You're listening to this naked mind is Annie Grace, and welcome to this Naked Mind podcast and I am super

excited today to be here with a unique guest different than our traditional naked life stories, but I want to talk to and bring you an expert on mushrooms and all things mushrooms and here's the thing I had no real idea or grasp of how

useful functional mushrooms could be in just helping me feel better, all sorts of things.

So there's really like a huge breadth of conversation

that we're going to get into,

but I just can't wait.

So thank you so much, Hamilton for coming on and sharing your expertise with us I really appreciate it.

Well, I'm very happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I rarely open up the podcast for something different than just people's stories, but honestly when there's been something in my life that has been like, oh, this has made a really big difference for me. This has been very useful. It's a market difference. Then I always want to talk about it. So that's that's kind of what this this is. And so I'm super excited. So why don't you kind of start at the beginning now why don't you tell us a bit about your

story with mushrooms and how you even got fascinated in in this industry and in this experience for yourself?

Well, first let me say that I'm just thrilled to hear that you're having a positive experience

with functional mushrooms.

That's wonderful news.

It's very consistent with most people. And so my story goes back to 2009 is when I went on my first mushroom hunt. And I had the benefit of going with someone who already knew a lot about mushrooms

and knew all the Latin names and was able to talk about the ecology and the relationships

and edibility and those kinds of things.

And to this day, I still consider that person my mushroom mentor.

And he recommended two books to me

because I was completely enthralled by the whole process.

It was like treasure hunting truly, like being able to find food and delicious food and rare food.

And he recommended mushrooms demystified by David Aurora, which is an amazing, it's kind of like considered the Bible of mushroom identification, although it's been updated, like taxonomy has been updated since then and a book called Mycelium running which is more about the practical applications applied mycology by Paul Stamets who's a very popular well-known American mycologist.

And I devoured these two books and then I ran on it on my own.

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