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Mushrooms Uncensored

Mushrooms Uncensored

Myco Beyond Meta

Mycopreneur Incubator
October 17, 2024

Welcome to the Mycopreneur Incubator Newsletter, a weekly round up of news from the mushroom universe. The invitation to today’s Mycopreneur Incubator is at the bottom of this newsletter.

A wave of bans and increased censorship has been sweeping across the mushroom and cannabis communities on Meta platforms. Moms On Mushrooms, a popular microdosing and mushroom education community with numerous mainstream media appearances, has been taken down, as has the 100K follower + Psychedelics.com page, the Third Wave page, and Basidium Equilibrium among countless others.

The propensity for Meta and TikTok to censor mushroom related content - even when it is in full compliance with all international laws - is nothing new, but the scale and intensity of the censorship is unprecedented.

This issue is uber familiar to me as I had my 25k follower original Mycopreneur IG page permanently banned with zero warnings last year, despite being a satirical page with no pictures of fruit or anything for sale. Rolling Stone published an article about it:

Psychedelic Censorship: Let Mushroom Educators Have Their Say

For legal small businesses, advocates and educators in the psychedelic or cannabis space, losing your social media account is common.

www.rollingstone.com/culture-council/articles/psychedelic-censorship-mushroom-educators-have-their-say-1234954255

The conversation about moving to alternative platforms where information and education can be freely exchanged has started to pick up serious momentum, with a number of devoted advocates in the space contacting me about how we might make that happen.

Solution: More in person events, like the wildly successful Oklahoma Mushroom Festival last week - and more podcasts, newsletters, and online incubators.

Mycopreneur.com is going through a much needed overhaul in the next few weeks - offering another outlet for uncensored news and independent journalism beyond the scope of the increasingly mycophobic Meta guidelines.

The fact of the matter that is if it wasn’t for the ‘digital town square’ facilitated by social media, a lot of us advocates and activists would not have been able to connect and build community the way we did - galvanizing from online friendships to IRL connections and mushroom events across the world.

The great irony of the censorship and bans that Meta in particular is enforcing is that it was the social media behemoth itself that significantly facilitated the communities it’s actively trying to stamp out.

Mushrooms in the news: This is a WILD story out of the U.S. -

Robert Shumake Japhia, AKA ‘Shaman Bobby Schu’, has been arrested in an alleged pump and dump stock scheme based around a psilocybin company he controlled called ‘Minerco’.

Mastermind of Multimillion-Dollar Penny-Stock Scam Indicted for Fraud and Obstruction

A federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment yesterday charging a Michigan man with defrauding investors in Minerco Inc. (stock ticker MINE) — leading to millions of dollars in investor losses — as well as obstructing a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proceeding by destroying evidence.

www.justice.gov/opa/pr/mastermind-multimillion-dollar-penny-stock-scam-indicted-fraud-and-obstruction

Shu’s co-defendant in the case Julian Jenge was arrested in late August trying to board a one-way flight to Tanzania on the same day that a federal complaint was unsealed charging him with securities fraud.

The Minerco company allegedly defrauded investors by falsely inflating their position and value during the height of the ‘Shroom Boom’ stock bonanza in 2021, raising the trading share of the company from $.0001 per share to $.016 per share - and pocketing over $8 million in the process.

Minerco falsely informed investors that they had been acquired by a ‘specialized investment firm’ and leveraged press releases to make their company appear legitimate and well-positioned in the ‘psychedelic renaissance’.

An interesting aside - Bobby Shu requested multiple times to be on Mycopreneur Podcast in 2021 or 2022, and I declined for one reason or another. Generally if I don’t personally have a connection to an individual or have community ties to their company, I’m less inclined to to do a podcast with them unless they’re a well-known public figure.

Speaking of community, I’m stoked to be emceeing the 2nd Colorado Psychedelic Cup awards ceremony on November 2nd in Denver, Colorado. This cup is testing several categories of ‘Natural Psychedelic Substances’, moving beyond psilocybin and exotic mushrooms to test DMT and mescaline containing products produced legally under the regulatory framework provided by Proposition 122 in Colorado. Tickets can be found here: https://pcodenver.com/cup/

This event will have the focused attention of many major players in the psychedelic space, as well as press coverage - they’re actively looking for sponsors to help recoup the considerable costs of renting a major venue, insurance, paying speakers, etc. If sponsorship is something you’d be interested in, hit me up and I’ll connect you to the leadership team.