Meta Targets The Myco Community

What’s the difference between a Reishi and a Psilocybe mushroom?

If you’re an AI censor 🤖, apparently there is no difference.

A recent algorithm update (among other factors) has seen a sweep of myco community accounts on Instagram in the last few weeks - numerous people have been affected, and those who remain are subject to heightened scrutiny around the language they use and their ability to promote legitimate interests and educational material. Even the functional mushroom purveyors are getting taken down as the AI censors seem to be unable to distinguish between different types of mushroom photos or content in general.

This has actually proven dangerous recently on more than one occasion as AI has misidentified or misrepresented wild mushrooms as a response to people’s queries - in one egregious instance from 2024, the Google Gemini AI app misidentified a deadly Destroying Angel as an edible Button Mushroom.

Mycopreneur friends and collaborators Fruiting Bodies, Moms On Mushrooms, Mikaela de la Myco, Fungstrate, Enchanted Farms Mushrooms, Mush Maps, Studiodelic, and many more have been impacted by the recent seemingly indiscriminate censorship and bans across Meta platforms such that SSDP (Students For Sensible Drug Policy) have penned an open letter to Meta and racked up 81 organizational co-signers from a dozen countries asking for Meta to stop censoring this community.

Meta platforms have played an invaluable role in connecting citizen mycologists all over the world, and now the community that benefitted so much from the platform is being targeted and systematically removed under the pretenses of vaguely outlined and arbitrarily enforced “Community Guidelines Violations”.

We wouldn’t want people sharing intel about substances that are clinically proven to extend cellular lifespan and improves survival (in mice, but hey, seems like a good start to me)

Guess what’s not censored though 👀 ?

The Mycopreneur Newsletter! Shoutout to Spore Daddy - these are some of his products shown above. He just quit his 9-5 job to go full-time into being a mycopreneur and he’s my guest on the forthcoming Mycopreneur Podcast due out this Friday. Show him some love and tap in with him on TikTok (@thesporedaddy) and IG (@thesporedaddy)

Shoutout to The Fungivore for sponsoring this week’s Mycopreneur Newsletter. They lead mushroom expeditions to remote and untouristy (is that a word? It is now) parts of Mexico and they have several nearly sold out trips coming up in August and September. I’ll be present for at least part of the MycoChiapas trip September 24 - October 2.

Did anyone catch Paul Stamets on Joe Rogan this past week? I’ve been meaning to check it out.

True story: Paul’s team contacted me to do a podcast in person with him in England when we were both at Breaking Convention 2023. When he got to the room we arranged to record in he told me he was burnt out from doing back to back interviews and he needed to go back to his hotel and rest. I saw him at the afterparty later that night in a 400 year old underground bar and had a chance to talk with him one on one for a good stretch. We discussed astromycology - I told him I tried to buy the domain www.astromycology.com in 2021 but it was unavailable and to this day there’s nothing linked to the domain. We also discussed puppets and probably a few other things. I’ve met him several other times but that was the most Stamets time I’ve ever gotten in.

This weekend marks the second edition of Yuy Fest, the biennial mushroom festival in the town of San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas.

“Yuy” means ‘Amanita’ in Tsotsil, an Indigenous Mayan language native to the highlands of Chiapas. This years Yuy Fest is dedicated to the mysterious ‘Yuy Chuk’ or Amanita muscaria mushroom. A legend among the people in this region associates Amanita muscaria with lightning strikes, and the Lacandon people of the nearby Lacandon Jungles also have a legend that poisonous snakes get their venom from Amanita muscaria after the mushrooms arrive by lightning. As such, historically whenever a resident of the community was bitten by the dead Fer-de-lance snake (pit viper), the bite went untreated because it was viewed as a message from the Gods. Snake bites were actually the leading cause of death besides old age for men in the Lacandon community of Naha until the late 1970’s, but thankfully that distinction has dwindled with the evolution of the culture.

Speaking of Amanita muscaria…have you tried it yet? I’m a former skeptic who has had great experiences thanks to the advocacy and quality sourcing of Minnesota Nice Ethnbotanicals. Highly recommend, check them out below.

There are quite a few distinguished mycopreneurs and academics involved in this myco celebration, including the leading expert on Chiapanecan fungi Dr. Felipe Ruan Soto, Dr. Marisa Ordaz, regular Mycopreneur contributor Ezequiel Cruz of Fungaria, The Fungivore founders Zach Hunter and Kim Williams-Hunter, and dozens of other regional experts on ethnomycology, myco gastronomy, mycopreneurship, cultivation, and various other considerations pertaining to fungi in Chiapas.

Check out the full itinerary at the Aleacion Fun website. And while you’re at it, give them a follow on Instagram (@fun.aleacion). They are truly delightful and highly intelligent people as well as diligent mycopreneurs.

Here’s a photo of the festival organizers with a random gringo tucked in second from left.

The first Yuy Fest wild mushroom foraging expedition actually kicks off today, so I wrote this newsletter last night since I’m out foraging for mushrooms in the forest with a great group of mycophiles right now. I’ll be back well ahead of the Mycopreneur Incubator today.

Mycopreneur Incubator

Time: Thursday, Jul 17, 3:00 PM East Coast U.S. / 12:00 PM West Coast U.S.

Here’s the link to the Incubator:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84767360844?pwd=sfhyLaoHMk3oRCoFwaR8E0BiK3g4PF.1

Meeting ID: 847 6736 0844

Passcode: 034513

Please consider making a financial contribution in the amount of your choice if you plan on attending the Incubato, have attended in the past and benefitted from the service, or want to tangibly support the Mycopreneur Newsletter and platform as it remains a free and consistent resource for the global mushroom entrepreneurial community:

Thanks for reading the Mycopreneur Newsletter, and see you at the Incubator today

DW