric loman and today for our fifth episode i got to talk with the meme master of unicorn bags mr garrett wilkerson well about 100 of us mycological weirdos out there very familiar with unicorn bags most of us are unfamiliar with who the hell started making these memes these crazy hilarious flashback to the shroomery 1990s into the 2000s memes that somehow pushed unicorn forward into the space of social media well there's one dude behind it and kelsey dug deep to find this guy and he responded and decided he'd be into being on the podcast so uh without further ado we really hope you enjoy this interview because we're really stoked to get to talk to him oh man dude you were the right dude for the meme joke i swear to god thank you how did you come into this whole thing with unicorn um well i it was a cold call believe it or not um and i'm i'm terrible at cold calling and so that was just it really surprised me that uh everything worked out like it did so back in uh january i participated in a uh a conference for like psychedelics and uh consciousness expansion and uh like veterans treating ptsd things like that okay um and they liked everything so well that when they did the second one they brought me on board to manage vendors and things like that and so i just kind of looked out in the dallas fort worth area to see what kind of like businesses would be interested and unicorn bags was one of the first ones that popped up so i said okay i'll give them a shout and lou said that he was very interested and this that and the other but he didn't really have a social media team and i was doing pr work at the time uh transitioning to social media i had done a lot of live events mostly uh the trans transitioning to social media i was like well you know i can help you with that how's your experience like uh breach into that world social media-wise like where did it come from just memes pretty much just yeah it's just making news yeah um companion uh posts and things like that for the live events uh doing just put random listening things like that uh not really doing anything like super duper professional just you know fluff for the events and uh yeah basically that's how i figured out how to do um like algorithms as far as targeted audiences go so if you look at my uh if you look at the algorithms for the ads that we run it basically reads like a sturgill simpson song it's hilarious which is the greatest comparison to anything in this world that's predictable if you research it long enough you know that's incredible man so what was that pitch to lou in general was it like just a like just that you're just like hey man i think you you guys could use something like this yeah yeah basically um i told him that it was uh you know i love the company but it was kind of hard to find uh information on it i had to do a little bit of digging and so i offered uh like a trial contract basically to see uh if he would like how much i uh expanded his presence online and he loved it that's awesome and he loved it so well three months later he expanded it so here we are that's incredible man was do you have what was like the first pitch to him to be able to just put it out there uh basically that it was just do you remember the first pitch i believe was um just letting me take over his facebook page because he had a facebook page but it wasn't really active uh i don't think anybody had posted since like 2008 or something like that damn um yeah everything has always been outdated with unicorn but everybody uses them yeah and and that's the that was the pitch that i made essentially is i'm not going to try and sell people unicorn bags because everybody already knows what a unicorn bag is it would be you know i don't want to insult people by it's like if i were to sell you an orange you know i'm not going to insult you by telling you oh well oranges are very high in vitamin c and they're delicious and like i'm not no i'll just add value to your feed let you you know loop you in be just constantly there and then eventually one day you say hey i'm in the mood for an orange hey that guy makes some funny stuff and he sells oranges and there we are yeah well i gotta say man and the in the amount of time that you've just like blasted stuff on there which has been definitely like through this covidien period of everybody's on their phones all the time the amount of people who just like looked at it and just been like holy like why has it taken this long for somebody to make this much hilarious stuff surrounding this community that we've all held like kind of nerdy sacred but somebody had to make fun of it like somebody had to do it and like you did

5:14 it and who the like you know it just ran it took a random dude to like make a pitch to lou and just do it which i i don't think there's any better space to do it in uh or time at all so it's it's incredible i remember sitting with a kelsey i don't know why like you know i didn't even know unicorn had an instagram page and we were thinking about doing similar stuff and putting stuff out there everybody's trying to expand their sales during the beginning of covid and i was like what in the the first one i saw was i presume it's you based on the shirt and a unicorn mask like just bashing uh like uh you're going you know pro bags but smashing like a car i was like what with the anvil course this is too cool yeah yeah i was like oh my god man when i showed that to kelsey when she became like she sort of went on a hunt she was like there's got to be a dude behind all this and i know it's not lou and i was like it's got to be somebody else unless lou's just got this secret thing you know there's nothing means all day that's unreal dude well what do you know in terms about unicorn in general because you know unicorn's pretty unknown except for the people who just talked to yeah yeah it's it's a very uh there's a very niche community uh which you know it worked out well for me because i don't have to waste anybody's time with advertising like in the beginning i was doing a much more like a lot more informed posts and a lot more uh scientific um just as i learned about unicorn i would share all the information that i learned in everything they started in in the late 80s i believe it was lou emigrated here from china and he was looking for he wanted to start a business and he saw a need in the the unit of the unicorns the mushroom industry for a affordable reliable high quality uh growing medium because in the in the 80s there wasn't really any kind of plastics technology that could uh withstand autoclaving so he went to a couple of seminars by a man by the name of paul stamets and they ended up working together to make the first ever unicorn bags which became mass produced in 1990 and those were the 14 a-bags which were originally grown for shiitake because the a filter has um i'm sure you probably know this um it has a 60 variance in the the the pore size so the 0.5 micron and then plus or minus 60 this gives it a bit of a bit more of an uneven airflow that's still reliable but it keeps the co2 intact uh keeps the co2 inside the bag and uh yeah so it doesn't have just our massive like you know right right well and shiitake loves co2 so if it was uh like for example our our type b bags they're 5.0 microns uh that's more like an oyster or something that loves fresh air yeah that's really interesting i didn't realize lou and stamets went back that far whatsoever are they still sort of in uh in communication with one another business no is that still like yeah i don't know about the the regularity of their business but i know that it's our bags that he sells on fungi perfect um yeah yeah yeah yep that's pretty cool man yeah it's it's like it's such a funny world coming from that like bag side because the the the original i think bags that we use were john donahue's and uh and it was just because eric at new hampshire mushroom company was using them and they were like that's the only bag we had no idea and then uh and then finally we i think heard of unicorn just i don't even remember how we thought it was the weirdest name the weirdest thing but it's like it's unmistakable and it's just like weird you're like what the is a unicorn bag everybody who sees it first comes in here they're like what the is that why does it say unicorn on that box they're like you know already in the weird world of mushrooms and it just got weirder you know yeah i don't think he even intended it to be the uh like the sort of mystical whimsical like type of association that people think of when they think of you know because you think of mushrooms you think like what kind of animals like elves and little frolicking like whatever right like smurfs and you know all that good stuff uh i think he was he was looking at more like you're looking for something that can be reliable you're looking for a unicorn you're hunting for something that isn't there at all and so it came out very straightforward analogy yeah that's incredible man that's really that's really intriguing well uh well i think that there's like a a push for people to like invent other bags and filters and things you guys have been the most consistent but you know i know through kovid like uh it was really kind of this weird state at which you might have come in i don't know when did you come into unicorn what was the in the past yeah this year i came in this past summer um this past summer okay yeah yeah yeah so i know right at the heat of like march into april uh unicorn put something on their website and it was like you know due to covid this that and the other plastics

10:14 blah blah blah and we were all like oh they really are the only company to get bags from and so many people rely upon them now on a micro scale that i think we all a brick and we're like all like talking to one another they're like gary sounded weird this morning you're like or so-and-so sounded strange or i got this strange email from so-and-so so it was like it was an increasingly conflicting time but um did have you heard about any of that or is there sort of a story so i'm an independent contractor and i work mostly from home so i'm not really privy to the like the the inner office politics i guess for lack of a better word um so i'm not really sure what's going on there but i do know that uh when the the stay-at-home orders came out and lockdown came down uh it yeah the labor pool took a big hit because suddenly we had this warehouse and even though we have hepa filters going non-stop to just cut down on everything like we have basically a clean room it's not a clean room but we have basically a clean room that we do all of our assembly in and even though we have all that filtered air and we have people who wear masks so that they you know don't breathe out all the spores that live inside a human lung on the bags we still had to cut our labor force by about half um yeah it was and we're still catching up um fortunately our our customers supported us and they came through for us with that uh in addition we got a lot of new customers because lo and behold a bunch of people are at home now and looking for hobbies there's been such a massive like explosion of people getting into this just since cohen it's literally it's like something you can't really dream up talking about you're just all of a sudden if you've been in this world as long as some of us have and i've been doing this for the past 15 years almost you're just all of a sudden like what what happened why does everybody want to grow mushrooms all of a sudden like everybody we had this uh this this girl and her dad come by and we're like you know we're a b2b business for the most part we don't do a lot of like sale to customers we don't even grow fresh mushrooms we solely do substrate and spawn and uh and consultations and then equipment and raw materials and um and this this girl and her dad come in and i kind of like look at her dad she's like nine years old or so maybe 10 and i was like you know what can we do for you and uh everybody's like all masked up and he just kind of like looks at his daughter and his daughter goes i'm just looking for some you know blue or brown oyster spawn to basically inoculate my straw substrate i like looked down at this like nine-year-old girl and i was like okay you know so like the age range is insane like it's little kids getting into it uh there's a farm in mass that's uh teaching kids and their parents to basically grow mushrooms together by these like zoom interactions and uh and charging you know not a lot for it but if it's 25 bucks ahead you're you're basically helping a farm keep going you know so there's all these people on a small level that just get a block and then they're like i need more blocks and then they're like i can sell these you know it's it's this weird self-propulsion right now which is fascinating yeah and that's exactly what we need in my opinion is local small growers local small businesses local small populations because if you look at if you look at solutions that we've come up like we meaning the human race the vast majority of like there's you know big organizations have done wonderful things and blah blah blah but the vast majority of progress has been made by small businesses and entrepreneurs who just saw a problem they saw a niche that needed to be filled and they just went for it yeah yeah no it's it's clearly like uh it's getting to that point too where i think a lot of the people who are in business who are of sort of our generation and even lose like stretching on in they see the value in that decentralized sort of supply chain and system you know and it's it's incredibly diverse and it's funny to have like a banker come up to us and they're like you know how do you get your customers and you're like well we're the only ones who do exactly what we do you know and it's it's very odd that there's a lot of people in this industry calling themselves the only people doing what they're doing you know it's it's pretty far out man but yeah it's like haunted houses i mean it's i'm not sure if you've ever uh worked in a haunted house industry but it's it's very similar to everyone has their badge that they're proud of yeah and yeah nobody like nobody really walks rocks the boat to say well i'm better than them at this because then then they risk losing their badge so it's this real real interesting kind of symbiosis that you see between supposed competitors yeah yeah we've really tried to break that barrier down um the commercial mushroom growing network is one on facebook that's yeah it's notorious and i'm sure you're maybe familiar with the connections in there between john holiday and joey schlegel and tr and stuff but there's this this interesting thing that transcended from like the 2008 period to like 2015 when it

15:14 transitioned away from holidays sort of you know observatory and uh on to like its own self-sustained unit where people started sharing a lot more um i think in the early days like joey would say you know if he's got um somebody in his area who's interested in becoming a mushroom farm he would sit down and have a beer with him but he'd never let him into his farm and it's changed 100 and it's almost because of the excitement and the innovation and the sort of pushes forward to really help people grow based on the lack of shelf life for these products that they're just like it yeah i know like we're just gonna we're just gonna help one another and keep growing we eat one percent of the world's mushrooms like who cares there's so much room for growth you know yeah and even the people who say that they don't like mushrooms i found that more often than not they don't like portobello mushrooms yeah they don't even consider like the alternatives yeah no i made a couple of names about it it's like that scene from the simpsons where he's like oh you're never gonna eat pork chops you're never gonna eat bacon you're never gonna eat like they all come from the same animal they're all the same mushroom criminy brown cat swiss brown spanish brown italian brown the mushrooms insane oh it's so true man and there's that homogeneous side that i think is becoming like extremely uh it's old world to a lot of people now because they've read about it they've seen it it's so visual now people are just reading about all of the studies or the you know clinical trials or just the you know hearsay stuff and it's it's pushing this weird generation of people that are you know as old as my grandparents all the way down to like this nine-year-old looking for spawn and not substrate with that are just stoked you know they're like this is so cool yeah and there is because of the lack of research there is like an element of magic about it that uh yeah that because we still don't know like there there are mushrooms that are so closely related to humans and others that are like completely distant that are in it like it's just the taxonomy of it is fascinating yeah and then the fact that we don't understand how they produce the chemicals that they like all of the all the antioxidants and all of the like superfood qualities of the mushrooms we still don't understand yeah no we we totally don't i mean some people don't realize that like the uh um you know speaking of like the weird fungal nature of psychedelics that you know lsd world's most famous psychedelic is just a conversion of something from a you know from a fungal standpoint so it's it's an amazing thing that people take for granted every single day or they have and now they're starting to re-sort of analyze how important they are in their daily life you know in general and it's not to sound like cliche or hippie about it it's just it's damn interesting it's a rabbit hole yeah and you don't even have to be into psychedelics to appreciate the the vast trove of resources that we have at our disposal as far as nutrition goes when it comes to mushrooms like all the research is coming out about lion's mane and neuroplasticity and reishi and cordyceps boosting the immune system yeah turkey tail fighting cancer i mean all of these things are coming out and it's yeah well you get you get the bad sides too i mean there's uh one of the major um reasons why i got into growing mushrooms was uh my mom's got ms and they did a study with this product that they deemed galena you know and it was basically a fungal uh um component or a compound that had been isolated from um from i believe it was like cordyceps nessus and uh this isolation they basically put through trials and in the first round it killed 50 percent of the people who entered the trial and they were like the so they like put everything on hold and they were like oh my god yeah so they came back into it and they redid it and i do believe it's a product that's now on the market but there's this like there's this huge scope of uh the unknown when people go into it from a pharmacological standpoint it's kind of scary you know yeah that's it's as scary as a psychedelic trip you don't know what you're gonna get 50 is i would say that's way more than way scarier than a psychedelic trip 50 chance of insane like yeah based in this first trial and they didn't they were just like this is just a inert compound basically you know but they didn't realize whatever was gonna sort of take hold together so it's it's a weird thing to study but um yeah wait so you so you were at a a psychedelic sort of uh um sort of event or something when you were presenting was it like a symposium yeah um so i did a uh in general actually almost a year ago today um i did a uh speech on san pedro cactus and its history of use uh the fact that the the mesoamericans basically trolled the entire catholic church when they came in to do the inquisition and destroy all the entheogens they named it san pedro they named it san pedro st peter

20:15 because this is you know it's the the gatekeeper the thing that lets you enter heaven and talk to jesus and everything and say oh no that's san pedro it's cool they have to worry about it just leave it and they did it worked it totally did it's like it's the epitome of flying under the radar you know so what got you into that uh world in general did you have you partook in psychedelic land or what drove you to that sort of surprise um well in my i was diagnosed with depression when i was a teenager and in my 20s someone gave me some psychedelic mushrooms and three grams did more than three years of therapy and pharmaceuticals and from there i was convinced that okay well we need to there's something about this something beneficial like obviously it's all set and setting you know it can make you do some crazy things but we already have laws about doing crazy things so also enough ambient can make you do crazy things you know yeah enough enough alcohol yeah um you know enough enough caffeine will kill you oh enough cheeseburgers like yeah like let's have scenes what do you remember about that first like sort of experience if it was that profound um i went to the museum of science and history and i made best friends with a dinosaur statue that was outside and we went to the planetarium uh i was unaware that we were going to take an entire journey through the virgo super cluster but that was pretty cool that's awesome yeah it was it was a trip it was great um that's crazy i mean obviously with uh you know being involved with unicorns i can't really go back into that type of lifestyle a lot more eyeballs on me oh for certain man for certain it's one of the most interesting things to talk about now because like you know yeah that's part of the reason like a lot of us got out of the psychedelic realm is because you realize the jail sentence behind it and you're like not you're like whoa a lot of us who originally got into this you know in the mid 90s going into the 2000s we didn't even realize the ramifications of it and 90 of us got our start doing that i don't know who in their right mind would say no or say otherwise but there's this moment where something becomes much more interesting when you realize that there's like a cultural effect that's beyond the psychedelics yeah like really you can feed the world you can change a lot of things and you can benefit them in a health you know space that they haven't had before you know whether it's the nutraceutical side or just eating fresh food yeah yeah absolutely so so that's and that's kind of the way that i've been looking at it now is you know i got i got my medicine i got healed got some benefit of it yeah thank you and i'll continue to do what i can to help spread it but i don't feel that's very i don't feel a particular need to you know go off for it anymore no no and i don't think it's necessary right it's something that uh you learn from you're supposed to like not perpetually stay in one program in one school doing the same thing over and over you know it's like you gotta expand your horizons and and really like push forward into other avenues of this world and i think like you pointed out earlier that's that's why so many people are just like humming into this world because it's just a funnel of chaos that they're like whoa you know it's far more trippy than a mushroom i know that terence mechanic quote of if you want to learn anything about yourself you don't need to take mushroom you need to try to grow mushrooms and you'll you'll certainly learn enough about yourself oh yeah i mean it's gardening in general but mushrooms are on such a so much shorter time scale i mean we're talking a couple of months instead of a couple of years if you're well if it's fruits a couple of years i guess vegetables would be still much longer but matter of months still you're you're relying on seasons or you're relying on other technology or heavy amounts of like inputs in terms of fertilization and such so and mushrooms are so much more basic it's literally just carbohydrates and either something with lingan or something without lingan if it doesn't care and that's it yeah yep like yeah what's really astounding too is to learn about the different uh phenotypes and those phenotypical traits that carry over those minute molecules that you know the tripe terp beans and the polysaccharides but that the fact that they actually offer that much of a condensed benefit when extracted is is really something you know it's it's something that like herbalists have done forever you know with plant matter but not a lot of people have put a lot of onus into like the study of these things uh fungal speaking yeah yeah and that's why i think it's very interesting when you look at for example cordyceps um cordyceps is a wild cordyceps that grows out of the insects is the most expensive compound on earth like gram for gram except for i guess maybe ambergris but when you're talking about something that somebody without a boat and a harpoon can go harvest

25:16 uh it's probably the most expensive compound uh gram for gram and it would be oh absolutely i would love to see more experiments with ant farms where you have some type of an insect growing colony or whatever and then you can just partition off like their little death march or something yeah so you can just yeah yeah yeah nobody's done that oh it's so true man no nobody's done a lot of this stuff you know i think uh five years ago mushroom leather was like the whoa thing you know or or making egg crates or dell packaging or wine containers out of mycelium was just like blowing the lid off but the fact of the matter is is like the programmer mindset the like ones and zero sort of focus can be pushed into this like all-natural variable-centric you know world of mycological cultivation and and you know absolutely can and it's it feeds the nerves man it really is yeah well and especially with 3d printing coming as long as it is as far as it has yeah there's going to be a lot of bio fabrication in this next decade i feel like i'm sorry speaking of i don't know if you you're on the biofabrication group on facebook but there's i got brought in because somebody posted a canoe that was made out of mycelium and every time they they float it it freezes yeah that's serious i mean the walls are like a fix so it's you know more of a pontoon boat but yeah it works that's amazing man yeah i mean you see like the chairs and stuff people would stuff with straw and then like inoculate with oysters and like give everybody the heebie-jeebies who hates all like the seed pods and yeah has all those weird phobias but yeah yeah that's i like the the uh the death march of the ants i feel like there's something like far out and i don't know it's all meme worthy is like what it comes down to yeah and that's that's really why i started doing uh memes because like i said i was doing more uh traditional scientific like the the funniest one that i did was like i posted a picture of an aunt that had uh you know cordyceps coming out and said oh free party hats for all your ants yeah and uh but that no but for real i would like to see that um because for one thing there is no i know y'all probably don't have fire ants up there but down here in texas fire ants are a very invasive species and they've actually oh yeah started getting displaced by a more invasive ant called a pyramid ant which isn't as aggressive to humans and mammals and livestock but they are every much as destructive to the uh the insect world the the microbiome okay i have microbiome macrobiome i don't know insect world right yeah yeah and there's no pesticide that will treat them because they are it's a type of crazy ant which fire ants are also a type of crazy ant um and this is all stuff i'm remembering from like three months ago so you know i i might be wrong i have to be fact check but there the point is there's no uh guaranteed pesticides that will attack the queen because they're they all form as one colony when one queen dies the rival colony just moves in like there's not even a war and since those quartercepts there's actually a deterrent now pesticide companies don't like that because how then how do you market you know four trials or four applications a year you know all you need is one every decade or two yeah that's an amazing sort of bio uh technology you know that most people don't even don't even have in a way yeah so that's another vector i'd really like to see people uh see more research into i'm going to be doing research my own on the pyramid ants that live in my front yard this summer so yeah definitely be posting so has has like jumping into this mushroom world like sparked that side of you that wasn't there before prior to like the psychedelic thing and all that was it even there or is just working for unicorn been this like blooming moment where you're like holy this is cool and basically yeah both actually but you know back when i was doing my crazy college days or whatever uh i did try to grow and i failed miserably and at that point i was like ah whatever i'll just eat portobello but now because texas all you can get is portobello unless you go to the asian supermarkets um which are great but then there are also very expensive uh there relative to uh yeah you know you've got like uh you've got a few people in texas like texas fungus i think is who you got did you mention them in an email i didn't know yeah um no yeah i always like there's so many different names and communication yeah so texas fungus is rad you know corey from over in austin smallhold is like pulling into austin they're all sort of in these weird areas and like you know i've hitchhiked through texas man to get across the 10 like in a month is a glorious achievement if you can actually make it and travel that way but it's such a vast area with nothing going on that you would expect that it could be this sort of sort of super dome of you know mycological happenings it's it's kind of a it's an open space yeah yeah there's a lot of room for sure

30:17 i hope some yeah some enterprising individuals are listening to this sell mushrooms in texas please i want to go to kroger and buy some oysters and lines man now kroger dude it's i mean it's come so far yeah well i mean no i do have to get kroger props because the one by my house just started selling shiitake um so that's good for them they're caught up to 1995. baby steps you know yeah hell yeah yeah yeah next is uh organic chicago and then you know and then maybe a little bit of like sea crustacean oysters you know they look like they're dying on the right some soggy lions man yeah yeah man uh i know that's one of the most uh intriguing parts of this and i had a couple different conversations with um uh the dudes from mossy creek and uh they're they're in this interesting world of like mycological warfare and they wrote a couple papers on it they're interesting and they're worth reading but it basically is like describing this idea of uh of um you know whoever owns the sort of rigmarole of distribution will own this whole thing in the end and i just don't buy it based on the vulnerability of the actual products you know if we're actually interested in eating this stuff it's it's good for a handful of days like yeah you know vegetables aren't even that even the most tender fruits aren't that suspect uh spoilage yeah you know and that's why you can't get a good it's so hard to get a good cantaloupe because they're all harvested in guatemala and they sit on a boat for a month and a half and so they can't have the ones that are ripe because then they'll just spoil yeah yeah exactly yeah it's sort of the thing that we've seen with the shiitake logs coming over from china too you know that was a huge part of like the lead up to 2020 and it was like um it was an interesting thing to see that stuff sort of flood in and the dinosaurs of pennsylvania changed like overnight and they decided to get rid of their own production and just buy and distribute these logs and man it did nothing but boom our business because people immediately were like yeah no i don't want that you know like at all yeah so not to mention there's uh lou made a very interesting uh blog post on unicornbags.com about the uh invasive species the micro species that would come in hitching a ride on these logs because a lot of time they're in shipping containers and the logs already have holes in them so whatever pests they catch on the boat right over from china are going straight to the soil yeah so look for not to mention uh china's like what 95 percent deforested and uh the majority of things that are going into the logs there's a couple people that have done tests um that i'm uh very aware of that uh have found formaldehyde in all of those blocks like across the board so formaldehyde is a huge you know benefit in terms of like using a cheap sterilization technique you know it's a thing that can work um not saying it's good but use it for not for human consumption i mean i guess if you know if you don't want to make a bag that's strong enough to withstand an autoclave using formaldehyde is the way to go it's the next best yeah yeah i know you see these towns over there that are growing like you know and there are entire towns that like grow mushrooms of one kind and they're just like the shiitake town the enoki town the whatever town and it it kind of baffles me because you realize that the the amount that they're growing for all of the applications that come over here are not just fresh mushrooms it's not just blocks you know and it's not necessarily a bad thing but it it it weighs on the perplexities of like how we see these like small sustainable uh decentralized farms growing yeah versus these like massive towns that really get paid pennies on the dollar for fresh mushrooms yeah and that's i have a theory that that's why their bags are so inferior because they can their growers you know like you said they work for pennies a day so if they lose two weeks of work who cares payroll is out like 15 bucks right yeah we're building the efficiency system here when it comes down to it you know and everything has to be efficient i mean every time like we double our production block wise and we go through another thousand you know uh ten pound bags of um blocks for customers we were like okay like we have to figure out how to make the next thousand in the same labor amount doing the same sort of mechanistic approach that doesn't double our propane usage or whatever it is all of those things are considered whereas when you think about autoclave usage versus like most of these chinese farms in particular they don't use autoclaves they might be making them for different industries and applying them in small sectors or for the bigger farms like key but most of them are really cooking in these ultra pasteurization modes where the bag doesn't matter you know it's just it's going to survive no matter what yeah the zero pressure high heat kind of uh yeah yeah yeah so i get it from that standpoint but you have this like comical and classic like east and west

35:18 just like colliding in this really kind of funny way it really is yeah i mean i'm i'm very much a proponent of if it works it works you know because because yeah i i think i made a meme about it there's you know there's dozens of right ways to do in hundreds of wrong ways but there's still dozens it's so true you know it's all good yeah that's totally true man well speaking of the meme side what do you use i think you mentioned something to kelsey and she asked me to ask because it made a ton of sense and kelsey by the way is our our manager here and she tracked you down she's like i'm gonna find this this guy's awesome and i was like oh man please do please do so she was asking uh in particular about like using this like educational niche version of a meme to sort of implicitly spread this like fastest information you know it's like yeah exactly yeah it's the it's the eyebrow wave you're like wait a minute you just use that to like correct like an entire community's perception of writing you know and that was that was fantastic because it's i mean like for example um people who put tyvek in the backs um yeah that's something that uh i'm not gonna name any names it's the roger rabbit thing man it's the roger thing yeah i'm not gonna name names but there's there's a lot of people who who advise that and it's so risky and has zero benefit that that was that was one of the reasons why i came aboard is lou wanted me to dispel all these myths like putting a pillow case in your pressure cooker so it doesn't melt the sides like all this crazy stuff that you have to do to keep chinese bags from melting but ours are made like there's a guy who put it under 300 degrees uh autoclave i think it was like 20 psi for half a day and no bursts um i've personally i've forgotten about the bags and just left the autoclave on you know nothing exploded because i have an all-americans built like a battleship and everything is dialed in so i didn't have to worry about that but the only thing that bad that happened was the grain burned and it wasn't tasty the mycelium of course not yeah that caramelization and mallyard stuff is no joke for spawn or anything yes so the idea behind that was you know the growers are just doing you know if you're using a bad grow you're still you're doing the best you can you know you don't mean to do to use in misinformation but some guy on the shroomery in 1995 said to do a thing and so you did it you know and nobody what's funny about that is like right if you trace that back that's my origins to any of this stuff and uh and i i remember shoving i bought like a giant bag of those tyveks leaves and you know that was the roger rabbit thing man but he was god back then there was no real access to unicorn people didn't have the internet really barely to order stuff they were like just on these boards and they were like trying to figure it out and it was like this classic sort of pirate radio version of my car yeah it was you know it was so so cool but nobody knew why we were doing what we were doing we're like that yeah i did it let's do that yeah i love roger rabbit i don't mean to you know insinuate that he's spreading bad information or whatever because he was doing the best that he could at the time too because he was using chinese bags and in that case yeah there's a lot of wacky stuff that can be done to improve bags of such low quality and then there's also an argument to me made of well there's you know there's easily a 50 fail rate on those bags so you do much of wacky stuff did that actually work or did you just get a good batch that time right right so yeah it's totally true man so how do you plan to use these memes going forward in terms of that like application of education because it's i think it's extremely important and like no matter how funny or efficient they are they're doing the job yeah you know through and through yeah and that's basically the that's the end goal for me is to just get the information out there um like i said earlier i want to add value to the feed i don't want to be just some random company like oh well in 1990 unicorn was started and we have no no no no i want to add value i don't want people to unfollow me basically i want people to look at unicorn bags and be like oh hey there's a new post what's this about you know because like who oh dude you know like people who follow walmart like okay like what value do you get out of that like yeah yeah and all these big businesses yeah i know we were on like a conversation with like i was a live podcast with mossy creek they did that thing on youtube and uh and you know we've always done the anti-marketing campaign so we're using like charles manson for a while you know just because it's it's hilarious and uh and i guess andrew mentioned that to somebody and they were like oh you mean the charles mansion company or mushroom company and i was like that's our new name i was like if this all goes to that's the new one dude it's just it's amazing to use these things for your advantage to sort of catch people off guard and be like what the hell are they doing yeah yeah and that's really that so one thing that we realized recently i

40:20 say we humans realized recently is that attention spans are actually human attention spans are actually lower than a goldfish that's why whenever you see a movie trailer on like social media as you're browsing you'll have like a five second trailer and then the 30 second trailer plays right after that because we don't even have 30 seconds to stop and look at an advertisement no no we can't handle it but that's also the reason why i decided to go with memes i mean originally yeah i just threw a meme out there and it took off and so i was like oh well i guess i'd better give the people what they want do you remember what your first uh sort of meme was that you made for unicorn or otherwise like the first one that you were like this is funny and i can actually do that oh man i it was so long ago well for me like right i've never thought about making a meme in my entire life and i think the only thing that's driven me towards questioning this like meme world is literally you making them which is hilarious because in the whole like you know meme of the hour sort of uh terence mckenna shenanigans the meme for me is a completely different concept so like you see these things and you're like i don't know this is kind of funny but it doesn't really the minute it relates you're like oh you know so i don't even know the thought process of like how i would make a meme so how do you go about that now um i basically just look through things that's why i don't that's another reason why i don't hold um growers with misinformation in any kind of negative light because they give me such good material like i do no i love them it's great like please be more vocal about like your methods and everything and you know no criticism no judgment whatever like it's very helpful from an educational point of view to understand what most people are doing um yep because you know it's a relay it's not a marathon so if i can get someone into the door there's so many more people out there who are so much more knowledgeable than me who can go through the actual technical details and the nitty-gritty that just just let me get them to the door and other people can take it from there yeah no there's there's so much to be generated in that too and and you're right it's like it's it's not bad on them necessarily but it's this strange thing like i just saw right before we jumped on this mushroom growers i can't help too but like have these things pop up on you know facebook or instagram and somebody is still using those like white freezer lids on top of ball jars with those like you know injection port filters and they wonder why their grain doesn't grow and my like i don't even care why their grandspawn's not growing what i care about is why are you using a lid that has zero gasket you know zero sealability do you not understand like this micro climate condition so on and so forth but i'm not gonna say anything i'm just like i'm over it to some extent yeah but it's amazing fuel for you yeah yeah it's just nothing but nothing but material uh we'll get people who uh you know they'll they'll be growing in jars and they'll just turn the lid upside down yeah as well another roger abbott yeah and it you know it does give you gas exchange and i guess if you're working in a super clean room uh if you have the knowledge of roger rabbit and you know to wipe down everything like you have ocd and just be clean clean clean then it'll work you don't have to worry about it but there's there's just so many better options nowadays yeah laboratory-grade filters are stupid cheap um the other thing is polyfill can we talk about polyfill for a moment i hate only phil so much you know how many like early cube growers though like all of a sudden like went to their local rennie's or walmart and they were like just buying out the pillow section they were like your grandmas and you're probably phil you're gonna grow in tubs like nobody's busy yes no it's great once you get it dialed in problem is it takes like 10 or 15 grows to figure out how thick you need to stuff it because nobody there's not like a measurement that you can use on it you know no no yeah it's there's the surface area goes out the window when you all of a sudden they're like oh the flat version of this is right yeah the earth might be round but the polyfill is circular yeah all right yeah it's it's crazy you just like having to like meet these interesting concepts with uh brain power doesn't necessarily fit into the psychedelic you know growing yeah persona you know at all it's just like ah somebody did that let's see yeah yeah i liken it a lot to uh i'm not sure if you're familiar with 40k uh warhammer but there's a uh there's a faction called the mechanicus the adeptus mechanicus and their whole thing is they worship technology uh to a point it's like post-apocalyptic or whatever and you know technology with salvation so i can get yeah you worship technology but they'll do things like pray and light incense before they remove a maintenance panel because that's just the way it's always been done because they have to honor the machine spirit and nobody's bothered to figure out why we do these things

45:21 or if they do we're so out of touch with our sort of spiritual connection to the world that if you haven't taken a trip or you haven't um you know enlightened yourself in other manners you're you're just like dying for ritual you're dying for something you know so it perpetuates the stupidity of these rituals in instead of like the generation of a diverse version of new ones right you know exactly and i think that that can be said for the mushroom world you know how many things like uh i love peter mccoy and the fact that he put out the radical mycology book the second big one and uh the first one was novel man it was so rad and like these little pamphlets of you know cubensis grows over the years that have come out they're outdated in two years upon you know upon printing it's amazing like how fast this industry changes when it comes to bags or filters or whatever people are just perpetually innovating which is so exciting you know yeah and maybe the meme is like the best recipe for tracking that and like pushing it it could be yeah you'd definitely be a vector for that because memes are are great for getting a lot of information across in a very short amount of time yeah yeah no they totally are they totally are man and uh they are they're they're for our bumper sticker brain our goldfish bumper sticker brand yeah just that real quick hit of dopamine yeah yep it's yeah we're really stupid species when it comes down to it and our uh intellect is 100 addiction based yeah i i i often say the human body is the laziest robot that was ever made yeah yeah yeah yeah that's so true man it's so true that's unreal man all right what other crazy questions i got here so you're you're working um this is sort of an interesting thing right so you're you're in this realm of like selling and sort of capitalizing on the meme thing with a company that's done a lot of innovation things and one of them is really interesting and it's worth talking about just so people are aware of is the biodegradable bags yes there's a lot of people out there who'd kind of like go one way or another on it and over the years it's taken us a lot of time to figure out that there really isn't a major quickly swift solution to making this a reality um and i don't know how the perception of unicorn sort of stands with it or if you stand in line with them but maybe you can see yeah um so i'm glad you brought that up i actually uh am going to be issuing a call to arms for anybody who wants to help participate in a grand experiment i'm going to be doing um so our biodegradable bags they have they're oxo degradable so they break down by oxygen and they break down by exposure to uv light and we also use an additive that makes this digestible to anaerobic bacteria so no matter where they're disposed of no matter if you they go to a landfill if they go to your backyard wherever if they you know get tossed in the middle of the street they will in under a year in most cases in some cases as quickly as three months they will completely break down the microplastics at which point the soil bacteria will eat them and digest them yeah because the polypropylene using this additive that we have from willow ridge the polypropylene itself is digestible so that's great for for keep getting the plastic out of the environment right the problem with having a bag that degrades as quickly as possible is that it degrades as quickly as possible so as soon as exposed to oxygen it starts breaking down so they literally start dissolving before they roll off the assembly line as soon as they're extruded they start breaking down so so is there a it's it's almost as vulnerable as the you know substrate spawn or fresh mushroom side at that point and which is probably intentional but necessary it's yeah it's a real it's a real tough balancing act um but my experiment that i'm going to be pulling off and what i would really love to do this with multiple data points because more data is more power is you only get several tubs and submerge not suspend submerge these things in an aseptic solution of some kind uh you know how okay so this is where your meme came from of uh submerging polypropylene in a cryogenic state yeah so yeah okay uh low temperatures do reduce the degradation but then once they freeze the actual plastic molecules become more brittle because of crystallization and thermal expansion things like that so my idea is to suspend them in a non-chlorine bleach because chlorine does terrible things to polypropylene but there's got to be something out there something that makes the solution aseptic so there's no bacteria in there and then it also gets rid of the exposure to air exposure to uv can be easily mitigated with an opaque container but if i can make some kind of a bag to tank that vendors can do like vendors can order our bags our biodegradable bags and then store them in these tanks that stops yeah or

50:22 at least slows down the degradation process we can see a tremendous amount of switch over from conventional divide degradable and the biodegradable bags only cost about three four cents more per uh per bag between three and five cents per bag so it's you're talking you know 50 bucks for a case of a thousand it's not that's interesting yeah it's completely feasible to to have this replace conventional plastics by the end of the decade if we all work together and we have this this technology that we can present because the main one of the main hold ups that willow ridge and by extension us have encountered is the let me pull up the actual the actual factual uh measurement standard info yeah yeah so uh d6868 is a industrial composting standard that everybody holds the bpi biodegradable plastics institute which is solely run by uh pla and starch and composting companies so their guidelines for biodegradable is it has to degrade in an industrial composter which basically means that you need to use a lot of water and it's a slow burn and you're actually incinerating just at a slow rate which is that that's not what we're trying to do at all we want to make it so that if you're you know yeah take it to a recycling center whatever that's cool but if it falls out of your truck on the way there it'll still break down you don't have to worry about it our whole goal isn't to stop plastic from you know going to waste it's just just stop plastic from being in the environment you know yeah just i say we didn't solve the problem of microplastics being created we saw the problem microplastics being harmful yeah yeah that's really interesting have you i mean maybe this is just me in being a naive sort of person who's has no intention on making bags but the uh um there's no way to basically use the the smallest amount of plastic possible but um a way to sort of create like a vacuum tight version of these bags so that it's just sealed so the problem with the vacuum is the bacteria are still there and that's so there's no stopping yeah at that point they would turn into anaerobes same thing with we tried putting nitrogen in there they just stop processing oxygen and they keep living a vacuum can kill some bacteria but it's not going to kill all of them and the ones that are left are going to continue chewing through the plastic yeah yeah yeah one of the reasons we uh um do not use unicorn bags speaking of vacuums for spawn in particular is because we employ a vacuum sterilization system and it is the only thing in which it will misshape a unicorn bag like in and for prevax basically so we'll have uh you know these these uh explosions and implosions of basically forcing air out of a bag or all the bags in the autoclave in order to get through a sterilization cycle extremely fast so that there's very little degradation in terms of caramelization or mallard reactions and so we see that like movement of even like the toughest of plastics but i wonder if because of the the um sort of living nature of these bags if there would be some sort of motivation there to try running them through a system like that um just out of curiosity because it was the one reason why we have to buy those bags in from belgium i mean sako 2 is a great company yeah they're the only ones who can stand against us toe-to-toe when it comes to quality yeah most definitely man especially with their new dura bag material uh the the ecological uh implications of it i have no idea you know yeah i just know we're locked into these strange sort of worlds where plastic is our ruler you know right yeah yeah and it's really it's really unfortunate that these monolithic plastic companies like like pla like you know the composting tycoons um they're they also want to see these uh prices go up we've already seen an increase in the price of resin from 88 cents last year to a dollar 22 a pound in january and it's it's likely going to increase um there are five refineries along the gulf coast that took a hit from just hurricanes and fires and just like bad stuff caused these things to go elsewhere 20 20 yeah yeah 2020 happened and refineries caught fire yeah yeah it happens oh my goodness all right we're going to see a lot of now there's actually been a strong push from the from the rail industry to to remove plastics from uh pipelines which i totally am you know i was against keystone because you know it's a native american burial ground like i've seen this movie i know how it ends let's not do that yeah you disrespect you're dead you're dead as a culture yeah yeah but as far as transporting by by pipeline in general it's statistically the safest way to transport it and it's also much friendlier to the environment

55:23 actually before the show i did some like bar napkin calculations that uh you know just basic arithmetic that anybody with a calculator can do um yeah so the average tanker truck gets about six and a half miles per gallon uh and these oil companies like they're gonna move their oil whether it's from pipeline a truck a train a boat like they're gonna do it yeah um excuse me so six and a half miles per gallon uh these these pipelines they run for hundreds of miles so let's just call it let's just call it 200 miles right 200 miles six and a half miles per gallon means 30.8 gallons per 200 mile trip right so you then go to uh i i use two sources for this next bit because it seems so fantastical that i i had to double check just to make sure according to the u.s energy information administration and the uh chemical engineering school of advanced engineering at coca-cola university in japan i know i butchered that name i'm sorry y'all go minasai hey we're just wipe yeah so the u.s energy information administration uh says that one gallon of diesel fuel when burned produces 22.38 pounds of co2 and mazda corporation who was the you know one of the sponsors of this study it was you know a car company like they have a vested interest in making it seem as harmless as possible right they came up with 21.8 pounds per gallon so let's just split the difference and call it 22 pounds of co2 right yep so you take that 200 mile trip with a six and a half mile per gallon uh tanker truck you will get 677 pounds of co2 per one truck going 200 miles and that's 8 000 gallons right these pipelines they do hundreds of thousands of gallons if not millions of gallons per day so to get the same kind of volume let's just you know start at the bottom with a 100 000 mile uh pipeline that would take 12 and a half trips with a tanker truck all right yeah it's 8470 pounds of co2 in one in one trip simple direction yeah yeah yeah damn um if if you know a little bit bigger pipeline like 500 000 uh gallons per day that'd be 60 tankers we're talking 42 000 pounds of co2 every day are these the sort of like implications that are um in particular motivating you motivating lou motivating just unicorn in general yeah well to sort of work towards a more sustainable option that nobody else really is working towards at all yeah because what we're seeing with the plastics industry um is the same kind of thing that we saw with the nuclear industry where people are calling for an outright ban instead of just fixing it making it better making it more efficient yeah so rather than that that's what i would like to see is right because like with with nuclear anti-nuclear and everything and you know yes there's dangerous things fukushima was terrible but that was also a plant that was built in the 1960s on a fault line like it was it was basically the and it was you know it had a lot of problems it undermined itself yeah it was underfunded it was run by this like greedy old man it was basically the nuclear plant from the simpsons i mean yeah quite frankly it wasn't if memory serves i'll need to research this i might just be talking on my ass here but if memory serves it wasn't even intended to last past the 80s because when they first built it they assumed that better technology would come along and that they could build a different plant that would replace it it was just a stop gap well humans are stuck in that like uh that that dangerous agenda engine where they assume like something else better is going to come along they're like it's coming so this and it did believe it or not thorium and molten salt reactors are incredibly safe thorium in particular has a safety mechanism that basically just melts the cork because it's a liquid fuel so there's a meltable torque on the bottom so no human input no computer input no electricity is involved at all just when it super heats the fuel gets separated from the catalyst and that prevents a meltdown but you say nuclear bad and that makes the hamsters in the focus group step on the pedal so nobody's going to build a nuclear plant it's the same thing we're seeing with recycling uh most u.s recycling programs at least all the government recycling programs have closed down so all that's left are the private enterprises because it's no longer profitable to ship our recycling to china no exactly and the minute that became nonprofitable which was quite a while ago now it was like you know it was deemed just don't say anything because everybody that still recycles is under the presumption that what they're doing is correct and they're like this is as much as i can do separate paper plastic and glass unfailingly every time you're like you got to do more in texas there's

1:00:24 not even that there's literally just a recycle bin and we say okay throw glass paper plastic everything goes in there just no no food okay they just don't put cardboard in there yeah yeah oh man it's it's up here it's like that they'll put it yeah yeah but because nobody you know nobody wants to be the politician that kills recycling because then that's going to basically kill their entire political ambition yeah well it's you can't really do a lot in a politician's career to like upheaval and change an entire system that's supposed to benefit us in a timeline that's longer than your lifetime you know so that's that's our that's our downfall at the end of the day and when it comes down to it it feeds right back into the excitement of like why every mushroom farm that knocks on our door i'm like yeah yeah come see what we're doing because i'm learning from you and you're learning from me and we're really like we're jamming this out like you wouldn't have the same sort of complexities in terms of production systems or spawn systems or even just the distribution network you know when we started you couldn't buy blocks to fruit on a financially solvent level you just couldn't do it we're the only ones to sort of turn that around and be like here this is the diversity this is how you go about doing this you know so we're seeing those changes like astronomically and it speaks to why things like radical mycology uh sort of like tombs become outdated really fast not like they're not worth reading or investing time in but it's worth just like continuing that conversation and pushing those sort of developments on every level yeah and uh attempting to not leave a big bundle of plastic in our path like a radioactive uh lab that was made down yeah yeah so if we can get going back to the the biodegradable option if we can get yeah if we just figure out what the thing is like there's got to be a thing that stops or slows down the degradation so we can just figure out what that is we can make the thing container and the thing transporter and all suddenly all of our plastics because that's the other thing about plastics is it's it's everywhere it's in everything it's in the bag of your cereal inside the cardboard box it's in the plastic wrap that's on top of the deli meat that you buy you know it's in your phone it's in the microphone that i'm talking into it's in the speakers that you're listening on me from like it's everywhere yeah it's it literally is man it's i think we're in that new wave too of people looking towards the fungal application for everything from like the you know the sound panels to packaging to whatever and if we can sort of look at the precursors that we've ignored for so long like the plastic side we can sort of get past that notion that these things have to have to use such a you know tough industry in order to keep this like you know sterile preservation through the whole process so i think yeah i'm glad you guys are working on it a lot of people ask about it and i'm sort of unaware of the technology behind it so i appreciate you clearing that out absolutely but literally their one downside is you can't have them sitting on the shelf longer than a couple of months or else they won't automatically yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense man you know maybe there's something to that and maybe enough farms just need to sort of take on the onus to be able to like realize that it's got an expiration date like anything else yeah yeah that sucks yeah but uh it's part of what sucks even more is we don't have any way of measuring the expiration date because like altitude affects it because of the density of oxygen heat affects it so it depends on what part of the country it's going to it depends on what the conditions were when it was transporting was it in a hot truck going down the freeway or was it you know shipped during the middle of winter yeah there's so many different areas so from a business standpoint because i'm in the world of really conversating with other business professionals that are working with companies have worked with multiple companies or owned their own mushroom farm or mushroom enterprise what is the process by which you guys start communicating and sort of working this stuff out within unicorn do you sort of have a board you have like a process and a plan a general goal you know like how do you how do you go about solving these issues well for the for the biodegradable bags i literally just emailed lou i was like hey have you thought about putting it in bleach i was like oh no i haven't cool so you're the dude you're the guy this is my idea this is gonna be my baby over the next like two years or you know knock on wood that we have some samples that last two years well in the bag to tank part of part of what um main Cap N Stem is doing in general and uh and i find it interesting to sort of see where other people are on the evolutionary train of forward integration we for the longest time have been shipping water in an extremely vulnerable product that's fully colonized and ready to fruit across the country up to canada you name it we've shipped it there there's inevitably going to be failures along that way and we have this designated sort of really clunky

1:05:25 distribution network of reefer trucks that break down the truckers that lie that try to cover up time so on and so forth to which you know you look at a lambert box of spawn and they basically have a thousand words to tell you to go yourself we try to work with yeah we we try to work with farms as best we can to help them out if these things happen but they happen so we started working with brad coons of um he's up in canada he's owns a bunch of different companies now but he's um he's integral into this like pelleted substrate design that we've put together with him which is essentially you can call it the masters mix or the shiitake mix depending upon if it's soy if it's wheat mids if it's got this that and the other in it but it's all oak sawdust at the end of the day the goal being to sort of take these farms that we've cultivated as customers over time that basically just buying blocks put them into the fruiting room harvest the mushrooms sell the mushrooms because it's really like this industry's got spawn it's got substrate and it's got fruiting it's really three total things that will cause you to work eight days a week if you're not careful on a small scale so we made it simpler for them we're trying to forward integrate them to say look you can make your own substrate you can take this on this equipment this substrate our spawn knock your own bags in a systematic approach that we're still developing to make it ultra simplistic and ultra inline and very much cost effective as opposed to like having to buy an autoclave or fabricate a steam box or buy a ribbon mixer or whatever the case may be all these things that are inflating in price we're trying to bring down and offer the inputs that really allow them to step in at their own level and then grow from there is there a way that you can incentivize and maybe this is a very outlandish question but incentivize sort of an inline process of buying this sort of extrudable uh sort of biodegradable substance and making bags in line in a process that really just involved the entire sort of application of bag to form to cool to whatever to introducing a substrate to um hydrating it to spawning it to sealing it to go so that that process of biodegration is like it's right there yeah is there a motivation or even a consideration of that well the so the biodegradable process the all of our all of our bags are proprietary um including the equipment everything uh we've actually been we've been sued twice by companies who have came on after the fact trying to claim uh intellectual property and of course blue had to go to the you know the court and said you know hey this patent from 1985 says that i invented you know yeah yeah yeah we're talking companies that were founded in like 2008. yeah so like yeah the first boom the mycological wave yeah yeah and so you know i mean we love these companies to death but it's also at a certain point it's like we have to we have to keep providing this level of quality right yeah so there's a uh there's a there's a non-profit aspect to it where if someone is is just genuinely wanting to use their own things for their own you know purpose or whatever like they're not trying to make profit off of it or anything like that it's a totally different uh thing than if somebody decides to well i'm gonna make pegasus bags well right right okay yeah yeah no and i i merely pointed out from the aspect of like figuring out how to take this sort of uh production that's biodegradable and turn it into an inline process so that the the development of this sort of goes in a pattern and it's not like you need an answer to that yes no no i'm sort of curious to know if that's a cool thought no it's so good i misunderstood the question so the the additive uh is actually comes from a company called willow ridge plastics um so the mix that we use is proprietary but anybody can buy the additive from them and use it in their own process um yep yep that makes sense yeah so once we figure out uh what works for unicorn it's going to be a lot easier for other people to make like say plastic shrink wrap that breaks down right or you know plastic grocery bags that break down yeah biodegradable yeah that's really rad yep and it's worth it i guess from a uh from a patent standpoint yeah from the sort of breakthrough standpoint to make sure that you're on the forefront of that and it's it's commendable by all means because like you know the longest i've talked to uh people in this industry from john donahue to anybody from luon it's it's not something that's been on the forefront because it's working and what's not broken you know don't fix it you know just keep going and it's we're only going to see this like inflation of prices and everything across the board that are really going to shake up how we go about you know doing this whole thing in general exactly exactly and there's there's been a big push to uh transport getting back to transportation to plastic there's been a big push to transport by by train instead of by by pipeline which

1:10:26 trains are there they're much more efficient than transporting my truck for example but they're still it's only four times as efficient so you take the you know the thousands of pounds example from earlier and divide by four it's still a big damn number yeah yeah and the other thing is that transporting um let me see i i pulled this up too uh transporting by uh 2014 transportation of crude oil was five dollars per barrel by pipeline 15 per barrel by rail and that cost is passed down to the consumer yeah yeah it always is it's great they're really the answer for that isn't getting rid of pipelines it's making pipelines better making sure that unions are giving their their best people because you can you know you can work on a pipeline as a as a welder you know a master welder yeah it's cool we need to make the best of the best master welders on this yeah on this thing because if you know something breaks it's it's a disaster yeah yeah there's uh yeah it's it's even from the motorcycle standpoint um uh making frames like the dom tubing and stuff that's used for electronic welding is not something we're like equipped to do on a large scale in any distance like that for pipelines so it really is it's just you know i know tons of people who like went to the pipeline rush just as welders and fabricators and sort of people in that world for the money but at the same time they didn't really like they're not incentivized to be more safe than they should be about it based on the implications of what happens during a disaster you know they just they're working you know they're welding and that's they're half drunk and they're happy and that's yeah that's all it you know yeah i'm sorry yeah no no but no you don't know it's yeah there's nothing wrong with wanting work there's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for your skilled labor like you spent 10 years learning how to be a welder obviously you're a very good welder and you should be you know paid and commensurate to your experience and your skill yeah but when it comes to pipelines i mean this isn't something that we can just you know do a visual inspection on and say oh hey that one's faulty we need to replace it it's right we in a lot of cases we don't know it until it's it's already there's already a leak and it's true now a lot of these companies uh leak detection technology has increased uh dramatically over the past couple of decades so uh most leaks i'm not going to say all because obviously there are some that are just terrible but most leaks can be solved in uh you know less than a few hundred gallons which is still terrible but it's much better than an 8 000 gallon spill from a truck getting tipped over or hundreds of thousands of gallons spilled from a boat or god forbid a 200 train car pileup that just dumps you know yeah that's totally true man i mean the the safety factor goes back to like flying versus driving right you know it's like you put a lot more onus on a driver in smaller increments but can be you know monumental when it's added up and not to mention the cost associated but when it comes from the standpoint of um you know from having these pipelines if you if you have it configured out it's the tubular technology of the future it's futurama all rolled into one yeah we don't think and look at that cartoon basis of being like oh how many people died in that tube shuttling humans through hyperspace we're not really looking at it like that but we have to you know if we're actually looking at implementing this yeah it's all about it all comes down to risk management yeah yep don't eat the peanuts at the bar man that's all i gotta say about that you know well this is cool so like your your role is expanded you're not just this master of means you're like you're trying to like get in there and sort of incentivize these like really like serious changes when it comes down to your beliefs in the whole sort of network of humanity yeah yeah like i said it's you know it's a relay it's not a marathon we can't switch over from these these heavy pollutants these toxins we can't solve all these problems at once overnight i mean we can but everybody would go broke doing it so the best way in my opinion the best way to do that would be like i said it's a relay would be just to to get just pass the baton to the next person who can stand on the shoulder of a slightly taller giant and then pass the baton to the next person just keep going yeah and that's why i'm really excited about this experiment because like i said if this pulls off and we figure out the the thing the liquid thing and somebody else can figure out the all-in-one package you know maybe some type of uh maybe some type of of a bag that's coated on the outside to not be uh degradable but on the inside and yeah yeah i see the irony of having a non-biodegradable bag that transports biodegradable decks but it always comes back to it though it's like we we've always found these fail-safes just in case so no matter if

1:15:26 you make this ideal product somebody's gonna wrap the pallet in plastic wrap and have the pallet be coated you know arsenic laced wood it's just it always we're always chasing our tail yeah that sort of stuff yeah but it doesn't mean that you can't perfect that like one version of it and hope that it marches forward yeah because it's amazing to go into a grocery store in new york versus a grocery store in mass versus grocery maine one you can't get bags when you have to pay for bags and the other it's bring your own bags or we'll shoot you you know it's it's very like all over the place and it's state to state which proves it's like anarchist territory it's like you know figure it out yourself yeah yeah and that's that's the inherent problem of centralization i feel is that there's there's no one-size-fits-all solution for everybody um yeah so the the fault then falls to a decentralized uh platform a decentralized industry like the mushroom industry you know like for example uh transportation costs you know like you were just saying uh it's incredibly difficult to transport fresh mushrooms uh from state to state and like with uh with china's centralization versus the decentralization over here you know i'm sure they have problems that state-sponsored media would never talk about with getting you know rotten mushrooms going from one end of the country to the other yeah but yeah over here because everything is decentralized you don't have like you were saying the you know the shiitake village and the enoki village you have you know farmer john who has 12 different kinds of mushroom and only three of them are portobello you know or none of them yeah hopefully yeah in a perfect world i think i've been really like uh intrigued by that because when i first started getting into this world there were a lot of farms that were like okay we got to do some of the mushrooms and then we can like sprinkle in some gourmets and the reality is now like that's just not a facet there are so many farms out there um who just focus on like the you know saprophytic obsidian mercedes they just want the primary decomposers they don't care about mushrooms you know yeah and it's uh i think it's a good thing but there are so many of them now it's unbelievable it's uh it's i i literally i'm blown away coming from an age in technology where like you know i didn't grow up with phones at all or cell phones it was a rotary dial and you like look on instagram now and every morning in the past couple years there's just new farms and you're like and you all see them starting at new vantage points but they all start now at the vantage point you assume makes the most sense but then there's like these outliers who will pull in weird technology or weird you know innovations from their past you know or memes you know it's it's huge man it's huge yeah absolutely yeah absolutely and the yeah not to not to keep on portobellos or anything because they are they have their uses they're delicious when they're stuck i like to stuff them with blue cheese and little worcestershire sauce oh it's really good but i'll take a pink oyster every time you know yeah yep yeah man it's it's a really funny thing i i think uh i'm excited to see where it goes and i'm really excited to hear that that push for like the biodegradable side is something that's kind of being generated because you know like i said kelsey mentioned it today asked him about the biodegradable thing and i was like oh yeah that's a good point yeah just like you know we don't think about it because it's not right in front of an idea that i had like a couple of days ago i just had like a brain dropping i was like oh what about bleach water pool water i think it was my was my idea was fill it with pool water um yeah like just really strong it'd be amazing to see these like ibc's like sloshing bag you know just like dipping into rivers of bed yes which you know simultaneously as these things become inline processes and i know it's going that way because i've been in this a long time and i'm sure it's different from different people's vantage points in this industry if you were to transport these bags in a sterilizing media per se it's almost instantaneous use so say they were submerged in something that could you know basically keep certain things alive but also kill the majority of competitors you know how many inline systems especially in the eu where people actually sterilize reams of bags and for an inline process it could be a whole sort of like you know integral sort of play into that which is really kind of cool yeah you know yeah not to mention it would make uh it would give cause to do tax incentives for the more biodegradable plastics so that all the current taxes that are on plastics uh you know companies that don't have any uh way to get their products to people other than using plastic they can get a little bit of a break and a little bit of stimulation from doing that that's huge man it's like the new solar that was the biggest for a while people would come by for like a good couple years in a row and they're like we're this new solar company we're gonna give you a free quote and you're just like getting the out like i don't want to hear your free quote yeah yeah oh my god don't get me started on the whole

1:20:26 it's the batteries the batteries take so much carbon to produce uh and yeah and with wind farms too there there's an argument that uh it takes decades for a wind farm to offset the carbon that was used to smelt the steel that goes into the the blades yeah yeah this is the thing where we're just pinching ourselves in our own yeah yeah if you buy a tesla like the the the amount of energy that it makes to takes to make those batteries like you gotta drive that thing for years before it starts to offset and then you're still plugging it into a grid that might be fueled by you know petroleum yeah yeah it's totally true you know it's uh it's a fascinating thing and i was just having a conversation with my friend about it and uh i i always express this envy for people who are in the ones and zeros world because i'm in such a tangible like physical product movement world and as you are in unicorn you kind of forget how implicitly amazing computer based technology is when it has zero bearing on a physical product so people who are like generating pdfs or like using energy to do these things their work and their content is essentially useless if the grid goes down all of their work goes away in a flash and i don't think there's anything cooler than that like i really don't i'm like that's far out you know like how many people can say that their work goes away with a flick of a speech you know that's really cool you know and people like look at me when i say that to them if they're like a computer programmer like i'm making a slide and i'm like no man like i really do think that's genuinely awesome and if you haven't thought about it well because you have uh you have the potential for infinite economic growth i mean you look at look at video games that have uh an in-game currency like uh like for example eve online uh people people make tens of thousands of dollars a year just playing video games because they're saying man my girlfriend's kiddo is like into that world so i bought him like a podcast mic and he's got a setup with a gaming computer which is all new to me like i i'm not in that world i'm so business focused and i just see it and he's like telling me about all these people who make you know hundreds of thousands of dollars just like doing that i'm like what the yeah yeah it's one of those things uh it's kind of like fair i guess it's any entertainment anything entertainment industry based where it's it's really hard to get your foot in the door but once you're there you're yeah you're alive for forever just don't it up and tell a really racist joke it's a long time don't take a lot of ambien that's how old hollywood has done it yeah don't take a lot of ambien try a psychedelic mushroom yeah jesus i don't know man i still at the end of the day like i get so fogged out for most of the stuff that i have to go like do a physical thing and like you know make a motorcycle or run a lathe or a mill because you just you you bug out realizing that so much of our focus is on something that really is just just fake it's this weird aura but it's very important at the same time yeah it's it's what caused the globalization that allows this type of work to flourish yeah yeah most definitely yep that's pretty incredible well on a uh on a personal standpoint what is your sort of other motivations in this world other than uh just mushroom bags and sustainability is there other stuff that sort of keeps you drumming in that same fashion i just want to teach uh i i would like okay so you're an educator i like yeah i like bringing new information to light new to light man yeah yeah that's huge yeah that's right so i've uh like i said the the conference and everything um i'm looking for uh or other conferences to get involved with that as well i got some cool stuff on the horizon but for now all of my energy is being devoted to unicorn bags i'm trying to get another vector well this will also fund the research is i'm just selling pre-sterilized grain bags and things like that um yeah i'm not you know i won't be getting a discount or anything like that so it's not like there's an unfair advantage or anything like that um yeah but just the amount of people who have messaged me asking if i sell a smaller quantities or pre-sterilized bags or anything like that and yeah you know officially yeah our policy is you know we have tons of wonderful vendors you know eric myers sells almost at cost so there's there's a very interesting um way that i'm gonna be going about that but the the end result is almost all of the profit from that is going to be going towards funding that research um i would like to get it selling to the point where i can give research grants to people sure um and then if anybody wants to go in on uh some biodegradable bags i'll absolutely do the the networking and the coordination to get some people who only have x amount of money to get certain bags uh because the warehouse is

1:25:27 completely no i mean we're two weeks behind on all of our orders and have been since the start of covet it's you know just been slammed so i yeah that's why we i think most of us have been ordering pallets at a time because we're just like if we don't we're not we're not going to order half a pallet at a time it's out of fear but it's also out of understanding that like you gotta look forward a little bit yeah yeah so they don't really have the bandwidth to uh to handle this an experiment like this or whatever um but i mean i'm you know i'm making memes from home i can you know slap a couple of dozen bags in the couple of totes i like it dude i like it that's really cool are you gonna sort of push these uh um uh sort of uh um composiums or uh you know gatherings or whatever group zoom things in a fashion that's sort of equipped to work within the confines of unicorn are you gonna try to do them on your own or is it sort of i'm going to i mean that's up to lou because at the end of the day this is his company and i'm not going to advertise for anything that he's not into yeah so that's the buck stops with him basically um i'd like to expand out and do all that i think that it would be a really good way to build community and you know solidify our relationship with said community yeah so yeah so hopefully there's gonna be a lot of cool stuff coming out soon about that that's great man that's great i'm glad to hear it that's you know been this podcast it's been a lot of like what people are sort of putting out there in these sort of covid based times you know it's it's a direct symptom of obviously being stuck inside for the most part not interacting and traveling as much as we used to but uh but it's also it's it's kind of exciting to see how many people are like brewing things in the background and just like and and then exposing them like slowly like companies like unicorn i would not have expected to pull in a meme dude i just like didn't i didn't see that coming man which really i think a lot of people did not see coming they were like what the these are amazing so they never see me coming kudos to you man no no that's good you got to keep them uh keem on their toes man yeah yeah that's great well you know lou didn't see that coming either i was you know originally brought in just to dispel myths and just you know put out some cool like science stuff and yeah yeah like i said one of them took off so i was like all right well here's some more yeah it's exploded that's crazy yeah so going back to that initial conversation with him was there like a meme in particular that he or you were extremely excited about sort of incentivize the push towards that because you you know you see these like professional profiles where people will post up their products and they're finally photographed and you know 3d animated and this that and the other or then you see the meme accounts and you're like both have their own plethora of like benefits yeah yeah absolutely but was there a moment there where he was like yeah that's the direction no really um he he didn't uh i so i was giving him weekly updates on how well like the the analytics of all of our posts excuse me um and just like how well everything is done was like oh well you know this thing did well but this didn't you know blah blah and yeah i started posting memes about that and he didn't speak out he didn't oppose it and so i just kind of ran with it and everything has taken off since then we just hit five thousand on uh instagram yeah once we and that's after getting the zuck after the band hammer happened uh i'm not sure if you're aware of this we got we got banned from instagram for like three days oh i have no you and i think a million other mushroom accounts yeah yeah and they have nothing to do with the psychedelics no not all like half of our followers got kicked um at the same time so we were we were almost at 5000 and then it got kicked down and like yeah it's a dumb little like number like whatever normal accomplishment but it's you know because once you get up to 10 000 you get verified and at that point it's a lot easier to be taken seriously in scientific world scientific circles yeah it's also much more difficult for uh instagram and facebook and you know our tech overlords to mess with us yeah yeah you have some say all you have to do is tweet about it and people be vivid well not only that but they look at the blue check mark and they say oh well we've already verified this person like that this is not that they just looked past yeah we we become a known quantity at that point yeah no that's super integral man um i think a lot of people are not looking at social media that way uh but a lot of people who are in that world of trying to like make up their own business decisions and how they approach a following in a sort of generation of an audience have to look at that implicit design of those stupid frameworks that instagram and facebook forced us into yeah and it is what it is and the the biggest advice that i could give for anybody who's trying to get their uh their account back and everything is just keep emailing keep being a pest because i i appealed the decision three times before they finally were like okay

1:30:28 well we don't allow anything illegal blah blah blah but we will be restoring your account like okay fine jesus i i feel like yeah there's this uh there's this interesting thing that happened in pennsylvania when those shitake logs from china started coming in you had all of these major farms just being like you know trump save us and list that and the other and they're trying to like fight the log sort of importation and then all of a sudden they the log importation won and they closed all their and just started hawking chinese locks which is an interesting side effect to how we approach situations we plan for this fight but we always have this like back out yeah you know and it it's such a pity the fool situation you're like what are you doing like just keep fighting for it you know so close to winning people don't do that like we're so close to having people reject chinese-made goods yeah like there's no reason like if you're fighting against chinese-made goods there's no reason to acquiesce not that yeah yeah there's no real reason acquiesce yeah unless there's something like just a ridiculous amount of expense involved um right but then you also have to take into account the uh it's like i don't did you ever watch the good place it's uh oh yeah yeah yeah that's what that she like yeah okay so it's the heaven-based yeah yeah there's a good place and a bad place yeah so yeah so when they go through the morals of doing everything they they go through like they finally get to like the accountant or whatever like the grand accountant in the sky and they're going through like all of the like the good deeds and bad deeds that everybody's done in their life and they're like oh look you gave a dollar to a homeless person that's great but you did this to earn that dollar and then the homeless person went and they did this with the money and then somebody robbed them and like is this big chain of like negativity attached to this one good thing that they're trying to do yeah yeah and it's just it's just insane it's like you know you save money like yeah you're saving you know 20 so that you can you know give more to charity and you can feed your family nicer foods and you know these wonderful things and that's like that is good that's you know that's great that's what we need to do but then you look a little deeper how did you save money well you outsourced labor to a despotic authoritarian regime that pays people pennies on a dollar and they had to build suicide nets on their factories and like it's this big muddy muddled thing like yeah it's it's it's scary to present that uh to the opposers of it as well and the people who are just arguing for argument's sake but when you oppose the importation of cheap products there there's inevitable vindication when your company grows during a pandemic and the mushroom industry has seen that and i don't know if you guys have seen that in terms of uh if you were aware of where unicorn was at or or um or where they're at now in comparison but i think it's been across the board if i'm not mistaken and uh and it seems like it's only headed for more more growth suddenly people realize that it's not the most difficult thing in the world there's now that we have good information and reliable techniques it's something that almost anybody can jump into with a couple hundred dollars get a pressure cooker and an impulse sealer and actually we just came out with a type of scissor clip that you just go to the hardware store and you get a bolt and a nut and you make a scissor clip that you don't even have to impulse seal it'll seal the bag after the fact after the steam vacuum creates the seal yeah yeah i you know i mean there's all these implications to this industry that like you don't even think how bags can adapt to an entire process which is where my mind goes which is like okay in line extruders for inline substrate production or spawn production to to things like that to ziplock versions of a unicorn bag you know there's so many cool aspects that could just save so much time and we give them zero sort of uh intrigue in the hopes that hopefully cats like you are jamming it out well that's i mean that's the beauty of the of the small business mindset right is that everybody's looking for a niche everybody's looking for a specialization a new way to specialize and solve a problem yeah because when you when you rely on these these global entities like going back to you know not to keep on the plastics industry but when you go back to the plastics industry you can shoot yeah i mean i mean yeah right i mean yeah i don't want to be all like oh big plastic but yeah big plastic like they have no incentive to improve uh biodegradation because they already have biodegradable bags and i hope that our listeners could infer my air quotes when i said that so define the difference for the audience so so traditional compostable degradable bags that is being pushed by big plastic you know things are made of starch they're designed to break down with water

1:35:29 and in order to get the water to break it down in less than years and years they have to be heated so you essentially have to send all this plastic to a industrial composter that's basically a low temperature incinerator and you have to burn this plastic which and i just i had to make a post because we had a i'm not going to name names we had a distributor who told people to incinerate our bags just burn them and that's why defeats every purpose ever right no you shouldn't you see your neighbor burning garbage and you usually make comedy yeah you don't go oh yeah should burn my trash yeah like uh how why would you think but that's essentially what the the industrial composters are doing um it's not now it's not that's a bit hyperbolic it's not burning plastic with burning plastic so what our bags they're designed so that they will break down no matter what environment they're in whether you send them to a recycling center whether you send them to the compost heap in your backyard whether you just let them lay out whether you bury them in your garden because we have a lot of people who get biodegradable bags and in the rare instances that they get a contamination they'll just bury it in their flower bed yeah and it takes care of itself i mean it blows my mind when i think about it because you know back when we were fruiting mushrooms and uh thinking about all the farms that we visited over the years it's still fruit thousands and thousands of blocks per week it's that same like you're just getting the to blast out the bottom of the bag and you're just making a pile of bags if you just didn't have to do that it would be i don't know how much time savings would be insane yeah and that's that's a whole moniker of of unicorn really is saving time because time is money and a lot of people especially a lot of people growing in jars they don't realize just how much time is saved by switching over to bags like our biggest bags can hold eight jars worth of mushrooms and it costs less than 50 cents and so imagine like how much time you spend washing eight jars how much time it takes to make eight lids how much time it takes to remake eight lids after the plastic ring gets a little bit too used how much i think you should go down the nerdy ass math of like how much space that jar actually takes up per cubic foot in a autoclave it's absorbed yeah and the bags they can just mush together like i can take you know my lazy tech that i talk about where i can process like 50 pounds of millet in you know about two to three hours of labor over the course of three days yes uh it's it's all about you just mush it together it's it's very like i was hitting myself when i realized how incredibly easy it was just because i was so paranoid i was like oh my god i didn't do this thing it's gonna be ruined and it wasn't it was fine it was cool it wasn't yeah yeah yeah yeah it's amazing man i mean there's there's something to this education side meme wise or otherwise or videos that you're making that it's got this level of absurdity to it that i think is so necessary because we've been inundated with this tell your ride like hippy ass grow everything i just it like it kills me thus the charles manson thing thus it's just like you know what you can be a like straightforward very like literal and almost perverse without being misinformed and you can sort of get your points across that way but so many people are like that might be your opinion this might be the best way to do it for you and you're just like no there's a right way around and we're gonna continue finding the wrong ways and sussing them the yeah yeah you know yeah there's a lot of butt hurt when when people start talking talking about different techniques um so that's you know and i do the that's why i have the attitude of well you know if that works for you that's great but for the journeyman to amateur mycologist i recommend doing this you know yeah yeah no and you can i hate to say it but you're not being nice and that's a good thing there's like there's this verbiage in those comments that i think is uh you know i'm of the of the mindset of like don't read the comments i don't give a but i've read them all from the universe i recently started doing this because it's like thank god like somebody's just like saying this stuff in a in an application that's not affecting their business in a negative way it's actually like it's propelling it yeah yeah this is like well if you want to use tyvek sleeves okay but there's no benefit to doing that you risk contamination and here's how steam works here's a little physics lesson you know steam takes up a thousand times more space than air so when you replace or then then water see when you replace that water with steam you're going to make a giant vacuum as it cools down like this is how it works it's crazy man i mean there's uh there's a certain level of intellect that has to go into you know the modern-day mycologist or amateur mycologist yeah you know we didn't i didn't come from a background of you know mycology i was a painter an art student you know

1:40:30 but the more you're in this stuff the more you realize that if you have uh the sort of brain mindset that is able to sort of analyze different variables all at once you're not gonna you're not gonna be butthurt by somebody being like what the are you doing because we're all caught off guard when we do something wrong we're like whoa why was i doing it that way i have no idea yeah yeah i for one definitely use typic sleeves man you know that's just what you did back then because somebody said to you i did the roger rabbit method of putting you know the jar lids on upside down like yeah there's you know and wondered why there's so much tricky dirt in my first house yeah we're doing you know everybody's doing the best they can and so i'm not like i don't slight people until they get shitty with me and i'm like yeah and then you're just like all irish yeah right like well you know that's you know this person does 300 bags a day and they said that i could seal before i autoclave like well are you doing 300 bags a day are you that good are you a master right no well then maybe you should just let the vacuum do its thing yeah it's totally true man it's amazing like he's like quoted people who are on just a different level of skill and they have you know decades of experience and then trying to replicate these little shortcuts that they do because they can do it because they know how to do it correctly and it saves them you know 10 seconds per bag but that's times you know 300 bags it's good savings yeah i had to go the opposite way you know where we started implementing the odin which is a a bagging machine a pellet-based bagging machine that brad coons has invented and it essentially doses pellets into two bags via load cells and those load cells quickly do the math for slight variances if it's like four point four pounds or point five or whatever and then it adjusts for the water so moisture content is the most important thing in fruiting mushrooms in my opinion for this stuff we've noticed if it's not exactly what you want it to be you're going to end up with negative and positive you know sort of back actions on both sides so we try to shoot for that exact moisture content this machine does that nice i i started talking to brad about like uh how i can sort of help you know get pellets out there get these baggers sort of out there and i i was under the presumption in my head that people can't use this as their workhorse necessarily if they're doing in my head everybody's doing 6 000 bags a week or 8 000 bags a week and i was i was like oh right like not everybody's doing that they're like you know 100 or 200 bags this is there's no labor involved here like you just make your 150 bags fill a thing and you're done i was like holy so i had to work backwards and realize that this is extremely valuable to like the small grower it's it's so important so it uh it's interesting to have to work forwards and backwards in this industry and really not be a dick towards one side or the other yeah there's a lot to be said about uh scaling um yeah and that's you know getting back to jars you know when you when you look at any aspect of uh doing this stuff to scale jars just become completely unfeasible in terms of the amount of labor that's required but everybody saw that paul stamet's book where he's got like a wall of grain master jars behind him and they were like god damn it i want that many jars in my life you know well and then you know a couple of months later you discovered bags and now you have you know two cabinets full of mason jars that you're never going to use that's i'm talking about myself so what's been your sort of transition in this in this studying but also like entrance into uh amateur mycology what like walk us through that did you just like you're like okay i got on the show marie and i started jamming into this from the psychedelic side went to the gourmet side like how did that work yeah so back in my back in my trippy dwp college days i had a soul-crushing office job and i ended up looking at the shrimery a lot just to see you know it was just it was just a fun little yeah it was just it was a partially part of it was it was a fun little way to rebel against this uh corporation that was uh crushing yeah yeah you know underpaying their employees and then you know mockery of it like what what year was this this was uh 2010 i believe yeah okay yeah so we're in the same wave of crazy interest yeah yeah yeah um and so i just you know at first starting i was just browsing memes i was just looking at you know different stuff on reddit playing a game of well how how much can i really take my labor down as far as what they're paying me like can i give them the amount of labor that they're paying can i give them eight dollars an hour worth of effort let's try and figure that out oh my goodness yes it's uh you know because as long as you meet quota they don't care so it's like well you know i'll knock everything out in four hours and then i got four more hours of my shift well shroomery yeah like if you're not like i'm sorry i'm not getting a profit sharing i'm not

1:45:30 getting stock options like what what incentive do i have to bust my ass so that my manager can make an extra quarter of a percent on his bonuses here so part of it was just you know rebelling just knowledge for the sake of knowledge i just wanted to learn about anything and you know waste time and milk the clock and all that changed once i finally decided to work for myself and i realized i'm not lazy i just value my time if i can get something like tell me what needs to be done and i'm going to do it and you know don't you know i'm very much opposed to micromanaging so when i got on shroomery and i started looking at all this stuff uh it really i started realizing that it's like first of all it was a lot it felt like there was a lot of superstitions involved because you go to any thread and you'll see conflicting information so you know a decade later when i got involved with unicorn bags that was one of the main things that like i said i wanted to dispel the myths excuse me but also a really easy way to create content was i decided to just start growing in unicorn bags yeah so i asked lou and i you know that might have endeared me to him a little bit more was when i asked lou for uh for some some bags that he had just like hey you got anything just on hand i want to try this out and so he gave me like a ream of 10 tees and those have been my go-to bag ever since they're my little goldilocks bag yeah they're just right yeah as far as i'm concerned okay um yeah but that's that's what started was it was content creation um i had an old iphone that uh it was you know recent enough that the os had the slow motion camera app on it or not slow much the time lapse time lapse okay both are awesome yeah yeah both are and it's you know there's no better uh spare camera than just oh hey i have this in my sock drawer all right cool yeah yeah so that's that's how that started out um i have some i have some lines main i'm actually doing a little experiment um rather than cleaning out my fogger i'm just i just poured some bleach in there i'm gonna see if the mushrooms live it it's amazing man a lot of mushroom farms use clo2 uh non-activated in their in their lines for misting so they just have little uh you know peristaltic pumps that bring in just a little bit it cleans the lines but it also in high pressure missing situations allows you to filter the water and the ice and then chemically treat it at the same time and so long as it's not active and you're not fogging activated clo2 that's going to basically kill you at some degree you're fine you know and clo2 is just a you know it's an extension of bleach basically so i have it it's a i put in the you know the disinfectant amount they're like three tablespoons or whatever and then i just dumped in like 12 more gallons of water on top of that so it's like that's awesome it smells like a pool when i go into my garage but the mushrooms don't seem to mind i just harvested a giant clump giant bouquet of blue oysters that have been just dumping fruit bodies since like november i just i just like i'm so charmed by it i haven't like brought myself to cut it down and you know throw them away or bury him or anything and it's like no you keep going i'm like i said i'm just charmed do my my favorite uh people that come by here like you know and they'll get a block and they're always just people who like you're like what the are you doing growing mushrooms there's this lady uh we call her the compost lady because like every few days she'll come by and she'll just like dig through our compost and like fill up her minivan and there's like four of us just standing outside staring at her it's like a total letter can you say it and uh it's just so weird and uh and she's great though because she'll come in and she'll be like kelsey you wouldn't believe this i've gotten my dozen um their 12th or 13th flush off my lion's mane block and she never like looks right at you while she's talking she's like talking to the space around you she's phenomenal but those people are like they're astounding they don't give a about growing mushrooms they're just like they're baffled by everything around them and they're like so into it that they get me re-excited i'm like oh my god this isn't just a i'm not just making blocks yeah yeah yeah that's i'm really excited to see how these these next couple of flushes do i put i replaced the sterilization water the bleach water or whatever i know yeah bleach water it's bad yeah i'm not gonna i'm not gonna be selling these these are my my mushies yeah they're your things all right i'm just really i'm excited to see how that affects their uh their growth everything um because it is under i mean it's huge for things like blotch man you know and it's bleach is the only real competitor i think i saw that on your post the magnificent crazy video that you made where somebody was like i mean first of all i have way too many questions about that but uh

1:50:30 i like saw stamit's face i have to go show this to every single person i was like all of our employees i was like walking around showing they're like wasting my time right now i was just like take the take the two minutes yeah and like jesus christ this is good um ah i forgot what i was going to say there oh the bleach thing somebody somebody was like you know can this really be the only way or whatever to like you know uh to to clean and you're like it's the only like it's the only way we know of right the only way to be sure yeah yeah and it's true besides isopropyl man that's all yeah so yeah so i mean there's you know i'm sure non-chlorine bleach is uh is a good option but yeah disinfectants that's the only way and the only way to cure contamination is like a video complete exterminatus like i found that that warhammer has a lot of crossover with mycology community um just in terms of he does man of different theories like because by the time you notice contamination it's too late like it's already spread throughout the block like if you're if you're growing for uh commercial use or reselling it's there's a very very fine line to be walked there so the the only guaranteed method of not selling people you know something that might have a black mold on it or alpha toxins or any of these like this crazy is to you just gotta throw it away cover it in bleach bury it because trichoderm is it is a soil bacteria like it's a soil biome not bacteria but it's a soil it occurs in the soil it's fine but it's not like when it's just it versus mushrooms there's yeah you need the entire ecosystem down there for that so burying is i mean that's the fascination with uh with pasteurization in general like keeping some things alive and killing off others it's a very you know harmonious sort of setup yeah yeah and i i'm even like i'm suspicious as far as the the beneficial biome that pasteurization supposedly leaves because it just seems like the stuff that it leaves wouldn't help mycelium it just wouldn't want to reproduce in a human body like yeah for sure it just it just seems like it's not gonna be an it doesn't seem like it's gonna help you know yeah i mean plenty of the nerdy early psychedelic growers like myself got to that point where we were testing different degrees of pasteurization on like one particular media growing media and um and yeah there's there's something about that and obviously it's it's very like cued into this like 165 175 if you're outside of that range you're gonna see a lot more contamination on either side of that than right in the middle but when it comes down to like the benefits of consumption i have no idea yeah you know it's that's sort of like left to the to the ether to assume you know based on milk or whatever other things are pasteurized yeah so now that i have i just recently bought a second all-american so i'm going to be doing side-by-side experiments with pasteurization and complete sterilization and again getting as much as many data points as possible because you know just like growing with tiny bags instead of big bags if you have 25 fail well if you only have 10 bags that's a lot more than if you have 50. yeah that's a lot it's more bags but it's uh easier to get to zero in on a vector of contamination yeah so there's a percentage of this stuff too that's like helping the the micro sort of like home grower is that a large portion of uh like you mentioned eric and eric's definitely like doing his part to like get small amounts of these things out to people and uh is there is there a motivation to push more people towards that side because that's sort of the breeding ground for who might take on the sort of decomposable sort of plastics or uh or combust compostable plastics or is it or is it just that there's that many people getting into this stuff that are that are interested in the there's just the different stuff there's just that many people um it's just that yeah that's great yeah i tried me personally i try my hardest to appeal to both newcomers and uh yeah newcomers and true believers alike words of stan lee but the uh you know i would like to getting back to what i was saying about adding value to different feeds um you know i don't want to choose one side of the community over the other there's not really there's not really any reason to just go full on for amateurs or full-on for professionals because i feel like a lot of the the appeal of memes is that they're they're so easily accessible you know you don't have to be in the uh very learned mycologist to understand a lot of these no no and there's something extremely exciting about that um you know and i i can say that from like

1:55:31 uh from seeing people who are amateur mycologists that work for us you know who are just interested in this stuff from people like me who've been in it a while it's it's definitely it hits you in the same sort of sensory thing where you're really just appealing to the same nerd and everybody yeah you know which is just so important i don't know how to reiterate that enough because it it still blew my mind and made me like be like kelsey find this guy yeah it's like man i make memes that i like so you're asking if i yeah i had one in particular they're all my babies i love all my children don't make me choose that's serious well starship troopers dude jesus christ man that was a fun one i mean i don't know how you get so many like words to even float over people like that i'm not you know i'm not in a visual world i'm like how the did he do that i mean what's that process adobe premiere that much those are all keyframe animations like i used to i used to make dumb little meme videos when i was in uh in college because before i i have a degree in robotics but before then i was going for uh radio tv broadcasting and one of my favorite classes was the video editing class because we had very like loose outlines for a project and so i would do things like like we had to edit a drama scene and i would just like have people walking backwards and like turn it into a comedy like throw like lines of dialogue that like weren't supposed to be there yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's amazing i accomplished the goal but i don't wanna yeah i wanna do it my way and so yeah i just kind of took it's amazing when you've like figured out those tools and you have the adobe suite at your you know disposal i remember watching i i made films when i was uh in high school going into college a little bit and uh i was mostly interested in like the cameras and the actual film making and cinematography as opposed to the editing but i had so many friends who like especially in high school is this stuff you know we had like the first macs that were like you know even remotely accessible for you know editing video and they were like you know doing all these like reverse things in terms of um speed and sort of uh film direction for making it look like they just snorted like a pile of flowers you know there's just like just all these things and like most of us are just sitting there like how the did they do that you know because it was brand new but they were like just you know just on that level where they were like yep this is how we're going to do it yeah and they like they would figure it out yeah blew my mind it's still great i found a lot of filmmaking filmmaking is all like barbecue as far as uh the way to figure out how to do it well is to just up over and over again yeah happy accident yeah yeah and bob exactly incidents um so yeah so one thing i used to do when i was uh younger is watch like old terrible like b movies and try to figure out like because there's usually don't tell me you still don't i mean yes but now i'm so busy i don't have three hours to devote to like uh you know the story of robin hood as shot on 500 you know that's very true but there's there's something to be said about watching a movie because if it makes it to distribution they've done one thing right like they figured one thing out at least if they made it to distribution or they just have a ton of money they can you know force their way in but it's always interesting to to watch and to break down like what is this one aspect that they figured out how to do really well and how can i rip that off and how can i copyright it and incorporate it into my own thing yes i mean it's it's integral right like we're all stolen it's it's all we're taking all this like visual componency and the use of these like things that have just become memes the manson thing the you know warhammer stuff any of it we're just like but we're just grabbing on to it because there's a subset of people that are alive right now in the population that are so invested in this stuff that it immediately triggers something yeah you know and uh it's it's amazing to watch that side of it in a positive manner be used in this like educational niche as you put it but then there's also like our parents generation who believe the immediacy of the facebook news as fed to them every morning and you're like okay can you fact check a article you know like you did when you were in high school come on man like no that's not the way the world is operating right now i know you want to believe that but and now it's turning on ourselves or we have to argue with our you know older generation yeah for like just the simplicity of that and even calling out some of that stuff will result in a ban like when all of the yeah like when all the hunter stuff came out and people were getting banned left and right and now just last week abc confirmed that everything was correct it was it was completely accurate you know 100 blah blah blah and it's like we don't have to turn it like i know everybody loves to be outraged and this is you know outrage culture whatever like we can remove political affiliation and just look at it from an unbiased perspective that these are

2:00:31 these are powerful people who are competing in a popularity contest fighting over who wants to be prom queen but at the end of the day that's what it comes down to yeah it's an unfortunate side effect of like the tail end of that version of news you know well and i blame i think william randolph hearst i'm going to cut you off but in the in the early 1900s william randolph first figured out that i don't have to sell you information i have to sell you outrage and you'll buy newspapers so sex and yeah yeah so he you know that's why uh when the you know blame the maine on spain you know with the with the spanish war and uh the uss maine was you know attacked by yeah yeah okay it was attacked by spain no we we wanted some we wanted that land yeah does the the ulterior motives have turned into conspiracy at best you know and it's it's only after years of sort of people just like being like oh i guess that was the way it turned out you know and you're like what the we have the technology we have the time we have we can look through this faster you know and like figure out what happened oh what kills me is yeah that's the way that turned out but it could never happen again that's not what's happening now like right yeah from mass genocide to you name it oh scientists scientists were paid by the tobacco industry but they're too there's no scientists that would take anybody's money nowadays like no that's people are people dude if we can find the exact geo or geographical coordinates of shia labeouf based on i mean like we can do anything and the fact is that was like a genomic wow like holy how many people figured that out as fast as they were less than 48 hours like i think the was it the fastest one they did like five seasons of just the greatest capture of the flag game of all time internet historian has an amazing like series on it that i recommend anybody watch i gotta watch it that's internet historian uh he will not divide us seasons one through five just the best capture the flag game of all time and i think the shortest time was like 21 hours or something like that i want to say it was close to 24 hours they figured all this out i mean there's people like looking at the train like triangulating star constellations and putting that next to like plane like the roots of airplanes yeah well i mean like look like how much if we have this like this this insane network of people who can figure this sort of stuff out and then years later we have uh what's his name neil degrasse tyson being like sort of brought into the recapture and re-envision of the titanic to make sure the stars are right in the sky we can get proper news to proper people in a timely fashion but that's not what we're after no because we're after that shock because there's five corporations that run all of the news for the entire country and so yeah if it's not going to make them money they're not going to air it no man it's it's sort of a it's why i think most of the world has been rapidly turned on to podcasts and youtube channels and these other very like intriguing enclaves of media and content generation which is so cool absolutely absolutely there's there's been a massive push there was before you know trump came to office and just everything turned to i don't want to get into the whole political thing i'm yeah i hit them both on the same page yeah yeah but if if you remember back to obama's final turn there's a big push towards independent journalism and internet journalism and just like there's a giant exodus away from mainstream media that i i yearn for that day to come around again um i mean when when the gamestop uh stock thing happened it was i was so happy it was like it was like week one of occupy all over again you had you had and caps and uh and comes like coming together to on wall street it was amazing it was heartwarming nothing short of heartwarming it was not only that but there had to be like um unfolding and uh you know basically unpacking articles for the layman to be like what happened now you know i was like this is so yeah my my girlfriend pointed out to me i was like what happened with gamestop i was like what and like quickly i got it based on a few things but i just been like you know negligent of anything happening in the news and i was like that's unreal holy and then it's the tick tock thing from kids like you know in the whole downplay of and not to bring politics in it but you know of uh mass buying of scenes for different things that was hilarious oh dude i mean and so what it goes to show is we're after this like uh comedic value that's represented by what we've come from the daily show from all of these you know colbert report all these things that they make sense for us you know and i i i'm speaking i'm saying us

2:05:31 people who are generating content and sort of generating these conceptual ideas and sharing them you know it's it's all coming from that comedic standpoint and seeing like how quiet can we be about this while we gently remind everybody who's still in control you know yeah exactly it's like you know it's like that old expression when you know when something bad happens you can laugh or you can cry and i feel like the you know the establishment wants you to cry the establishment you know when i say oh the establishment yeah whatever like the corporations that tell you what to think want you to cry but you can't just laugh at the absurdity of it you can just the only thing i can't laugh at is the dodo uh on facebook i cry every time poor little pit bulls or geese or birds or whatever i'm like oh my god yeah what's happening you know you're like holy but then they have there's a lot of that oh absolutely it's terrible but then they have the the good videos of the ones where it's at the the rescue that uh you know they socialized them and they adapted really well and after you know so many months look at them they don't even look like the same animal anymore it's just it's wonderful yeah oh yeah it's amazing man i mean that's there's these sort of feel good things and they're they're they're grappling with the emotions of uh not so much i i think like me per se but definitely like i want to say like my parents generation it's just they're they're hell-bent on like that sort of sex death drama they're like oh my god i still need it in some fashion and netflix isn't good enough no so it's unreal they finally walked back on cuties though that was oh you know like how like how daring and brave do you have to be to take a stance against pedophilia i mean really but you know congratulations you did the minimum effort like yay yeah oh my god man but that's just what we do you know we like our minimum effort is considered uh a plausible and like award-winning yeah yeah yeah it's an intriguing thing especially in the in an industry like entertainment where everything is politicized like you can't like uh what's your name who got fired from mandalorian uh i think it happened like today or yeah yeah there was you know when she got introduced there were people saying oh you're feminizing star wars oh it's you know cancer culture and that she's gotten the same people are all disney disney it's like you can't win people just want to be outraged yeah man that's that's what it's about which is incentivizing from like the meme world and uh and from this content generating world because you can use that as your tool to sell and you can use that as your tool to incentivize and it's interesting because most major companies like you probably pointed out don't they don't give a no they already own it no no like do you really think bank of america gives a if they change their logo to the gay flag like they don't care they're doing it to get shares yeah yeah they don't give a flying and i think that's the intriguing part though is they're not using it and they don't realize that the ammo that they're giving other people to sort of come up and like and scope around yeah so it's and then it becomes and it becomes a pandering contest because if you don't like even if you support lgbtq and you've donated for years and everything now you have to change your profile picture or else you're a bigot and it's like yeah it's you know it's just a profile picture but it's the fact that now you have to you have to make that choice it's no longer an option you have to verbalize that kind of support instead of just being genuine yeah no it's totally true you know this is the i went through a crazy sort of period over the last couple of years my wife was a late wife was diagnosed with uh brain cancer so she she passed away just about two years ago now and she are just a little under but she uh she in this time period i you know all this stuff is coming up on the internet we're hyper focused in this world of sort of trying to like incentivize the growth of this business and really figure out where it's going and uh and i didn't realize how much effort was being put into the infrastructure of these like gofundme efforts and uh you know i was paying rent here as you know keeping this business business under tact air intact and then i had to fly out to arizona where she was going to motorcycle mechanics school to pay for like uh you know her rent that where she was living her school bills on top of this like healthcare sort of stationary spot where we were um it was like a cancer center basically and uh that's like five rents and i was like what the but i didn't even say a word somebody put together a gofundme and i was like jesus christ like finally i can i mean this is weird i don't understand it and it scares the out of me that people give a um but it totally changed my perspective on that like whatever incentivizes people to help

2:10:31 people you know it's it's much more than just like that go feel good video you know it's it's there's something else there and we're developing these really cool sort of basis for them and uh like we wouldn't not made it out of that without an incredible amount of debt if it wasn't for some random friend of ours and i don't mean random in a bad way but just a person to just do it you know it's made me you know donate to like random amounts of stuff and sort of sacrifice my surplus to make sure i'm doing something else good yeah and uh i think more and more people are working in that fashion and realizing there's this explosion of people that support one another's businesses and and downfalls and up fall or you know up sweeps in in a very like communal way yeah and it's it's incredible to see you know it's really cool yeah absolutely and i think a lot of uh subscription-based services a lot of especially in small businesses um they capitalize on that because it establishes a human connection and when you when you look at most of these services they're you know between 5 and 20 bucks a month so it's like yeah it's like someone's saying hey look at this these services that i provide to you and you know if you want to buy me like a beer and a burger like it's you know 12 bucks a month to you know continue with whatever um it's literally lizard man at the tattoo conventions back in the day it just says jar with beer money yeah you know he's just like just keep me drinking and going you know you're like sweet yeah i don't think people realize how much that means to like the generation that's using things like patreon yeah it's incredible man i mean just to hear the patreon story in general and understand that like half of the co-four one of the co-founders there was making like you know half a million dollars a year on itunes downloads alone and then all of a sudden it got swept out from under him by spotify and patreon was merely a reaction to that was like how amazing is that yeah yeah it's incredible not that spotify is this big demonic whatever because they actually pay their artists more than pandora or youtube yeah so it's most definitely yeah it's always interesting to me to see uh when ethics come into play uh with capitalism and the small businesses always find a way to just to just come through um they do man yeah i don't know if there's just more heart in it or what but they do come through well it's it's the i think it goes back to what we were talking about before with their they see a niche they see a hole that needs to be filled you know some kind of a problem that nobody has bothered to solve yet um like a centralized platform for donating to your favorite artists right yeah it's incredible man i still yeah it's it's it's weird to like participate in that world now having not for a long time and just know that it's out there and people put it out there and you're like if you really do enjoy that content why the hell wouldn't you like donate to npr why the hell wouldn't you like do these yeah it's like so maybe it's just age and maturity but at the same time when you're directly affected by it you're like why wouldn't i this is rad you know yeah it's pretty cool yeah and it's it's a lot a lot of it comes down to uh disposable income in today's age and you know there's people who you know they'll they'll have that five bucks a month and they'll go you know buy you know tacos or something with it but it's yeah it's five bucks it's yeah you can yeah you can get a couple of tacos or you can commit to something that you love and make sure that it lasts longer yeah and you're getting something in return you're not just like donating money to starving kids in africa you don't yeah yeah it's not like some random political party that you know you get in now you're on their email list and the only thing you bought is spam yeah yeah exactly yeah that's perfect man it's perfect well is this stuff um i guess or is something else motivating you to keep pushing into this industry is there is there something there that you're like just stoked to be able to offer in general as you sort of go forward well the decentralized nature of mycology is something that really speaks to me um the fact that in as you mentioned texas fungi and that's it as far as companies in dfw and dallas fort worth who supply different uh you know mycological needs so that's one that's one factor that wants me to uh that's causing me to try and try and push out try and grow this uh but the other thing is we've had unicorn has seen an almost 90 percent increase in sales uh this year that's incredible so there's there's so much room for growth um that i'm just like i would really like to harness that energy in some way and yeah yeah you can call it you know uh selfish or whatever yeah i would like to expand this contract and make more money but sure that is dependent on

2:15:31 making sure that the company is better you know adding value to the community proving that there's there's worth beyond uh the current contract um it makes a ton of sense yeah and that goes back down to small businesses uh in general because i'm not the only person who's trying to perfect to get a better contract that's the nature of the small business owner um ever since i was little i was always been a fan of the sort of jeffersonian idea of america as a nation of small business owners and artisan craftsmen and yeah that's that's something i would really like to contribute to that's cool man well it's admirable and you know i appreciate the people like you're out there doing it talking about it and expanding upon it so keep at it yeah i really appreciate the opportunity to come on here and talk about this yeah no anytime man if you're up for it again we'll we'll make another time we'll have another crazy conversation yeah man that sounds good awesome for it thank you garrett i appreciate the out of it and uh yeah until next time i guess very welcoming yeah thanks man thanks so much for listening to the show this week you can follow or subscribe to micah wizards wherever you go for your podcast write to us at p.o box 897 in gardiner maine because i sure as do love that old school snail mail and if you want to follow us head on over to instagram and find us at michael wizards podcast or at main cap and stemco this episode was produced and sponsored by mancap and stem mushroom company head on over to Cap N Stem.com for certified organic substrate or spawn for all your mycological needs and until next time later you