July 2, 2025 • 59 mins
In this episode of Resilience Gone Wild, host Jessica Morgenthal speaks with fungi enthusiast and circular economy advocate Mark Violo about the hidden potential of fungi across multiple sectors. From agriculture and pest control to sustainable materials and healthcare, Mark unpacks the extraordinary power of fungi and the vital role of mycelium networks in plant communication. He shares his personal journey into mycology in China, India and across the globe and emphasizes how storytelling can shift cultural attitudes and drive innovation in fungal science. This conversation explores the circular economy as a blueprint for sustainable living, the need for greater conservation efforts, and how policy must evolve to support fungal research. If you’ve ever been curious about the future of mushrooms beyond the dinner plate, this episode is for you.
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(00:04):
Yay. I'm so thrilled to be here with
Mark Violo, who I have not known for
that long, but I am super inspired
and so excited to bring this third f
of my flora, fauna,
fungi
phenomenon, and forces
to Resilience Gone Wild in in, like, this
beautiful depth and super
(00:26):
creative, intriguing,
business oriented,
and art oriented. Anyway, so let's get to
chatting with Mark. He is
the creator and leader of Myco Stories, and
this is where we're gonna go with this.
So tell us about yourself, Mark.
Hey, guys. Thanks for having me, Jessica.
Love that you're
(00:46):
differentiating
plants and fungi because a lot of people
put both of these in the bag and
there's a lot of work being done at
the moment
to, you know, put back, give a bit
more credit to fungi as an individual living
kingdom. And, that's a little bit what we're
trying to do as well at Myco Stories,
effectively helping
(01:07):
all of the incredible
applications of fungi, which is an incredibly diverse
living kingdom over
2.5
estimated billion species. That's almost 10 times
as more as we estimate
plants to have. Stop. Like, we have like,
just to process that. Right? Like, we have
lumped the ignorance, right, of lumping all fungi
(01:29):
into
plant species when there's billions times more. It's
just so interesting. Like, we need to separate
this and really focus on it and really
embrace
the zillions of of benefits
to having fungi more intentionally in our lives.
Okay. Go for it.
No. No. That's right. And I I I
love the enthusiasm.
Actually, you know, most people think of fungi
(01:52):
or mushrooms as, you know, this popping living
organism that you find on tree stumps in
the soil in your grasslands.
But that's just really one family of
mushrooms. But the biggest variety really comes in
all shapes and forms from microscopic fungi that
live in your gut, from
(02:12):
other
species that live in the roots of plants
and and so forth. But,
there's a lot of mycology experts that are
far greater than myself to to talk about
all this, but I wanted to support in
my own way. My background
is a mix of business and circular economy,
so tech and circular economy, if I can
(02:32):
summarize it that way. And,
what I've learned over the twenty years of
my career is effectively
to focus on tangible solutions,
ideally,
that are nature based
in order to change our economies for the
better. Because if you look for solutions in
nature,
they're most likely gonna be more integrated,
(02:55):
will have better externalities
once implemented.
And so what's really interesting is Well, I
mean, I think you're talking systems based. Right?
Like, if you go to nature, you can't
just pick one tiny little bit of a
system. It's all the interconnection.
The diversity of a system is so key
and this the symbiosis
(03:15):
of, I think, all fungi, I I assume.
And it's it's just such an enormous part
of it that
we need to be able to think about
and to process the complexity.
Yeah. I mean, we're going a bit in
a tangent, but I'll give you a very
simple example. Right? If you look at modern
agriculture today, we're using mostly
(03:35):
petrochemical
based derived
herbicides,
fertilizers.
Yeah? So what we're putting in the ground
is not used to being in that ground.
Right? So naturally, it's not necessarily gonna be
integrated very well by those ecosystems.
Well, if we look at fungi
who are incredible
(03:56):
enzyme manufacturers
to develop
these fertilizers or herbicides,
well, then we're leveraging
what is already in the ground and using
that to
bio stimulate
the crops. And so naturally, the externalities,
the reintegration
of such product in the ground is gonna
be much much better for ecosystems.
(04:17):
Yeah. I have to give our audience a
a warning because this whole topic of fungi
is so complex
and so interesting and so broad. Right? Like,
you already said there's zillions of different species
of fungi that, you know, I just wanna
put it out there that we're gonna bounce
around because we just I just wanna bring
up, and and you're like the perfect person
to do this with, all the different applications.
(04:39):
And it's so and integrated pest management
is some part of where you're going with
this small bit, which is only a small
part of the brilliance
of the contribution that fungi and the resilience
of fungi offer in terms of making the
world better and in terms of our learning
for resilience for ourselves, like how much we
can learn from them. And I was just
thinking, which is not related at all, but
(05:02):
that my world stepping into nature and integrated
pest management was I'm gonna put it out
there that in
'85,
I worked for Ralph Nader
for the summer writing articles about integrated pest
management. And the it was a long like,
it was relatively a long time ago, early
in this conversation,
and I get super lit up even going
(05:23):
in that direction. So thank you for bringing
that up, and keep going down that and
many other paths because this is gonna be
a great conversation. So I'll keep the intro
short so we can get into the thick
of it. But, yeah, effectively
set up a
international
platform
which helps to support
all the innovators in the space of fungal
biotechnologies.
(05:44):
And what that means is solutions
derived from fungal
processes in the space of
food,
health, drug development,
health supplements, in the space of biomaterials
to replace packaging or to replace animal based
leather, for example, or polluting construction materials,
(06:04):
but also in the space of what I
call soil, which is everything linked to agriculture,
forestry management, carbon sequestration projects. And, and there's
many other fields out there, but to sum
it up, I like to divide it in
those four fields. And so we support
startups, entrepreneurs.
We support investors to try and match make
them with these startups. We work with larger
(06:27):
industry groups who are starting to think and
invest heavily into nature based solutions because market
demands it, because customers demand demand it. And
because it's it's a good economic decision.
Long term good economic decision. It needs to
be because sustainability
is no longer the driving vector. It was
(06:47):
maybe for ten, twenty years, but macroeconomic
context has made
that big businesses are kind of shifting back
to the bottom line is what matters first
and foremost.
And if there's sustainability
benefits added to that, okay. But, you know,
the bottom line
is it needs to be an economic competitive
(07:08):
advantage first and foremost. So, yeah, that's what
we've been doing for the last three years.
We've worked with, probably over 50 organizations
in the four continents of this planet, and,
there's,
way, way more to do.
Okay. What a great intro. What a great
start. We don't know anything about you yet,
though, and you are one interesting person. So
(07:29):
that was just the last three years of
what you've been working on. Can you give
us what where how why fungi?
How did you get here? Like, what lights
you up? Why are we in this conversation?
Yeah. So I'm French originally. I was lucky
to live abroad,
growing up, Lived in The States, lived in
Germany and Belgium.
Lost my French accent along the way.
(07:52):
Studied business. Still a little tiny bit of
that beautiful French accent. That's right. So you
got a little enough.
Little,
tidbits of it. Yeah. I, studied business because
I didn't know what I wanted to do.
Had the opportunity
of learning where business is is done,
in the most exciting way in India. So
(08:12):
I did my master's in New Delhi. I
then had the opportunity of,
doing my first job in China, in Shanghai.
So I I went to to China in
02/2008,
worked for the largest
Chinese tech tech company called Tencent, known for
one of its main product called WeChat, and
got to learn Mandarin,
got to really immerse myself in Asian culture.
(08:35):
And I think I
discovered
the quite interesting nature of
fungi when I was there,
because
they're a ubiquitous
part of traditional Chinese medicine. So if you
go on market stalls
across China, you'll find really weird looking structures,
which
from a Western point of view, you will
(08:57):
not assimilate to mushrooms.
But actually,
these funny looking mushrooms called reishi, which have,
over a thousand years of use in traditional
Chinese medicine,
are there. They're sold in powders. They're also
sold as beautiful
sculptures that,
wealthy Chinese families put in their homes.
(09:18):
And, so that got me interested. Then I
went off to live in Singapore, set up
an innovation agency there, funded by the Singapore
government. But I was far from home, so
I decided to move back with my wife
to The UK in London where we're currently
based and, to try and and kind of
capitalize on all this this knowledge, that was
(09:38):
mostly
profit driven. You know, I was working for
tech companies and for
large,
companies and to try
and see what could happen if I honed
that knowledge
and,
focused on supporting circular economy initiatives.
And, and that was what led me to
start discovering
(09:59):
the
incredible and diverse
world of fungal
biotech or fungal solutions,
of which I named a couple already.
And, and, yeah,
Because I'm a very kind of tangible, action
focused person, the first thing that I did
when I started to read about the topic
was I wanna I wanna talk. I wanna
(10:21):
meet just like you, Jessica, with all the
people who are really driving the space. I
didn't record a podcast, but, these were personal,
short conversations where I tried to understand
what are these people doing,
what are challenges that they're facing,
and, how could I be of service?
And so on the back of over a
(10:42):
100 conversations
over a couple of years,
I realized that all of these people were
facing three main challenges. The first one was,
how do I raise funding
to,
you know, bring these small pilot scale Yeah.
Solutions to to life and to deliver some
real impact?
How do I scale? It's great to do
(11:03):
a little experiment in my garage or in
my lab,
but actually there's no impact or there's no
business model if you don't get to a
certain scale. But when you're when you're working
with a living organism,
it'll come with a bunch of challenges to
scale production. But thankfully, there's a lot of
people who've done this before, so maybe we
(11:24):
can learn from them. And the last one
is something that you've dedicated the last couple
of years of your life doing is education.
Most people have no idea what fungi, mushrooms,
mycelium
really are, what they do, their role in
the evolution of our ecosystems over time, their
role in our, microbiome.
And the reason why I decided to dedicate
(11:45):
my life to them is because I got
so blown away when I discovered
the amount that they are responsible of.
I was like, look, I'm not a conspiracy
theorist, but there's something there. Like, why haven't
I not been taught anything
about this living kingdom before? And so, yeah,
(12:06):
I kind of decided to
dedicate
a large chunk of my life to them.
Amazing. It's it's those moments that it was
like when but when I was
talking to people about parrot fish and and
I learned the story of a parrot fish
creating a bubble to protect its sleep, that
it was like this just one of the
huge moments that was like, this is what
(12:28):
I needed to be doing to, like,
offering these stories up so that we can
use them for metaphor. I mean, there's just,
like, these moments. And you had this, like,
starting in Shanghai
with this this, like, wow. This is not
the mushroom I knew.
This is not as simple. And to like
this,
like, wow, mind blowing. This is so big.
(12:50):
Why is this is this under the radar?
Like, how do we not know and appreciate
the opportunity?
I don't think I've ever given an explanation
for circular economy, which I think is really,
really important. Like, I try to get into
regenerative, and that's kind of complex also. But
just give us a quick
circular economy. It was where you went with
this to, like, in your in your brain,
(13:11):
I think. Like, you know, these are some
of the imagery is around this circular aspect.
So give us a quick one. Yeah.
So I think since the dawn of civilized
times,
so give or take ten thousand years, we've
lived in a world of abundance and where
we had a lot of land, a lot
of resources. And so
we were never really thinking about how to
(13:32):
optimize when we use this land and resources.
So it kind of led to a
production and consumption and disposal
model model that was very linear, you know,
make,
consume,
dispose. And we realized
as population
really grew to the numbers that they are
today and resources
(13:52):
became
scarcer,
that
actually this model has a lot of externalities
which are negative to our human health and
negative to the ecosystems in which we live
in.
And so a lot of people started thinking
maybe this linear
system doesn't work because we're just accumulating
(14:15):
these ridiculous
volumes of waste. We're wasting 30% of the
food that we produce. We're changing and buying
new clothes
seasonally, but we don't have a proper recycling
model for clothing or
most complex plastics that we've developed in the
twentieth century.
And so
(14:35):
the concept of circular economy is
when you design a product,
you think about the whole life cycle of
the product that you're designing, which means that
ideally you're using materials that once produced,
you can
ideally repair.
So you can Well, the 10 r's. The
(14:56):
the 10 r's are great. The ten, fifteen.
Let's let's you know? Yeah. And so, yeah,
you wanna try and repair. You wanna extend
its life because it means you won't need
to produce it again.
And then eventually everything runs its course. The,
you know, the product will won't be repairable
anymore. So how do you reintegrate
it back into its own supply chain or
(15:18):
ideally another supply chain? So, yeah, to keep
it simple as, you know, how do you
get the the life cycle as circular as
possible in everything
that you design or that you produce?
Yeah. I mean, right now, if you just
use those three, the make, consume, waste,
the volume of all three of those. We're
(15:39):
making too much,
which the step before that, the extraction
of of raw materials that go into, right,
like, into the making.
We're using too much of that. We're making
too much. We're consuming too much.
Much of the world, not all of the
world, but some of the world is consuming
too little. And we're just disposing of it
and then disregarding it. Right? We are pretending
(16:00):
that you can just throw stuff out and
it will disappear. And this whole circle versus
linear is just the key to everything. And
I try to, like, think of a really
accessible example, you know, and what popped in
my head. And I'm not sure if you've
got one that's
that works that you've tested and and makes
sense in terms of the story better. But
(16:21):
I'm just thinking about cooking dinner. Right? Like,
you're making dinner for your family and you
think about the input. So you go
to the supermarket and you have and your
refrigerator is full of all this stuff, and
your pantry is full of all this stuff
and all the inputs, and and you don't
think about where any of them actually come
from. So you've started with this
pretend basket
that has no origin. So there's no circle
(16:42):
there. Right? It's just the first point of
extraction.
And then you make something and then
you potentially consume way too much of it
or not. But there's gonna be waste. Right?
There's going to be waste in the stuff
that you left behind when you were preparing
it, and there's waste in the extra food.
And then you just throw it out. Right?
Like,
it doesn't work. Like, you know, just to
bring it down to really understanding
(17:03):
the tangibility
of life. It is all about that cycle.
So give us what what's coming to you
when you think of of my little example,
what's coming to mind?
Yeah. I'd I'd add to what you said
that even before it gets to the consumer,
there's
(17:23):
the
industrial
manufacturer
of your ketchup, for example, who's only gonna
use, let's say, forty, fifty percent of the
tomato and it's going to get rid of
the skins, it's going to get rid of
the seeds,
and then it's going to add a variety
of other products. Some of them, you know,
(17:45):
will have to be manufactured, not necessarily issued
from a,
kind of a recycling process. And so you
can already
think in terms of circularity
at this stage where, well, what could we
do with the seeds and the skins that
are being wasted at at this stage, right?
And there's a fantastic
(18:06):
organization
in the South Of France that is doing
exactly that. It's
working with tomato
processors, the largest in Europe, and it's creating
a fermented product that adds texture
and taste from seeds and skins of tomato,
and it's selling it back
to the tomato
(18:28):
manufacturer
for it to, you know, really try and
embrace that circularity. And on top of that,
you know, give,
new nutritional
or new flavoring profiles to the products that
they're manufacturing.
Yeah. We're throwing out the stuff that has
all the nutrition in it. Right? The skins,
the seeds, all of it. Anyway okay. So
I took you totally off. Thank you so
(18:48):
much. I think that was really important to,
like, have that new vocabulary for a lot
of people and to really understand it. So
thank you. We can come back to it
when it comes to micro micro stories and
and the work you're doing with fungi.
So stories, I wanna take you so we've
sort of touched on what lit you up
about fungi. What about the stories? Like, you
we we talked about this for a bit
before we got on, but I'm obsessed with
(19:09):
stories. Stories are what people remember. Stories are
what people connect to, not as opposed to
the facts and the question of truth and
whatever. So go down the story path. Tell
us about stories.
We can even go back before the dawn
of civilization.
Right? The things that have connected human beings,
for millions of years is the capacity for
(19:31):
ourselves to tell each other stories. Right? That's
what unites us. That's
what is at the origin of shared culture.
And I think,
that's the best testament to the importance of
stories
to get messages across important messages across. So
when I started MycoStories,
myself not being
a scientist
(19:51):
or a biologist or a mycologist,
you know, what I thought was really important
to help
to,
I guess, carry across
the important messages and what we can learn
from
fungi as a microorganism,
but also the very tangible applications
of fungi
are through accessible stories that talk about
(20:13):
people. You know?
People need to hear about people. That's why
we anthropomorphize
everything. We like to, you know, relate to
human emotions and the challenges of setting up
a company, the successes of publishing a research
paper. So focusing on people, focusing on tangible
solutions because people relate
(20:34):
to things that impact their direct life. So
if we talk about, you know, how we
can,
make the food system more resilient,
people will be like, oh, yeah, well, that's
that's important for my
kids' future and so forth.
And then
really importantly,
(20:55):
make stories
understandable.
And because I don't have that scientific background,
I was the first one to really feel
ill at ease when I was
trying to read through research papers or tried
to read complex
pitch decks from startups that were, you know,
gonna revolutionize
(21:16):
the drug discovery
industry. But, you know, I was reading through
this and, oh my lord, it was impossible
for me to really grasp all of it.
And so I thought that if we tried
to popularize
these stories, make them relatable,
and ideally have
elements of call to action. How can I
(21:38):
participate? What are these people looking for? What
do they need in order to fulfill and
follow-up on the initial work that is being
done. We would, render great service
to a microorganism
and an innovation space that has a huge
potential
for disruption
and improvement
(21:58):
of the society we live in. Yeah. I
mean, you've brought together this combination between the
science and the business aspect and made it
all accessible
through story,
which is a beautiful space to be in
because we need to be able to connect
to fungi,
to this massive network, and we don't have
an entry
point. Right? Like, all we have is these
(22:19):
mushrooms. So giving us this new vocabulary of
and stories. Thank you. Like, huge. Thank you
so much. And
and supporting and inspiring and helping small companies
that are taking this natural
cycle of life forward and replacing
nature, replacing the oil and the plastics and
(22:40):
and all the rest of the stuff that's
damaging our society and replacing it with something
natural is just such a gift. So thank
you. Okay. So we've got stories. We've got
the whole sort of the fungi starter point,
circular
economy starter point. Let's just go to something
fun. Like,
tell us about what
you were blown away by that you learned,
(23:00):
like, going from I mean, you told us
a little bit about seeing this new looking
stuff in the Shanghai markets. But, like, give
us a couple of fun stories about
when you discovered that this was fungi
and that it was
something else, that it could be made into
something else that mattered. So what comes to
mind? Some of your incubators or?
(23:21):
Yep.
So many examples. I surprised myself that after,
you know, three years of having launched this
project,
probably
six years of having done research in this
space, Every week, I still discover something new.
I'll just pick one of
the more recent examples. We're
(23:42):
starting to develop
material, bioactive material. When I say bioactive, it's
the good kind of bio, by the way,
not the radioactive.
Radioactive. Bioactive. Yep. Yep. You know what? Since
Niagra is watching this, you gotta explain it.
So tell us radioactive versus bioactive. What is
bioactive?
Bioactive means we're effectively
(24:03):
drawing from
some of the active
compounds
great molecules that a lot of plants and
fungi have in their composition, and we're absorbing
them or we're using them for our benefit.
I'm not an expert on anything radioactive.
I think I have the same
understanding as most that, you know, radioactive
(24:25):
is not necessarily the type of stuff you
want in or around you. Yeah. I mean,
it goes to energy. Like, for me, it
goes to energy. Like, you've got positive energy
and negative energy that ripples from whatever we
do. And the reality is that every single
thing we do, whether it's facial or, you
know, nonverbal expression or language,
any move we make, any decision we make
(24:45):
has positive and negative
energy. And if we can intentionally
think about sending out positive energy and you've
got radioactive energy, which is somewhat negative, I
would say, to our world
versus the positive energy of bioactive.
That that's where I'm going. Yeah. So yeah.
For sure. So there has been research published,
(25:07):
a couple actually over the last twelve months,
that is using
certain fungus that have wound healing properties. And
so they're extracting
bioactive compounds of these
fungus, of these fungi,
and they're integrating it in band aids
or in material
(25:27):
that you can put on top of wounds
that will,
at the same time that they protect the
wound, they actually accelerate the healing process of
the wound because
you have these these incredible compounds. And so
I think the
potential
for leveraging fungi in the health care industry
(25:47):
is is huge. There's literally
dozens of research papers being published on the
diversity of applications
from helping to cure Alzheimer's,
Crohn's disease, all sorts of disease that are
impacting millions
every week. And because we only know about
10%
(26:07):
of the
fungi
compared to those 2,500,000
that I've mentioned,
you know, we're only starting to scratch the
surface. Yeah. And, you know I just wanna
throw it out there that just something that
I think is dramatically
under known, undervalued
under everything is that
that this is happening in the plant
(26:28):
and just in the world and has been
for a long time that, you know and
I I think of certain things like,
honey. And this is an animal. It's plant
and animal. So, like, honey is used for
wound care. And I know in the sea
turtle world, when in the sea turtle hospital
that I volunteer at, they use honey in
the bandages. So it's one of many examples,
(26:51):
I think, of wound care. And I picture,
there's a story of the orangutans.
I think it's the orangutans who are of
bin and bears who have seen chewing up
certain plants that they know that the compounds
in them, if they chew them up and
they put them they literally use them as
as bandages
that they can heal faster. I mean, that
there's there's so much
(27:12):
that we've
already started to do, and it seems like
fungi is like the such an unbelievable low
hanging fruit, no pun intended,
to
to, like, just the by it's not really
biomimicry.
That's a whole separate world. But, like, just,
and then I, you know, the story I
had written a blog about it, like Ozempic,
you know, and the
(27:33):
the semiglutides
actually come from a, Gila monster.
And learning about the Gila monsters, the
chemical structure
that keeps away the hunger and all that.
And, like, much of what we do when
we create
companies create new compounds for anything, whether it's
for health or it's for materials or it's
(27:54):
for food or whatever, is coming from nature,
and we don't talk about it. So, like,
your micro stories is all about talking about
it, and I'm about talking about it. Like,
we need to understand how much we are
connected, integrated, dependent
in this world as a system with nature
that we're not coming up with all this
stuff,
like, and making it out of nothing. So
(28:15):
where does that go when you're, you know,
you're smiling? You know, where where is that
going for you and your
what's your path of No. I think well,
I get I guess from the perspective of
MyCo Stories, we started by talking about it.
And through talking about it, a large community
started building around that conversation.
Today, we have around 70,000
people who engage and subscribe and relate to
(28:37):
the content we publish. And, this has helped
to create
a beautiful network, mycelial
of sorts.
Yeah. And,
and so we started to really
be placed in a unique position
to
create synergies between the different people that were
confronted to different challenges. So from talking, we
(28:59):
went to acting
on these challenges
by really positioning ourselves as,
an organization that can really help to fast
track
the work happening in this space and that
can help to
lower the barriers, break down the barriers so
that all of the incredible
(29:19):
pioneers in this space feel better supported,
have access to more resources, and, yeah, and
ideally can focus more on, like, doing the
work as opposed to convincing
others that their work is valuable.
Yeah. And stories are so much fun. Right?
So, I mean, if you just go into
and we'll put it in the show notes,
microstories.com.
Is that the website? Like, the stories are
amazing. Like, you know, whether it's building surfboards
(29:42):
or it's bandages or it's, you know, the
diapers. Right? I mean and these, in terms
of the circular economy, go back into the
ground
and don't
and and they're supposed to be there. Right?
Like, it's a it's a whole cycle that
can get reused.
Yeah. Check out Myco Stories for the stories.
They're really exciting. They're really interesting. They're really
(30:03):
thought provoking. So anyway, I'm just blown away
by them. So I'm one of your 70,000
for sure.
Love the excitement.
Yeah. It's it's all I'm all about excitement.
Okay. So let's step back a minute also
in terms of just vocabulary and understanding.
Tell us about the networks, the mycelium networks.
Like, I touched on it in my Mother's
Day episode around mother trees and the ancient
(30:24):
forest and how everybody's connected and the wood
wide web, but we need more. We need
to understand it better. So tell us the
story
of the network that it's all connected
through fungi.
Yeah. So,
look, there's
a a huge beautiful narrative that,
trees
(30:45):
communicate
through these mycelial networks. And the first thing
I wanna say is, once again,
humans are great at anthropomorphizing
Right. Concepts.
And so
maybe it's not exactly the way we imagine
it. What we know scientifically
is that, there is a symbiosis
between
(31:05):
80 to 90%
of plant species, so not just trees, but
all plant species with different fungal
hosts, different,
fungi species. They vary by the hundreds of
thousand.
And it is true. So far. Those are
just the ones That we know so far.
Absolutely.
And these,
(31:28):
these fungi live potentially around the roots or
within the roots and have the capacity to
develop
little white threads that,
you might have seen when you dig up
a patch of healthy soil. Or if you
kick
a dry log and suddenly you see
exposed these white eIFIL threads. And so
(31:51):
what we call mycelium network is effectively
the interconnected
EIFL threads that, can expand
up to,
I think, a couple of hectares. In Oregon,
you have what is deemed to be the
largest living organism. And so
what is scientifically proven again is that
(32:11):
within these threads,
you have
a lot of nutrients,
carbon, sugars that are
minerals that are basically flowing,
as you would see on a highway, a
fungal highway. And these nutrients
are going in all directions, sometimes changing directions,
sometimes going from one plant to another.
(32:33):
A lot of it being effectively
managed
like a
like nature's stock market, if you want, by
the Hyphol network. And and it exists because
fungi,
especially
the ones living in the soil, do not
have the ability to photosynthesize,
(32:54):
which means that they can get the sugars
that plants are excellent at getting
through that process. But plants, because they have
very thick roots compared to,
fungal hyphae, do not have the capacity
to access and break down very small nutrients
in the soil, minerals and and so forth.
(33:15):
And so over the course of hundreds of
millions of years through the course of evolution,
they have developed this symbiotic
relationship where
the fungi is like, okay. Well, give me
a bit of your your carbons
and your your sugars. And in exchange of
that, I'm gonna help you access what is
harder for you to access. And and there
has been some really interesting research around these
(33:37):
networks sometimes
favoring one plant
partner over another one. But, you know, again,
we're still early on in all that process
of research. And so I think
it is incredible what we see. It is
incredible to think that 80 to 90%
of plant species
(33:58):
have these relationships, and a lot of them,
And need these relationships. They don't just have
them. They're dependent on them.
Or if they don't have them, you need
to
find a way to give these nutrients to
the plants. So that's what happens in modern
agriculture because
the soil of a a modern day field
(34:19):
that is heavily reliant on petrochemical
pesticides and herbicides probably has a very poor
soil, probably
with little
or no of these fungal
symbiosis happening. So they've replaced
what happens beautifully in the soil naturally by
an alternative.
Right? And which means it's dead, and it
(34:40):
has to keep being recreated
from scratch each time. It doesn't just Which
is a great business case. Yeah. That's true.
And so, yeah, I I think it's incredible
what evolution has created between these two
living kingdoms. Notabenae,
we are much closer to fungi than we
are to plants as animal. We actually share
(35:02):
interesting. Go down that path. That is cool.
We share over 50%
of our DNA
with fungi.
I think it's 98
with bonobo
or chimpanzees.
But, yeah, with fungi, it's already 50%.
It's pretty crazy. Just, like, for a moment
to, like, just stop and process that. Like,
(35:23):
that is really pretty incredible that
we our DNA
is I I think that most people have
no concept of this, that our DNA
in
living carbon based
material,
carbon based any, you know, species or carbon
based anything are connected
to that level.
(35:43):
Yeah. Anyway. Wow. Mind blowing. Okay. I wanna
pick up on something else you said that
I think is super important because my brain
kind of goes to the resilience question and
this goes down there. The you quickly said
sometimes there's a there's a reversal, like there's
a switch of which direction
the
information and the nutrients and the everything is
(36:04):
going. And to me, that's all about connection.
Like, that's about a healthy system
where it's not one directional. A system that
works together and feeds it feeds each other
and feeds itself and grows together. We like
I'm all about metaphor. So can you what's
coming to mind for you around that? Like,
I gotta smile again from you. So, like,
something's popping up in your head around around
(36:24):
this.
Yeah. So I'm really,
really intrigued
and a big supporter of the work of
a
nonprofit organization in this space called SPUN, the
Society for the Protection of Underground Networks Oh,
I love it.
Which has
probably one of the boldest missions out there
in the world of mycorrhizal
(36:46):
networks, mycelium
networks, which is effectively to map out
the
mycelium
networks
globally.
Small tasks and they do some
really, really fantastic
groundwork. So they're literally going to collect samples
of soil on all continents. They've got ambassadors
on all continents, and they're effectively trying to,
(37:09):
yeah, understand all of these interactions much better.
And, they publish incredible,
research papers. One of their latest one was
published in Nature last month. Strongly encourage everyone
to go and have a read. We will
put them in the show notes. And people
do read the show notes too. We will
yes. It will be there. And,
yeah, they've identified, they don't understand it yet,
(37:31):
but they're noticing these changes
of pattern. So what does it mean? Well,
maybe
it means that this organism
is somewhat
conscious
because it decides,
from one reason or another, that, oh, actually,
this little
molecule of carbon,
(37:53):
it's it's it's probably not optimal for it
to go that way. So
why don't we reverse that and have it
go somewhere else? Yeah. I mean, go down
that path because,
you know, it's at the at most
people, I think, in general,
get a
and are accepting
of a level of sentience of primates. Right?
(38:13):
Okay. So
and then, you know, mammals, maybe. But there's
such a a lack of understanding of sentience
in so much of even the animal species
community,
let alone
plant, fungi, you know, all the other parts
of nature and parts of our world. And
I think it's so incredibly important to to
process the concept of sentience. And so go
(38:35):
for this because this it's close to my
heart. Like, I love sharing that. It just
why why say no when
you instead could say,
I'm curious. Maybe. Right?
Yeah. Well,
you know, what I've learned after just about
forty years living on this planet on four
continents and, you know, having talked to
(38:56):
a variety of folks is that
with every day that goes by, I actually
know less. Right, right. Yeah. The more you
know, the more you know now. Yeah.
Exactly.
You know, I've recently,
through an amazing podcast called Telepathic
Tapes, also to add in the footnotes that,
you know, it is not impossible
(39:17):
and is it, it is actually fact that
some people,
in this case,
kids
diagnosed
with severe autism
and who are nonverbal,
have the capacity to read other people's mind.
I'm simplifying, but that's that's the catch. Yeah?
I can't wait to read it. I'm, I'm
(39:38):
excited for it to be in the story
now. And, and what that means when I
looked into it and was listening to this
podcast,
it completely, again, new eureka moment,
it completely
challenged a lot of the assumptions that I've
had all my life around the power of
the mind, around
communication,
around how information
(40:00):
can be transmitted.
And what that means is
there's, it's not because science cannot explain it
that it doesn't exist. And
I believe because we are 50%,
at least,
fungi
and because, as you said, we are all
(40:20):
from
very similar,
eukaryotic
molecules, we're all from, you know, at least
fungi and,
animals are are all from that evolutionary trait.
It means that, yeah, we probably share much
more than we think we do and we
have to leave space for that.
(40:42):
And we have to open our imagination,
scary it is because we can't explain it.
But also the more
open we will be to understanding
and potentially
(41:03):
grasping
some of these incredible
natural things that are that that that are
happening and and that we can't explain.
Yeah. I mean, I talk about the broaden
and build theory, which is all about what
you just said, which is if you add
judgment and you decide what is
not acceptable and gives you some ease to
your fear of uncertainty,
then you shut down, and you can't be
(41:25):
innovative. You can't be creative. You can't be
curious. You can't be empathetic.
You literally your brain does not allow.
Because it's intentionally
blocking out
all that potential expansion, expanded thought. So if
you just stop with the no,
the n o, not the k n o
w. That's funny, actually. And you expand, you
(41:47):
open yourself up to new questions and and
push aside the fear of uncertainty.
The world opens up,
and it's so much more fun. Like, you
didn't say that, but to me, that's what
it is. It's, like, so much more fun
to think about
bigger stuff
and the possibility
than it is to be sure. So yeah.
Yeah. Fully resonate.
(42:07):
Yeah. Okay. So tell in in that path,
I know that you had mentioned that, like,
some of the MICA stories is about art
and creativity
and a lot of the work that's that's
happening that you're inspiring and that you're enabling
and empowering with within, you know, Myco Stories
and your incubator and all the rest of
it. So I don't we don't know enough
about it yet. So tell us some of
the cool things that are going on,
(42:29):
the,
the hopes and the dreams of you and
the network and
the players and and the participants. So go
with it. Just tell us more. It's so
exciting.
Yeah. So, you know, I like to say
I've become a bit of a I'm an
accidental
entrepreneur because
I I had a vision. I had an
(42:52):
idea,
originally for
a project that I thought would really entertain
entertain me, and I launched it. I like
to I like to do more than talk,
and I like to listen as well.
And,
you know, so I've had to effectively build
something,
really based on the feedback I was getting
(43:15):
from the different stakeholders I was speaking with,
which has made it for a really interesting
journey of building a company.
And
but it also means that it's very early
stage. You know, we're three years in.
I work with two business partners and have
worked with 22 consultants who are all superheroes
(43:39):
in the fungal world, but it's still very
much the beginning. What I hope Myco Stories
can achieve over time
is, number one, because money is still king
in this society we live in. But it's
understanding
who are the people out there
who are
really interested
in supporting innovation,
not just sustainability, but, like, business cases that
(44:01):
will support sustainability.
Yeah.
And,
Moving it to the next level, like, not
taking what we have now of sustainable
and accepting that that's enough. Yeah. Yeah.
But but really putting business first and sustainability
as a byproduct
of this incredible business case, which are which
is nature based and and so forth. So,
(44:24):
you know, calling out to the money where
it's at because, yes,
investment
lands the investment landscape is much more complex
and
and restricted as it was a couple of
years ago, but there's still a lot of
people making a lot of money. And there's
still a lot of people
with a rising
desire
to leave a
(44:45):
positive
sprint on on this planet. So, you know,
involving these guys and, educating them on the
topic, connecting them with fantastic folks that are
leading
change and leveraging fungi,
Making sure that we
educate
the masses as well. Right? Why did I
(45:06):
have to wait to be in my case
to understand that,
you know, a mushroom is not a plant?
I was never taught anything
about this in bi biology. So the Fungi
Foundation, for example, Chilean based organization, does an
incredible job at pushing out curriculums
that any teacher can use
in their class to start putting this concept
(45:28):
forward through, you know, very fun activities.
Awesome.
Okay. So that's great. In the show notes
too. Sorry. Yeah. There you go. So we
start we start early on
and
then we
keep on
influencing
people at different
stages of their life and in their profession.
So, you know, what can we do from
(45:49):
a policy standpoint
to
provide more recognition for fungi
as a living organisms in conservation practices? Yeah,
yeah.
How do we
educate and influence
the regulators
in charge of our agriculture industry, of our
food industry,
so that novel mushrooms
(46:10):
are deemed safe to consume
with positive health on our positive benefits on
our health and that we don't necessarily
stay rooted in a lot of the mycophobia,
which is, deeply rooted in most of the
West with some exceptions and which is completely
opposite
in the East, you know, with Japan, Korea,
(46:32):
China really leading the way on kind of
traditional usage. You know, if Myco Stories can
try to help push this general global agenda,
more people paying attention, more people being involved
and supporting
in what they can, time, expertise, or money.
I'll give myself a nice tap on the
back and keep on going.
(46:53):
Absolutely. I mean, you mentioned so many really,
really important
basic
conversations we should have We should be having.
Right? Like that fungi is actually a healthy
addition
to our lives, and we need to understand
more about it. And we need to get
it into policy and get it into
the government agencies
that,
(47:13):
that need to open up their work that
they're doing to include
fungi.
This whole world that's missing from policy discussions
and science research and and all that that's
funded
through governments.
So thank you if raising the stature
and the importance is huge. Conservation,
I mean, how do we take care of
(47:35):
since it's invisible,
right, primarily invisible,
so we can't see the green shoots either
coming up or not coming up because of
drought or whatever,
or the animals, you know, with the extinctions
that we hear about. Like,
conservation is a topic that we're not talking
about at all
in in terms of the entire fungal network
that is a massive part of our world
and is and the symbiosis
(47:56):
enabling those green shoots to come up that
Yeah. And then mycophobia, like,
you know,
the the difference between the eastern western,
both medicine and just life,
the connection with nature and the connection with
our Earth is so different. I don't know
how that happened. Like, how did that even
(48:16):
happen and how do we undo that? How
do we build that head somewhere in this
Western culture towards
more open minded and less fear based around
new novel
around new thoughts?
Thoughts?
I think it comes
originally
from
a question of beliefs and culture.
Mhmm.
(48:38):
If you look at,
Christianity, which was, you know, one of
the founding pillars of
modern society and, you know, if we just
take Europe and The US,
and then the influence
Christian religion had
also
in Latin America and in
different
(48:58):
parts of of Africa.
As I had a fantastic conversation with a
with a nun in a car share journey
in France, fantastic conversation I had with a
sister, Sister Faust team. You know, in her
eyes, nature,
you know, man was above nature.
And
nature was there to serve the man,
(49:20):
the humankind. And so from that very basic
concept, already conservation is going to take a
hit at some point. And if you look
at
Asian cultures
that have different belief systems, some of them
are animists,
are very rooted in the wisdom of nature,
in Japan, for example.
Well, that
(49:42):
basic,
you know,
foundational belief
is already very, very different, right? So you
relate
to nature differently.
You,
and so
you naturally
are going to have,
you know, different approaches in
into its conservation.
(50:04):
So,
you know,
the interesting thing is,
in the end, regardless of the belief systems,
I think, what the belief system that that
won it
over everything is capitalism,
which is another
religion,
probably the most popular religion at the moment,
which, you know, superseded
(50:25):
the
potential relationship, the nature that some of the
folks in in Asia had because you still
have the same
field
degradation, a lack of conservation policies
in the in a lot of Asian countries
as you have them in the West. Right?
But Yeah. You look at the the abuse
of of so many animals that are being
(50:45):
extracted for
Asian medicine. All sorts. There's this disconnect that
there used to not be a disconnect, and
now there's
this capitalism driven disconnect. Yeah.
I think Yuval Noah Harari, the author of
Sapiens and many other groundbreaking books,
You know, it says it very well in
his follow-up book to Sapiens and Omo Deus
(51:06):
writes, it is
us above everything else. And I think what
I've loved about
working in the fungi community is
we tend
to really try and step down from this
pedestal
of us above everything else, but try to
understand how we are part of everything. And
(51:28):
if we wanna work with and, yeah, it's
like working with nature as opposed to working
Using.
Using it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Those those
points are so, so important, and I have
my very strong biases. I studied religion for
quite a while, and and the what crop
what what bubbled to the top was certainly
the hierarchical
(51:49):
permission
to use, abuse, extract, own,
and which is the short term versus the
long term thinking. And and it's so interesting
that you brought us to a place, you
know, where where
thinking process has moved because of capitalism, you
know, towards the Western, and it's not helping.
But that we're shifting back. Like, we're we're
telling stories
and we're bringing attention to important things. And
(52:11):
when hopefully, we're doing some shifting back. Okay.
So I've taken tons of your time, and
I so appreciate it. Give us some you
know, what have we not talked about? What
words of wisdom
do we need to know that really
are the basis and drive
you and the work you're doing and the
and future that you're creating for us? So
(52:32):
big question.
Well,
well, the good thing is, you know, I
can pretty much go
wherever I want with it. Yes. Yes.
So.
I think that
as,
you know, as
young adults start taking decisions in life,
the ones that have the luxury of asking
(52:53):
themselves question,
so not kids that don't get the chance
to go to university because they need to,
you know,
have one or two jobs already to support
families. So these guys, unfortunately,
don't have a choice most times. But for
all the people who do have the choice,
have the luxury to study what they want,
manage to reimburse their university debt after some
(53:15):
years and get in a position of comfort
is,
you know, to really ask themselves
whether they feel the model we live in
is really working. And
based on that answer,
this very personal answer, what they can do
at their scale
to
potentially
change things, to direct
(53:36):
the global way things work nowadays
towards models that resonate more with what they
would want to see more of. And so
that means, you know, keeping
a
strong sense of,
a strong sense of of stealth, but like
an honest
and a and some level of integrity as
(53:58):
well. And,
and not necessarily doing what the society expects
you to do,
but really trying to, like, look deeper within
you to,
you know, what resonates.
And,
I'm just saying it doesn't have to be
loud.
It's quietly within you, but be self self
respect self, reflective. Think about your values. Align
(54:21):
your life with your values and and align
and choose values that
really make you feel good about your life.
Yeah. And you you don't necessarily need to
be a black sheep. You can be a
black sheep. We need black sheeps.
But you can also be a sheep, but
that kind of like thinks and challenges and
things differently.
And and I think
(54:41):
people need to learn to have more dialogue
with, people that have different opinions than themselves
to learn also why these people are coming
from where they're coming from. Right? Don't say
no. Say tell me more.
Tell me more and listen. You know? Too
often, I speak with people who, you know,
have this anxiety
(55:02):
of, you know, putting their point across. And
in the process,
you know, just,
you know, forget
to listen to the people that they're speaking
to.
And, actually,
it's it's it's more fun to listen, you
know, because you know your point of view.
Sure.
Put it across and, like, listen and listen
and learn. Stay curious,
(55:23):
and,
you talk.
Mhmm. Yeah. Listen more than you talk and
do more than you talk. And think and
I would say think about yourself
in a network, like a mycelium network or
whatever the right term is. Like, we do
not live in a disconnected
world. We live completely
integrated and connected to each other and to
(55:44):
nature, and our ripples matter, and our energy
matters, and the directional
multidirectional
sharing matters. You know, it's it's a way
to think that is so much more productive
for a win win win. Yeah.
I I I've just come up with this
little
little motto for,
for humankind with less scrolling, more digging.
(56:08):
I love it. Less scrolling, more digging. I
love it. I love it. Hey, Hugh. Put
your put put your hands in the soil,
be curious and go dig for information, challenge
the information that's just given to you, and
dig deeper in the relationships around you.
And without judgment. Just curiosity, not judgment. You
can only do one or the other. They
can't live together.
Okay. So tell us what you're working on,
(56:28):
what you're going what's what's the next steps?
I know that there's some really powerful
offerings that you're separate from the supporting of
these individual,
companies and and inventions and creations.
You've got some actual products that you share
and that that are part of your offerings.
Like, you've got the fungi industry map, which
is really cool.
Some graphics, there's more like, tell it just
(56:50):
go what are you doing? What's coming? What
do we what do we have now? What's
coming? And what do you want us to
know about my co stories that we can
you can leave us with so that
we're all in? Sounds good. So I would
suggest anyone listening and still listening to go
on to Myco stories, which is m y
c o for mycology, and,
you know, look at the different categories of
(57:12):
content we have out there to see what
resonates most. If you come from the industry
and you're more interested in the professional side
of things,
head over to the ecosystem page to get
a sense of
the hundreds of organizations
that are developing mind blowing applications
in different sectors and subscribe to our newsletter
so you can, you know, feel the drumbeat
(57:33):
of the fungal kingdom. And what's happening in
the next couple of months? We're speaking at
a number of conferences in The UK and
Austria.
I'm always looking for opportunities to, you know,
spread the word and be able to participate
in the debates that might be heavily nature
focused or not. Again, let's speak to everyone.
Let's listen to everyone. So reach out if
(57:56):
you feel that there would be, an interesting
fit for collaboration. And,
yeah, I'll I'll I'll pause it at that.
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so so much.
Mark, it's been such a joy. And start
kicking us off on some really complex as
well as really basic understanding of
(58:16):
the fungi fungi fungal network, and we're gonna
keep going with this. So we'll have Mark
back. We'll have more conversation in season two.
This is too important to keep under the
radar, so thank you.
And at some point, we'll touch on the
mushrooms you know, the magic mushrooms, the edible
mushrooms,
whatever. But for right now, we're gonna be
(58:37):
talking more more about this whole world. So
thank you. Thank you.
Thanks, Jessica.
And and thank you for the work you're
doing.
This has been a production of BLI Studios
produced by me, Kai.
(58:59):
Follow along with our other BLI produced shows
at balancinglife'sissues.com/podcast-bli.
Got an idea for the show? Email me,
Kai, at balancing life's issues dot com. And
don't forget to stay in touch with your
host, Jessica, at jessica@winwinwinmindset.com.
Anything else to add, Miles?
Yay. I'm so thrilled to be here with
Mark Violo, who I have not known for
that long, but I am super inspired
and so excited to bring this third f
of my flora, fauna,
fungi
phenomenon, and forces
to Resilience Gone Wild in in, like, this
beautiful depth and super
(00:26):
creative, intriguing,
business oriented,
and art oriented. Anyway, so let's get to
chatting with Mark. He is
the creator and leader of Myco Stories, and
this is where we're gonna go with this.
So tell us about yourself, Mark.
Hey, guys. Thanks for having me, Jessica.
Love that you're
(00:46):
differentiating
plants and fungi because a lot of people
put both of these in the bag and
there's a lot of work being done at
the moment
to, you know, put back, give a bit
more credit to fungi as an individual living
kingdom. And, that's a little bit what we're
trying to do as well at Myco Stories,
effectively helping
(01:07):
all of the incredible
applications of fungi, which is an incredibly diverse
living kingdom over
2.5
estimated billion species. That's almost 10 times
as more as we estimate
plants to have. Stop. Like, we have like,
just to process that. Right? Like, we have
lumped the ignorance, right, of lumping all fungi
(01:29):
into
plant species when there's billions times more. It's
just so interesting. Like, we need to separate
this and really focus on it and really
embrace
the zillions of of benefits
to having fungi more intentionally in our lives.
Okay. Go for it.
No. No. That's right. And I I I
love the enthusiasm.
Actually, you know, most people think of fungi
(01:52):
or mushrooms as, you know, this popping living
organism that you find on tree stumps in
the soil in your grasslands.
But that's just really one family of
mushrooms. But the biggest variety really comes in
all shapes and forms from microscopic fungi that
live in your gut, from
(02:12):
other
species that live in the roots of plants
and and so forth. But,
there's a lot of mycology experts that are
far greater than myself to to talk about
all this, but I wanted to support in
my own way. My background
is a mix of business and circular economy,
so tech and circular economy, if I can
(02:32):
summarize it that way. And,
what I've learned over the twenty years of
my career is effectively
to focus on tangible solutions,
ideally,
that are nature based
in order to change our economies for the
better. Because if you look for solutions in
nature,
they're most likely gonna be more integrated,
(02:55):
will have better externalities
once implemented.
And so what's really interesting is Well, I
mean, I think you're talking systems based. Right?
Like, if you go to nature, you can't
just pick one tiny little bit of a
system. It's all the interconnection.
The diversity of a system is so key
and this the symbiosis
(03:15):
of, I think, all fungi, I I assume.
And it's it's just such an enormous part
of it that
we need to be able to think about
and to process the complexity.
Yeah. I mean, we're going a bit in
a tangent, but I'll give you a very
simple example. Right? If you look at modern
agriculture today, we're using mostly
(03:35):
petrochemical
based derived
herbicides,
fertilizers.
Yeah? So what we're putting in the ground
is not used to being in that ground.
Right? So naturally, it's not necessarily gonna be
integrated very well by those ecosystems.
Well, if we look at fungi
who are incredible
(03:56):
enzyme manufacturers
to develop
these fertilizers or herbicides,
well, then we're leveraging
what is already in the ground and using
that to
bio stimulate
the crops. And so naturally, the externalities,
the reintegration
of such product in the ground is gonna
be much much better for ecosystems.
(04:17):
Yeah. I have to give our audience a
a warning because this whole topic of fungi
is so complex
and so interesting and so broad. Right? Like,
you already said there's zillions of different species
of fungi that, you know, I just wanna
put it out there that we're gonna bounce
around because we just I just wanna bring
up, and and you're like the perfect person
to do this with, all the different applications.
(04:39):
And it's so and integrated pest management
is some part of where you're going with
this small bit, which is only a small
part of the brilliance
of the contribution that fungi and the resilience
of fungi offer in terms of making the
world better and in terms of our learning
for resilience for ourselves, like how much we
can learn from them. And I was just
thinking, which is not related at all, but
(05:02):
that my world stepping into nature and integrated
pest management was I'm gonna put it out
there that in
'85,
I worked for Ralph Nader
for the summer writing articles about integrated pest
management. And the it was a long like,
it was relatively a long time ago, early
in this conversation,
and I get super lit up even going
(05:23):
in that direction. So thank you for bringing
that up, and keep going down that and
many other paths because this is gonna be
a great conversation. So I'll keep the intro
short so we can get into the thick
of it. But, yeah, effectively
set up a
international
platform
which helps to support
all the innovators in the space of fungal
biotechnologies.
(05:44):
And what that means is solutions
derived from fungal
processes in the space of
food,
health, drug development,
health supplements, in the space of biomaterials
to replace packaging or to replace animal based
leather, for example, or polluting construction materials,
(06:04):
but also in the space of what I
call soil, which is everything linked to agriculture,
forestry management, carbon sequestration projects. And, and there's
many other fields out there, but to sum
it up, I like to divide it in
those four fields. And so we support
startups, entrepreneurs.
We support investors to try and match make
them with these startups. We work with larger
(06:27):
industry groups who are starting to think and
invest heavily into nature based solutions because market
demands it, because customers demand demand it. And
because it's it's a good economic decision.
Long term good economic decision. It needs to
be because sustainability
is no longer the driving vector. It was
(06:47):
maybe for ten, twenty years, but macroeconomic
context has made
that big businesses are kind of shifting back
to the bottom line is what matters first
and foremost.
And if there's sustainability
benefits added to that, okay. But, you know,
the bottom line
is it needs to be an economic competitive
(07:08):
advantage first and foremost. So, yeah, that's what
we've been doing for the last three years.
We've worked with, probably over 50 organizations
in the four continents of this planet, and,
there's,
way, way more to do.
Okay. What a great intro. What a great
start. We don't know anything about you yet,
though, and you are one interesting person. So
(07:29):
that was just the last three years of
what you've been working on. Can you give
us what where how why fungi?
How did you get here? Like, what lights
you up? Why are we in this conversation?
Yeah. So I'm French originally. I was lucky
to live abroad,
growing up, Lived in The States, lived in
Germany and Belgium.
Lost my French accent along the way.
(07:52):
Studied business. Still a little tiny bit of
that beautiful French accent. That's right. So you
got a little enough.
Little,
tidbits of it. Yeah. I, studied business because
I didn't know what I wanted to do.
Had the opportunity
of learning where business is is done,
in the most exciting way in India. So
(08:12):
I did my master's in New Delhi. I
then had the opportunity of,
doing my first job in China, in Shanghai.
So I I went to to China in
02/2008,
worked for the largest
Chinese tech tech company called Tencent, known for
one of its main product called WeChat, and
got to learn Mandarin,
got to really immerse myself in Asian culture.
(08:35):
And I think I
discovered
the quite interesting nature of
fungi when I was there,
because
they're a ubiquitous
part of traditional Chinese medicine. So if you
go on market stalls
across China, you'll find really weird looking structures,
which
from a Western point of view, you will
(08:57):
not assimilate to mushrooms.
But actually,
these funny looking mushrooms called reishi, which have,
over a thousand years of use in traditional
Chinese medicine,
are there. They're sold in powders. They're also
sold as beautiful
sculptures that,
wealthy Chinese families put in their homes.
(09:18):
And, so that got me interested. Then I
went off to live in Singapore, set up
an innovation agency there, funded by the Singapore
government. But I was far from home, so
I decided to move back with my wife
to The UK in London where we're currently
based and, to try and and kind of
capitalize on all this this knowledge, that was
(09:38):
mostly
profit driven. You know, I was working for
tech companies and for
large,
companies and to try
and see what could happen if I honed
that knowledge
and,
focused on supporting circular economy initiatives.
And, and that was what led me to
start discovering
(09:59):
the
incredible and diverse
world of fungal
biotech or fungal solutions,
of which I named a couple already.
And, and, yeah,
Because I'm a very kind of tangible, action
focused person, the first thing that I did
when I started to read about the topic
was I wanna I wanna talk. I wanna
(10:21):
meet just like you, Jessica, with all the
people who are really driving the space. I
didn't record a podcast, but, these were personal,
short conversations where I tried to understand
what are these people doing,
what are challenges that they're facing,
and, how could I be of service?
And so on the back of over a
(10:42):
100 conversations
over a couple of years,
I realized that all of these people were
facing three main challenges. The first one was,
how do I raise funding
to,
you know, bring these small pilot scale Yeah.
Solutions to to life and to deliver some
real impact?
How do I scale? It's great to do
(11:03):
a little experiment in my garage or in
my lab,
but actually there's no impact or there's no
business model if you don't get to a
certain scale. But when you're when you're working
with a living organism,
it'll come with a bunch of challenges to
scale production. But thankfully, there's a lot of
people who've done this before, so maybe we
(11:24):
can learn from them. And the last one
is something that you've dedicated the last couple
of years of your life doing is education.
Most people have no idea what fungi, mushrooms,
mycelium
really are, what they do, their role in
the evolution of our ecosystems over time, their
role in our, microbiome.
And the reason why I decided to dedicate
(11:45):
my life to them is because I got
so blown away when I discovered
the amount that they are responsible of.
I was like, look, I'm not a conspiracy
theorist, but there's something there. Like, why haven't
I not been taught anything
about this living kingdom before? And so, yeah,
(12:06):
I kind of decided to
dedicate
a large chunk of my life to them.
Amazing. It's it's those moments that it was
like when but when I was
talking to people about parrot fish and and
I learned the story of a parrot fish
creating a bubble to protect its sleep, that
it was like this just one of the
huge moments that was like, this is what
(12:28):
I needed to be doing to, like,
offering these stories up so that we can
use them for metaphor. I mean, there's just,
like, these moments. And you had this, like,
starting in Shanghai
with this this, like, wow. This is not
the mushroom I knew.
This is not as simple. And to like
this,
like, wow, mind blowing. This is so big.
(12:50):
Why is this is this under the radar?
Like, how do we not know and appreciate
the opportunity?
I don't think I've ever given an explanation
for circular economy, which I think is really,
really important. Like, I try to get into
regenerative, and that's kind of complex also. But
just give us a quick
circular economy. It was where you went with
this to, like, in your in your brain,
(13:11):
I think. Like, you know, these are some
of the imagery is around this circular aspect.
So give us a quick one. Yeah.
So I think since the dawn of civilized
times,
so give or take ten thousand years, we've
lived in a world of abundance and where
we had a lot of land, a lot
of resources. And so
we were never really thinking about how to
(13:32):
optimize when we use this land and resources.
So it kind of led to a
production and consumption and disposal
model model that was very linear, you know,
make,
consume,
dispose. And we realized
as population
really grew to the numbers that they are
today and resources
(13:52):
became
scarcer,
that
actually this model has a lot of externalities
which are negative to our human health and
negative to the ecosystems in which we live
in.
And so a lot of people started thinking
maybe this linear
system doesn't work because we're just accumulating
(14:15):
these ridiculous
volumes of waste. We're wasting 30% of the
food that we produce. We're changing and buying
new clothes
seasonally, but we don't have a proper recycling
model for clothing or
most complex plastics that we've developed in the
twentieth century.
And so
(14:35):
the concept of circular economy is
when you design a product,
you think about the whole life cycle of
the product that you're designing, which means that
ideally you're using materials that once produced,
you can
ideally repair.
So you can Well, the 10 r's. The
(14:56):
the 10 r's are great. The ten, fifteen.
Let's let's you know? Yeah. And so, yeah,
you wanna try and repair. You wanna extend
its life because it means you won't need
to produce it again.
And then eventually everything runs its course. The,
you know, the product will won't be repairable
anymore. So how do you reintegrate
it back into its own supply chain or
(15:18):
ideally another supply chain? So, yeah, to keep
it simple as, you know, how do you
get the the life cycle as circular as
possible in everything
that you design or that you produce?
Yeah. I mean, right now, if you just
use those three, the make, consume, waste,
the volume of all three of those. We're
(15:39):
making too much,
which the step before that, the extraction
of of raw materials that go into, right,
like, into the making.
We're using too much of that. We're making
too much. We're consuming too much.
Much of the world, not all of the
world, but some of the world is consuming
too little. And we're just disposing of it
and then disregarding it. Right? We are pretending
(16:00):
that you can just throw stuff out and
it will disappear. And this whole circle versus
linear is just the key to everything. And
I try to, like, think of a really
accessible example, you know, and what popped in
my head. And I'm not sure if you've
got one that's
that works that you've tested and and makes
sense in terms of the story better. But
(16:21):
I'm just thinking about cooking dinner. Right? Like,
you're making dinner for your family and you
think about the input. So you go
to the supermarket and you have and your
refrigerator is full of all this stuff, and
your pantry is full of all this stuff
and all the inputs, and and you don't
think about where any of them actually come
from. So you've started with this
pretend basket
that has no origin. So there's no circle
(16:42):
there. Right? It's just the first point of
extraction.
And then you make something and then
you potentially consume way too much of it
or not. But there's gonna be waste. Right?
There's going to be waste in the stuff
that you left behind when you were preparing
it, and there's waste in the extra food.
And then you just throw it out. Right?
Like,
it doesn't work. Like, you know, just to
bring it down to really understanding
(17:03):
the tangibility
of life. It is all about that cycle.
So give us what what's coming to you
when you think of of my little example,
what's coming to mind?
Yeah. I'd I'd add to what you said
that even before it gets to the consumer,
there's
(17:23):
the
industrial
manufacturer
of your ketchup, for example, who's only gonna
use, let's say, forty, fifty percent of the
tomato and it's going to get rid of
the skins, it's going to get rid of
the seeds,
and then it's going to add a variety
of other products. Some of them, you know,
(17:45):
will have to be manufactured, not necessarily issued
from a,
kind of a recycling process. And so you
can already
think in terms of circularity
at this stage where, well, what could we
do with the seeds and the skins that
are being wasted at at this stage, right?
And there's a fantastic
(18:06):
organization
in the South Of France that is doing
exactly that. It's
working with tomato
processors, the largest in Europe, and it's creating
a fermented product that adds texture
and taste from seeds and skins of tomato,
and it's selling it back
to the tomato
(18:28):
manufacturer
for it to, you know, really try and
embrace that circularity. And on top of that,
you know, give,
new nutritional
or new flavoring profiles to the products that
they're manufacturing.
Yeah. We're throwing out the stuff that has
all the nutrition in it. Right? The skins,
the seeds, all of it. Anyway okay. So
I took you totally off. Thank you so
(18:48):
much. I think that was really important to,
like, have that new vocabulary for a lot
of people and to really understand it. So
thank you. We can come back to it
when it comes to micro micro stories and
and the work you're doing with fungi.
So stories, I wanna take you so we've
sort of touched on what lit you up
about fungi. What about the stories? Like, you
we we talked about this for a bit
before we got on, but I'm obsessed with
(19:09):
stories. Stories are what people remember. Stories are
what people connect to, not as opposed to
the facts and the question of truth and
whatever. So go down the story path. Tell
us about stories.
We can even go back before the dawn
of civilization.
Right? The things that have connected human beings,
for millions of years is the capacity for
(19:31):
ourselves to tell each other stories. Right? That's
what unites us. That's
what is at the origin of shared culture.
And I think,
that's the best testament to the importance of
stories
to get messages across important messages across. So
when I started MycoStories,
myself not being
a scientist
(19:51):
or a biologist or a mycologist,
you know, what I thought was really important
to help
to,
I guess, carry across
the important messages and what we can learn
from
fungi as a microorganism,
but also the very tangible applications
of fungi
are through accessible stories that talk about
(20:13):
people. You know?
People need to hear about people. That's why
we anthropomorphize
everything. We like to, you know, relate to
human emotions and the challenges of setting up
a company, the successes of publishing a research
paper. So focusing on people, focusing on tangible
solutions because people relate
(20:34):
to things that impact their direct life. So
if we talk about, you know, how we
can,
make the food system more resilient,
people will be like, oh, yeah, well, that's
that's important for my
kids' future and so forth.
And then
really importantly,
(20:55):
make stories
understandable.
And because I don't have that scientific background,
I was the first one to really feel
ill at ease when I was
trying to read through research papers or tried
to read complex
pitch decks from startups that were, you know,
gonna revolutionize
(21:16):
the drug discovery
industry. But, you know, I was reading through
this and, oh my lord, it was impossible
for me to really grasp all of it.
And so I thought that if we tried
to popularize
these stories, make them relatable,
and ideally have
elements of call to action. How can I
(21:38):
participate? What are these people looking for? What
do they need in order to fulfill and
follow-up on the initial work that is being
done. We would, render great service
to a microorganism
and an innovation space that has a huge
potential
for disruption
and improvement
(21:58):
of the society we live in. Yeah. I
mean, you've brought together this combination between the
science and the business aspect and made it
all accessible
through story,
which is a beautiful space to be in
because we need to be able to connect
to fungi,
to this massive network, and we don't have
an entry
point. Right? Like, all we have is these
(22:19):
mushrooms. So giving us this new vocabulary of
and stories. Thank you. Like, huge. Thank you
so much. And
and supporting and inspiring and helping small companies
that are taking this natural
cycle of life forward and replacing
nature, replacing the oil and the plastics and
(22:40):
and all the rest of the stuff that's
damaging our society and replacing it with something
natural is just such a gift. So thank
you. Okay. So we've got stories. We've got
the whole sort of the fungi starter point,
circular
economy starter point. Let's just go to something
fun. Like,
tell us about what
you were blown away by that you learned,
(23:00):
like, going from I mean, you told us
a little bit about seeing this new looking
stuff in the Shanghai markets. But, like, give
us a couple of fun stories about
when you discovered that this was fungi
and that it was
something else, that it could be made into
something else that mattered. So what comes to
mind? Some of your incubators or?
(23:21):
Yep.
So many examples. I surprised myself that after,
you know, three years of having launched this
project,
probably
six years of having done research in this
space, Every week, I still discover something new.
I'll just pick one of
the more recent examples. We're
(23:42):
starting to develop
material, bioactive material. When I say bioactive, it's
the good kind of bio, by the way,
not the radioactive.
Radioactive. Bioactive. Yep. Yep. You know what? Since
Niagra is watching this, you gotta explain it.
So tell us radioactive versus bioactive. What is
bioactive?
Bioactive means we're effectively
(24:03):
drawing from
some of the active
compounds
great molecules that a lot of plants and
fungi have in their composition, and we're absorbing
them or we're using them for our benefit.
I'm not an expert on anything radioactive.
I think I have the same
understanding as most that, you know, radioactive
(24:25):
is not necessarily the type of stuff you
want in or around you. Yeah. I mean,
it goes to energy. Like, for me, it
goes to energy. Like, you've got positive energy
and negative energy that ripples from whatever we
do. And the reality is that every single
thing we do, whether it's facial or, you
know, nonverbal expression or language,
any move we make, any decision we make
(24:45):
has positive and negative
energy. And if we can intentionally
think about sending out positive energy and you've
got radioactive energy, which is somewhat negative, I
would say, to our world
versus the positive energy of bioactive.
That that's where I'm going. Yeah. So yeah.
For sure. So there has been research published,
(25:07):
a couple actually over the last twelve months,
that is using
certain fungus that have wound healing properties. And
so they're extracting
bioactive compounds of these
fungus, of these fungi,
and they're integrating it in band aids
or in material
(25:27):
that you can put on top of wounds
that will,
at the same time that they protect the
wound, they actually accelerate the healing process of
the wound because
you have these these incredible compounds. And so
I think the
potential
for leveraging fungi in the health care industry
(25:47):
is is huge. There's literally
dozens of research papers being published on the
diversity of applications
from helping to cure Alzheimer's,
Crohn's disease, all sorts of disease that are
impacting millions
every week. And because we only know about
10%
(26:07):
of the
fungi
compared to those 2,500,000
that I've mentioned,
you know, we're only starting to scratch the
surface. Yeah. And, you know I just wanna
throw it out there that just something that
I think is dramatically
under known, undervalued
under everything is that
that this is happening in the plant
(26:28):
and just in the world and has been
for a long time that, you know and
I I think of certain things like,
honey. And this is an animal. It's plant
and animal. So, like, honey is used for
wound care. And I know in the sea
turtle world, when in the sea turtle hospital
that I volunteer at, they use honey in
the bandages. So it's one of many examples,
(26:51):
I think, of wound care. And I picture,
there's a story of the orangutans.
I think it's the orangutans who are of
bin and bears who have seen chewing up
certain plants that they know that the compounds
in them, if they chew them up and
they put them they literally use them as
as bandages
that they can heal faster. I mean, that
there's there's so much
(27:12):
that we've
already started to do, and it seems like
fungi is like the such an unbelievable low
hanging fruit, no pun intended,
to
to, like, just the by it's not really
biomimicry.
That's a whole separate world. But, like, just,
and then I, you know, the story I
had written a blog about it, like Ozempic,
you know, and the
(27:33):
the semiglutides
actually come from a, Gila monster.
And learning about the Gila monsters, the
chemical structure
that keeps away the hunger and all that.
And, like, much of what we do when
we create
companies create new compounds for anything, whether it's
for health or it's for materials or it's
(27:54):
for food or whatever, is coming from nature,
and we don't talk about it. So, like,
your micro stories is all about talking about
it, and I'm about talking about it. Like,
we need to understand how much we are
connected, integrated, dependent
in this world as a system with nature
that we're not coming up with all this
stuff,
like, and making it out of nothing. So
(28:15):
where does that go when you're, you know,
you're smiling? You know, where where is that
going for you and your
what's your path of No. I think well,
I get I guess from the perspective of
MyCo Stories, we started by talking about it.
And through talking about it, a large community
started building around that conversation.
Today, we have around 70,000
people who engage and subscribe and relate to
(28:37):
the content we publish. And, this has helped
to create
a beautiful network, mycelial
of sorts.
Yeah. And,
and so we started to really
be placed in a unique position
to
create synergies between the different people that were
confronted to different challenges. So from talking, we
(28:59):
went to acting
on these challenges
by really positioning ourselves as,
an organization that can really help to fast
track
the work happening in this space and that
can help to
lower the barriers, break down the barriers so
that all of the incredible
(29:19):
pioneers in this space feel better supported,
have access to more resources, and, yeah, and
ideally can focus more on, like, doing the
work as opposed to convincing
others that their work is valuable.
Yeah. And stories are so much fun. Right?
So, I mean, if you just go into
and we'll put it in the show notes,
microstories.com.
Is that the website? Like, the stories are
amazing. Like, you know, whether it's building surfboards
(29:42):
or it's bandages or it's, you know, the
diapers. Right? I mean and these, in terms
of the circular economy, go back into the
ground
and don't
and and they're supposed to be there. Right?
Like, it's a it's a whole cycle that
can get reused.
Yeah. Check out Myco Stories for the stories.
They're really exciting. They're really interesting. They're really
(30:03):
thought provoking. So anyway, I'm just blown away
by them. So I'm one of your 70,000
for sure.
Love the excitement.
Yeah. It's it's all I'm all about excitement.
Okay. So let's step back a minute also
in terms of just vocabulary and understanding.
Tell us about the networks, the mycelium networks.
Like, I touched on it in my Mother's
Day episode around mother trees and the ancient
(30:24):
forest and how everybody's connected and the wood
wide web, but we need more. We need
to understand it better. So tell us the
story
of the network that it's all connected
through fungi.
Yeah. So,
look, there's
a a huge beautiful narrative that,
trees
(30:45):
communicate
through these mycelial networks. And the first thing
I wanna say is, once again,
humans are great at anthropomorphizing
Right. Concepts.
And so
maybe it's not exactly the way we imagine
it. What we know scientifically
is that, there is a symbiosis
between
(31:05):
80 to 90%
of plant species, so not just trees, but
all plant species with different fungal
hosts, different,
fungi species. They vary by the hundreds of
thousand.
And it is true. So far. Those are
just the ones That we know so far.
Absolutely.
And these,
(31:28):
these fungi live potentially around the roots or
within the roots and have the capacity to
develop
little white threads that,
you might have seen when you dig up
a patch of healthy soil. Or if you
kick
a dry log and suddenly you see
exposed these white eIFIL threads. And so
(31:51):
what we call mycelium network is effectively
the interconnected
EIFL threads that, can expand
up to,
I think, a couple of hectares. In Oregon,
you have what is deemed to be the
largest living organism. And so
what is scientifically proven again is that
(32:11):
within these threads,
you have
a lot of nutrients,
carbon, sugars that are
minerals that are basically flowing,
as you would see on a highway, a
fungal highway. And these nutrients
are going in all directions, sometimes changing directions,
sometimes going from one plant to another.
(32:33):
A lot of it being effectively
managed
like a
like nature's stock market, if you want, by
the Hyphol network. And and it exists because
fungi,
especially
the ones living in the soil, do not
have the ability to photosynthesize,
(32:54):
which means that they can get the sugars
that plants are excellent at getting
through that process. But plants, because they have
very thick roots compared to,
fungal hyphae, do not have the capacity
to access and break down very small nutrients
in the soil, minerals and and so forth.
(33:15):
And so over the course of hundreds of
millions of years through the course of evolution,
they have developed this symbiotic
relationship where
the fungi is like, okay. Well, give me
a bit of your your carbons
and your your sugars. And in exchange of
that, I'm gonna help you access what is
harder for you to access. And and there
has been some really interesting research around these
(33:37):
networks sometimes
favoring one plant
partner over another one. But, you know, again,
we're still early on in all that process
of research. And so I think
it is incredible what we see. It is
incredible to think that 80 to 90%
of plant species
(33:58):
have these relationships, and a lot of them,
And need these relationships. They don't just have
them. They're dependent on them.
Or if they don't have them, you need
to
find a way to give these nutrients to
the plants. So that's what happens in modern
agriculture because
the soil of a a modern day field
(34:19):
that is heavily reliant on petrochemical
pesticides and herbicides probably has a very poor
soil, probably
with little
or no of these fungal
symbiosis happening. So they've replaced
what happens beautifully in the soil naturally by
an alternative.
Right? And which means it's dead, and it
(34:40):
has to keep being recreated
from scratch each time. It doesn't just Which
is a great business case. Yeah. That's true.
And so, yeah, I I think it's incredible
what evolution has created between these two
living kingdoms. Notabenae,
we are much closer to fungi than we
are to plants as animal. We actually share
(35:02):
interesting. Go down that path. That is cool.
We share over 50%
of our DNA
with fungi.
I think it's 98
with bonobo
or chimpanzees.
But, yeah, with fungi, it's already 50%.
It's pretty crazy. Just, like, for a moment
to, like, just stop and process that. Like,
(35:23):
that is really pretty incredible that
we our DNA
is I I think that most people have
no concept of this, that our DNA
in
living carbon based
material,
carbon based any, you know, species or carbon
based anything are connected
to that level.
(35:43):
Yeah. Anyway. Wow. Mind blowing. Okay. I wanna
pick up on something else you said that
I think is super important because my brain
kind of goes to the resilience question and
this goes down there. The you quickly said
sometimes there's a there's a reversal, like there's
a switch of which direction
the
information and the nutrients and the everything is
(36:04):
going. And to me, that's all about connection.
Like, that's about a healthy system
where it's not one directional. A system that
works together and feeds it feeds each other
and feeds itself and grows together. We like
I'm all about metaphor. So can you what's
coming to mind for you around that? Like,
I gotta smile again from you. So, like,
something's popping up in your head around around
(36:24):
this.
Yeah. So I'm really,
really intrigued
and a big supporter of the work of
a
nonprofit organization in this space called SPUN, the
Society for the Protection of Underground Networks Oh,
I love it.
Which has
probably one of the boldest missions out there
in the world of mycorrhizal
(36:46):
networks, mycelium
networks, which is effectively to map out
the
mycelium
networks
globally.
Small tasks and they do some
really, really fantastic
groundwork. So they're literally going to collect samples
of soil on all continents. They've got ambassadors
on all continents, and they're effectively trying to,
(37:09):
yeah, understand all of these interactions much better.
And, they publish incredible,
research papers. One of their latest one was
published in Nature last month. Strongly encourage everyone
to go and have a read. We will
put them in the show notes. And people
do read the show notes too. We will
yes. It will be there. And,
yeah, they've identified, they don't understand it yet,
(37:31):
but they're noticing these changes
of pattern. So what does it mean? Well,
maybe
it means that this organism
is somewhat
conscious
because it decides,
from one reason or another, that, oh, actually,
this little
molecule of carbon,
(37:53):
it's it's it's probably not optimal for it
to go that way. So
why don't we reverse that and have it
go somewhere else? Yeah. I mean, go down
that path because,
you know, it's at the at most
people, I think, in general,
get a
and are accepting
of a level of sentience of primates. Right?
(38:13):
Okay. So
and then, you know, mammals, maybe. But there's
such a a lack of understanding of sentience
in so much of even the animal species
community,
let alone
plant, fungi, you know, all the other parts
of nature and parts of our world. And
I think it's so incredibly important to to
process the concept of sentience. And so go
(38:35):
for this because this it's close to my
heart. Like, I love sharing that. It just
why why say no when
you instead could say,
I'm curious. Maybe. Right?
Yeah. Well,
you know, what I've learned after just about
forty years living on this planet on four
continents and, you know, having talked to
(38:56):
a variety of folks is that
with every day that goes by, I actually
know less. Right, right. Yeah. The more you
know, the more you know now. Yeah.
Exactly.
You know, I've recently,
through an amazing podcast called Telepathic
Tapes, also to add in the footnotes that,
you know, it is not impossible
(39:17):
and is it, it is actually fact that
some people,
in this case,
kids
diagnosed
with severe autism
and who are nonverbal,
have the capacity to read other people's mind.
I'm simplifying, but that's that's the catch. Yeah?
I can't wait to read it. I'm, I'm
(39:38):
excited for it to be in the story
now. And, and what that means when I
looked into it and was listening to this
podcast,
it completely, again, new eureka moment,
it completely
challenged a lot of the assumptions that I've
had all my life around the power of
the mind, around
communication,
around how information
(40:00):
can be transmitted.
And what that means is
there's, it's not because science cannot explain it
that it doesn't exist. And
I believe because we are 50%,
at least,
fungi
and because, as you said, we are all
(40:20):
from
very similar,
eukaryotic
molecules, we're all from, you know, at least
fungi and,
animals are are all from that evolutionary trait.
It means that, yeah, we probably share much
more than we think we do and we
have to leave space for that.
(40:42):
And we have to open our imagination,
scary it is because we can't explain it.
But also the more
open we will be to understanding
and potentially
(41:03):
grasping
some of these incredible
natural things that are that that that are
happening and and that we can't explain.
Yeah. I mean, I talk about the broaden
and build theory, which is all about what
you just said, which is if you add
judgment and you decide what is
not acceptable and gives you some ease to
your fear of uncertainty,
then you shut down, and you can't be
(41:25):
innovative. You can't be creative. You can't be
curious. You can't be empathetic.
You literally your brain does not allow.
Because it's intentionally
blocking out
all that potential expansion, expanded thought. So if
you just stop with the no,
the n o, not the k n o
w. That's funny, actually. And you expand, you
(41:47):
open yourself up to new questions and and
push aside the fear of uncertainty.
The world opens up,
and it's so much more fun. Like, you
didn't say that, but to me, that's what
it is. It's, like, so much more fun
to think about
bigger stuff
and the possibility
than it is to be sure. So yeah.
Yeah. Fully resonate.
(42:07):
Yeah. Okay. So tell in in that path,
I know that you had mentioned that, like,
some of the MICA stories is about art
and creativity
and a lot of the work that's that's
happening that you're inspiring and that you're enabling
and empowering with within, you know, Myco Stories
and your incubator and all the rest of
it. So I don't we don't know enough
about it yet. So tell us some of
the cool things that are going on,
(42:29):
the,
the hopes and the dreams of you and
the network and
the players and and the participants. So go
with it. Just tell us more. It's so
exciting.
Yeah. So, you know, I like to say
I've become a bit of a I'm an
accidental
entrepreneur because
I I had a vision. I had an
(42:52):
idea,
originally for
a project that I thought would really entertain
entertain me, and I launched it. I like
to I like to do more than talk,
and I like to listen as well.
And,
you know, so I've had to effectively build
something,
really based on the feedback I was getting
(43:15):
from the different stakeholders I was speaking with,
which has made it for a really interesting
journey of building a company.
And
but it also means that it's very early
stage. You know, we're three years in.
I work with two business partners and have
worked with 22 consultants who are all superheroes
(43:39):
in the fungal world, but it's still very
much the beginning. What I hope Myco Stories
can achieve over time
is, number one, because money is still king
in this society we live in. But it's
understanding
who are the people out there
who are
really interested
in supporting innovation,
not just sustainability, but, like, business cases that
(44:01):
will support sustainability.
Yeah.
And,
Moving it to the next level, like, not
taking what we have now of sustainable
and accepting that that's enough. Yeah. Yeah.
But but really putting business first and sustainability
as a byproduct
of this incredible business case, which are which
is nature based and and so forth. So,
(44:24):
you know, calling out to the money where
it's at because, yes,
investment
lands the investment landscape is much more complex
and
and restricted as it was a couple of
years ago, but there's still a lot of
people making a lot of money. And there's
still a lot of people
with a rising
desire
to leave a
(44:45):
positive
sprint on on this planet. So, you know,
involving these guys and, educating them on the
topic, connecting them with fantastic folks that are
leading
change and leveraging fungi,
Making sure that we
educate
the masses as well. Right? Why did I
(45:06):
have to wait to be in my case
to understand that,
you know, a mushroom is not a plant?
I was never taught anything
about this in bi biology. So the Fungi
Foundation, for example, Chilean based organization, does an
incredible job at pushing out curriculums
that any teacher can use
in their class to start putting this concept
(45:28):
forward through, you know, very fun activities.
Awesome.
Okay. So that's great. In the show notes
too. Sorry. Yeah. There you go. So we
start we start early on
and
then we
keep on
influencing
people at different
stages of their life and in their profession.
So, you know, what can we do from
(45:49):
a policy standpoint
to
provide more recognition for fungi
as a living organisms in conservation practices? Yeah,
yeah.
How do we
educate and influence
the regulators
in charge of our agriculture industry, of our
food industry,
so that novel mushrooms
(46:10):
are deemed safe to consume
with positive health on our positive benefits on
our health and that we don't necessarily
stay rooted in a lot of the mycophobia,
which is, deeply rooted in most of the
West with some exceptions and which is completely
opposite
in the East, you know, with Japan, Korea,
(46:32):
China really leading the way on kind of
traditional usage. You know, if Myco Stories can
try to help push this general global agenda,
more people paying attention, more people being involved
and supporting
in what they can, time, expertise, or money.
I'll give myself a nice tap on the
back and keep on going.
(46:53):
Absolutely. I mean, you mentioned so many really,
really important
basic
conversations we should have We should be having.
Right? Like that fungi is actually a healthy
addition
to our lives, and we need to understand
more about it. And we need to get
it into policy and get it into
the government agencies
that,
(47:13):
that need to open up their work that
they're doing to include
fungi.
This whole world that's missing from policy discussions
and science research and and all that that's
funded
through governments.
So thank you if raising the stature
and the importance is huge. Conservation,
I mean, how do we take care of
(47:35):
since it's invisible,
right, primarily invisible,
so we can't see the green shoots either
coming up or not coming up because of
drought or whatever,
or the animals, you know, with the extinctions
that we hear about. Like,
conservation is a topic that we're not talking
about at all
in in terms of the entire fungal network
that is a massive part of our world
and is and the symbiosis
(47:56):
enabling those green shoots to come up that
Yeah. And then mycophobia, like,
you know,
the the difference between the eastern western,
both medicine and just life,
the connection with nature and the connection with
our Earth is so different. I don't know
how that happened. Like, how did that even
(48:16):
happen and how do we undo that? How
do we build that head somewhere in this
Western culture towards
more open minded and less fear based around
new novel
around new thoughts?
Thoughts?
I think it comes
originally
from
a question of beliefs and culture.
Mhmm.
(48:38):
If you look at,
Christianity, which was, you know, one of
the founding pillars of
modern society and, you know, if we just
take Europe and The US,
and then the influence
Christian religion had
also
in Latin America and in
different
(48:58):
parts of of Africa.
As I had a fantastic conversation with a
with a nun in a car share journey
in France, fantastic conversation I had with a
sister, Sister Faust team. You know, in her
eyes, nature,
you know, man was above nature.
And
nature was there to serve the man,
(49:20):
the humankind. And so from that very basic
concept, already conservation is going to take a
hit at some point. And if you look
at
Asian cultures
that have different belief systems, some of them
are animists,
are very rooted in the wisdom of nature,
in Japan, for example.
Well, that
(49:42):
basic,
you know,
foundational belief
is already very, very different, right? So you
relate
to nature differently.
You,
and so
you naturally
are going to have,
you know, different approaches in
into its conservation.
(50:04):
So,
you know,
the interesting thing is,
in the end, regardless of the belief systems,
I think, what the belief system that that
won it
over everything is capitalism,
which is another
religion,
probably the most popular religion at the moment,
which, you know, superseded
(50:25):
the
potential relationship, the nature that some of the
folks in in Asia had because you still
have the same
field
degradation, a lack of conservation policies
in the in a lot of Asian countries
as you have them in the West. Right?
But Yeah. You look at the the abuse
of of so many animals that are being
(50:45):
extracted for
Asian medicine. All sorts. There's this disconnect that
there used to not be a disconnect, and
now there's
this capitalism driven disconnect. Yeah.
I think Yuval Noah Harari, the author of
Sapiens and many other groundbreaking books,
You know, it says it very well in
his follow-up book to Sapiens and Omo Deus
(51:06):
writes, it is
us above everything else. And I think what
I've loved about
working in the fungi community is
we tend
to really try and step down from this
pedestal
of us above everything else, but try to
understand how we are part of everything. And
(51:28):
if we wanna work with and, yeah, it's
like working with nature as opposed to working
Using.
Using it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Those those
points are so, so important, and I have
my very strong biases. I studied religion for
quite a while, and and the what crop
what what bubbled to the top was certainly
the hierarchical
(51:49):
permission
to use, abuse, extract, own,
and which is the short term versus the
long term thinking. And and it's so interesting
that you brought us to a place, you
know, where where
thinking process has moved because of capitalism, you
know, towards the Western, and it's not helping.
But that we're shifting back. Like, we're we're
telling stories
and we're bringing attention to important things. And
(52:11):
when hopefully, we're doing some shifting back. Okay.
So I've taken tons of your time, and
I so appreciate it. Give us some you
know, what have we not talked about? What
words of wisdom
do we need to know that really
are the basis and drive
you and the work you're doing and the
and future that you're creating for us? So
(52:32):
big question.
Well,
well, the good thing is, you know, I
can pretty much go
wherever I want with it. Yes. Yes.
So.
I think that
as,
you know, as
young adults start taking decisions in life,
the ones that have the luxury of asking
(52:53):
themselves question,
so not kids that don't get the chance
to go to university because they need to,
you know,
have one or two jobs already to support
families. So these guys, unfortunately,
don't have a choice most times. But for
all the people who do have the choice,
have the luxury to study what they want,
manage to reimburse their university debt after some
(53:15):
years and get in a position of comfort
is,
you know, to really ask themselves
whether they feel the model we live in
is really working. And
based on that answer,
this very personal answer, what they can do
at their scale
to
potentially
change things, to direct
(53:36):
the global way things work nowadays
towards models that resonate more with what they
would want to see more of. And so
that means, you know, keeping
a
strong sense of,
a strong sense of of stealth, but like
an honest
and a and some level of integrity as
(53:58):
well. And,
and not necessarily doing what the society expects
you to do,
but really trying to, like, look deeper within
you to,
you know, what resonates.
And,
I'm just saying it doesn't have to be
loud.
It's quietly within you, but be self self
respect self, reflective. Think about your values. Align
(54:21):
your life with your values and and align
and choose values that
really make you feel good about your life.
Yeah. And you you don't necessarily need to
be a black sheep. You can be a
black sheep. We need black sheeps.
But you can also be a sheep, but
that kind of like thinks and challenges and
things differently.
And and I think
(54:41):
people need to learn to have more dialogue
with, people that have different opinions than themselves
to learn also why these people are coming
from where they're coming from. Right? Don't say
no. Say tell me more.
Tell me more and listen. You know? Too
often, I speak with people who, you know,
have this anxiety
(55:02):
of, you know, putting their point across. And
in the process,
you know, just,
you know, forget
to listen to the people that they're speaking
to.
And, actually,
it's it's it's more fun to listen, you
know, because you know your point of view.
Sure.
Put it across and, like, listen and listen
and learn. Stay curious,
(55:23):
and,
you talk.
Mhmm. Yeah. Listen more than you talk and
do more than you talk. And think and
I would say think about yourself
in a network, like a mycelium network or
whatever the right term is. Like, we do
not live in a disconnected
world. We live completely
integrated and connected to each other and to
(55:44):
nature, and our ripples matter, and our energy
matters, and the directional
multidirectional
sharing matters. You know, it's it's a way
to think that is so much more productive
for a win win win. Yeah.
I I I've just come up with this
little
little motto for,
for humankind with less scrolling, more digging.
(56:08):
I love it. Less scrolling, more digging. I
love it. I love it. Hey, Hugh. Put
your put put your hands in the soil,
be curious and go dig for information, challenge
the information that's just given to you, and
dig deeper in the relationships around you.
And without judgment. Just curiosity, not judgment. You
can only do one or the other. They
can't live together.
Okay. So tell us what you're working on,
(56:28):
what you're going what's what's the next steps?
I know that there's some really powerful
offerings that you're separate from the supporting of
these individual,
companies and and inventions and creations.
You've got some actual products that you share
and that that are part of your offerings.
Like, you've got the fungi industry map, which
is really cool.
Some graphics, there's more like, tell it just
(56:50):
go what are you doing? What's coming? What
do we what do we have now? What's
coming? And what do you want us to
know about my co stories that we can
you can leave us with so that
we're all in? Sounds good. So I would
suggest anyone listening and still listening to go
on to Myco stories, which is m y
c o for mycology, and,
you know, look at the different categories of
(57:12):
content we have out there to see what
resonates most. If you come from the industry
and you're more interested in the professional side
of things,
head over to the ecosystem page to get
a sense of
the hundreds of organizations
that are developing mind blowing applications
in different sectors and subscribe to our newsletter
so you can, you know, feel the drumbeat
(57:33):
of the fungal kingdom. And what's happening in
the next couple of months? We're speaking at
a number of conferences in The UK and
Austria.
I'm always looking for opportunities to, you know,
spread the word and be able to participate
in the debates that might be heavily nature
focused or not. Again, let's speak to everyone.
Let's listen to everyone. So reach out if
(57:56):
you feel that there would be, an interesting
fit for collaboration. And,
yeah, I'll I'll I'll pause it at that.
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so so much.
Mark, it's been such a joy. And start
kicking us off on some really complex as
well as really basic understanding of
(58:16):
the fungi fungi fungal network, and we're gonna
keep going with this. So we'll have Mark
back. We'll have more conversation in season two.
This is too important to keep under the
radar, so thank you.
And at some point, we'll touch on the
mushrooms you know, the magic mushrooms, the edible
mushrooms,
whatever. But for right now, we're gonna be
(58:37):
talking more more about this whole world. So
thank you. Thank you.
Thanks, Jessica.
And and thank you for the work you're
doing.
This has been a production of BLI Studios
produced by me, Kai.
(58:59):
Follow along with our other BLI produced shows
at balancinglife'sissues.com/podcast-bli.
Got an idea for the show? Email me,
Kai, at balancing life's issues dot com. And
don't forget to stay in touch with your
host, Jessica, at jessica@winwinwinmindset.com.
Anything else to add, Miles?
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