Welcome to the Mycopreneur Newsletter - Your Guide to the Global Mushroom News Cycle.

Read on for your invitation to today’s Mycopreneur Incubator, a free online mentorship and networking event for mushroom entrepreneurs.

“Mushroom foraging is taking over Chinese social media, with young fungi fans posting their finds and competition for the rarest kinds fierce”

Chinese social media users are foraging and posting their fungi finds to platforms like Xiaohongshu, China’s ‘answer to Instagram’.

Foragers are posting images of Morels, black tiger palm mushrooms, milk-caps, blackening brittlegill, termite mushrooms and matsutake among other wild foraged species, with the crown jewel of finds reported to be the Jian Shou Qing (见手青)

The Jian Shou Qing mushrooms, scientifically known as Lanmaoa asiatica, are a group of Boletes that bruise heavily blue when cutting into them (see image above) - which are purported to cause ‘Hallucinations’ and facilitate encounters with ‘Little People’. Yes, these are the same mushrooms that U.S. Secretrary of the Treasury Janet Yellen reportedly ate on her recent state visit to Yunnan Province, prompting a deluge of headlines around the world declaring “Janet Yellen Ate Magic Mushrooms” (Actual Washington Post Headline).

The hashtag #Jianshouqing has racked up over 140 million views on Xiaohongshu and more than 1.83 billion views on Douyin.

The viral craze has driven the development of products designed around this enchanting ‘magic bolete’ , though just like the recent controversies in the U.S. regarding mislabeled mushroom products - the Jian Shou Qing flavored beer and ice cream shown above may only contain flavors meant to approximate the mushroom taste, not the actual mushroom. If it’s an encounter wit hthe ‘little people’ you’re after, probably best to source your Jian Shou Qing from the wild and not from Alibaba. And don’t forget to post a pic on your feed when you find one!

More Mushrooms in the news this week: 

Mushrooms are the Darling of Sustainability (Washington Post)

This article touches on a lot of the core thesis that Mycopreneur was built around - that mushrooms touch every imaginable vertical of the sustainable design and development world and that the future belongs to entrepreneurs and businesses who recognize and intelligently leverage this potential. The article covers mycelium foods, materials and manufacturing, mycoremediation, fungi as organic fertilizer, and more.

The article projects the ‘ $56 billion global mushroom market’ (overly broad framing, but in context it seems they’re referring to Button Mushrooms, Cremini, Lion’s Mane, etc. - culinary mushrooms) to be valued at $136 billion by 2032.

I was particularly interested to read this extraordinary statement from Ecovative Co-Founder Eben Bayer regarding the scope of their operation

Interestingly, the hyperlink embedded in the ‘$1 Trillion’ text links to an Error 404 Message - because damn that is a staggering number and I’d personally love to learn more about this assertion.

Shoutout to MycoWorks Co-Founder Phil Ross - an attendee at last week’s Mycopreneur Incubator - for his feature in this article.

The Fate of Magic Mushrooms in California is Unclear: Some Wellness Businesses are Using Them Anyway.

My thoughts on this piece:

Journalist Michelle Lhooq wrote an exceptional piece for the Los Angeles Times this week chronicling the ‘above ground psychedelic underground’ in Los Angeles.

Psilocybin mushrooms are federally illegal in the U.S. & at the state level in California, yet there are increasingly public, professional, & quality brands producing lab tested mushroom products & bespoke experiences in numerous cities across the U.S. This article cites a ‘herd mentality’ - “Safety in numbers”

The only route to access that federal regulators seem to be interested in potentially validating will likely come in the form of pharmaceuticalized psilocybin grounded in a clinical framework - there could perhaps be a carve out for Microdosing as we’ve seen with some studies in Australia. 

Cannabis is still federally illegal, but three dispensaries have recently opened up in the conservative middle class area I grew up in and there’s a legal market in 15 states. 

Rather than outright cede control over a legal mushroom market to a government monopoly, as has been proposed in a recent RAND report, perhaps a ‘membership model’ similar but not identical to the mushroom churches we see popping up all over is a viable regulatory option; most of the legitimate underground brands and experiences already operate this way on a referral and vetting process anyways. You apply to join a club, have access to community & education, are accountable to the community, and can have your membership / access revoked in the event of bad faith actions. 

I’m also definitely a cognitive libertarian and fundamentally support decrim but that’s a different conversation than regulated access and a marketplace from my perspective. 

Any way you slice it, the mushroom genie’s not going back in the bottle and it’s great to see people who are deeply embedded in the culture of psychedelics publishing their work in the LA Times.

Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Getting Much, Much Stronger

Moving along, as of 4 hours ago, Wired has published an article titled “Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Getting Much, Much Stronger” (linked below) - I was quoted in this article, as was Mycopreneur Incubator attendee and potency testing pioneer Ian Bollinger of the Center For Mycological Analytics

What have you noticed in terms of the increased potency of strains available on the market?

The invite for today’s Mycopreneur Incubator is here:

Topic: Mycopreneur Incubator

Time: Oct 10, 2024 04:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83050825335?pwd=SYASrUKj3Nvjwvt0IDjLjbmySWTowM.1

Meeting ID: 830 5082 5335

Passcode: 636487

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See y’all at the Incubator!

DW