End of Season One

Mushroom Revival Podcast is saying farewell to our beloved co-host, Lera Niemackl. Nearly three years running, our show has evolved and blossomed in ways we did not think possible when we launched.

Season 2 will still have the host and founder of Mushroom Revival that we know and love, Alex Dorr. As we transition to this new era in podcasting, episode frequencies will fluctuate as we figure out how to best produce the show with new team members. Thank you all for being part of this journey and making this podcast thrive.

Show notes:

Support Lera's mushroom endeavors: https://www.patreon.com/mycotalabs/

Mushroom in Every Language: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n8TfPMjLcLa8oVwFKMmgPuvbieakmB-6jd9stiLZ6xI/edit#gid=0



www.mushroomrevival.com

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Transcript

Alex: 0:00

You're listening to the mushroom revival podcast.

Lera : 0:22

All right, friends today on the show, we have a farewell podcast. This is the end of season one and the beginning of season two, which we'll get into the details of what that means exactly. But first, you know the drill, we got the review of the week. Alex, would you like to do the honors?

Alex: 0:40

This one is by Danny wambo, which I love. And the subject is spread the spores. And the content is I have been listening to mushroom revival for months now. And I have learned about the existence of so many important fields and issues. Without a moment of boredom. I've never been able to thrive in hard science spaces. But the level and style of education this podcast offers is so tasty for my brain. It's not fluff, they really explore the biology and chemistry at fungi and proper terms. I recommend it to anyone who wants to get to know our wonderful, wonderful fungal world, and how we interact with it every day. Thank you so much, Lear and Alex, for putting on such a great show. Thank you, Danny wambo. What an awesome name.

Lera : 1:32

Yeah. And a great review to I can't read that.

Alex: 1:36

And not think of SpongeBob

Lera : 1:40

I don't get that reference.

Alex: 1:42

There's an episode with Patrick and wambo. Oh, I can't remember the exact details. It's been a while since I've watched it. But right now it's a sponge by reference. I am curious if that's actually his last name.

Lera : 1:57

Or if I'm kind of jealous. It's a great my last name was Wamba sort of an email. Cool.

Alex: 2:02

So anyway, I mean, end of season one.

Lera : 2:05

Well, with bitter sweets and sorrow Lera saying farewell to the mushroom revival podcast, at least as a consistent host. I'll be back on occasionally writes, you know, maybe a month or two in between

Alex: 2:22

breaking my heart. Why are you saying this?

Lera : 2:25

Wow, well, I'm a busy lady. And I need to simplify my life. You know, I have another job. I got it. I got a full time job in a lab. And I'm consumed by it. And it's just in order for me to maintain mental health and not cut corners. And both of these jobs. It's, I kinda had to pick one, you know?

Alex: 2:47

Yeah. And you you're working like seven days a week. Ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, yeah. With both of these 12 hour days, every

Lera : 2:55

day. It requires a lot. But it's passion. You know, it's cool to have a job where you look at the clock, and you're like, Damn, it's already too. I want more time. Not like, oh, it's only two. Yeah, you know. So it's a wonderful, beautiful thing. That so this is big. This is your less is more. Yeah. And it was a super tough decision. I don't know how many hours we spent talking about how to proceed. But the good news is mushroom revival podcast isn't going anywhere. It's gonna stay. Alex is sticking around. It'll be the same. We're not fucking leaving shows on the show must go on for sure. And we're still gonna, you know, same style. We'll have mycologists and artists and enthusiasts from around the world talking about their work, and interviewing them. You know, we'll keep it up. And I'll be back here in there. Hell yeah. And Alex, you're such a wonderful host. You don't even need me.

Alex: 3:54

I owe you have a way prettier voice than I could ever dream of having. So I apologize for your ears, everyone. Unfortunately, you'll have to just listen to My voice and not this angelic angel of her voice right next to me. So yeah, I was born with this voice. I apologize for your ear lobes, but you're gonna have to deal with it. So we do make a good match. And we've been killing it it. Do you know that? We started the mushroom revival podcast, April 26 2019. It's almost been three years. Right now. We're recording this on February 19. So it's around 34 months that we've been doing it and over 1000 days of cranking out these podcasts. And pretty much for an exception of a couple of weeks. We've been doing it weekly, one episode every week. I think a couple times. We did a couple episodes in one week. So yeah, a lot of work a lot a lot of episodes and we've been doing doing so many different things like, I mean, how many how many different things have we tried over the last almost three years now?

Lera : 5:08

Well, I remember when we shared one Yeti mic did you said um, a lot and I was super shy and like, never talked,

Alex: 5:15

I still do say a lot. But listening to old recordings of myself is the most cringe thing in the world. I had no idea how much I said, um, until I listened to a recording of myself. And it was I wanted to smash my head against the wall. I was like, oh my god, I had no idea. But it was a lot. It was every second I would say, um, it's pretty bad.

Lera : 5:43

gotten a lot better. Yeah, you're very eloquent. No.

Alex: 5:46

And, and there was a period where I was editing the whole podcast and I didn't edit any of the um, so probably, if you listened to some of our earlier episodes, there's a lot of those have been lira ticket over. And she edited out every single bless her heart, so many of them. And so I had to train myself to lessen her workload of editing out all my arms.

Lera : 6:13

So it's been great. And you know, my editing style now, I hardly edit anything out. I just add the role in the rollout occasionally, if there was a loud noise or something, I'll chop that up. But we've gotten pretty good about being really organic and uncut. With most of our content.

Alex: 6:32

Yeah, yeah, we did for a little bit. You tried more of a? Would you call it like a report style

Lera : 6:38

Portage? Yeah, like with music, and it was

Alex: 6:42

really cool. I those episodes, were clean as fuck, and just, they slept

Lera : 6:49

less of an interview and more of a story like, Yeah, but it was three times the work at least

Alex: 6:56

a lot of work. And we tried videos for a while we even we're gonna animate every single episode. And we're working with this animator, to basically make a little animated video. What was that TV series with? The podcast guy.

Lera : 7:16

Duncan Trussell,

Alex: 7:17

Duncan Trussell, Midnight gospel, Midnight gospel, we're kind of we saw minute gospel. And I was like, do we could totally do this with a show and have this animator have this like, really cool, mushroom animated thing in the background as our podcast was going on? So we were we were playing with that. And it was just, yeah, simply just a straight video of of it was just so much work per episode. And yeah, we're not getting bankrolled for doing this by a big network. So you know, maybe one day but

Lera : 7:53

yeah, we tried to. We tried a lot with a podcast, and quickly learned that it's not completely worth it. Because it is an auditory experience. And you know, our YouTube videos didn't get many viewers. No, not at all. Yeah, processing power. It took two because like, I think the first one we did was was not Kelly, the first video, and it was in 4k. And like,

Alex: 8:19

yeah, no, I had to buy a new computer for it. We bought all this equipment. And like, I we were taking lessons from people on like studio lighting and camera stuff. And I was doing all this research, too.

Lera : 8:34

That's just how you are though. Yeah, I

Alex: 8:37

got really into it. I was I yeah, this is you approaching a new task. This is my ADHD just kind of go to the stars get to Mars. Yeah. I've learned a lot. I'm glad we did it. But it was a lot. It was a lot. And yeah, podcasts are mostly an auditory experience. So how do we make that experience the biggest bang for our buck? And, you know, for us not to burn out and keep pumping out really amazing content without putting an arm and a leg into it and finding that right balance. And same with our length too. We've had such really long episodes, but we've also had, I think, to leorio walk ins was our shortest. What was that? Like? I feel like it was like 10 minutes or something?

Lera : 9:26

Like 20 or maybe something? Yeah. And

Alex: 9:30

I loved it. He gave the shortest answers ever. And it was very it just answered the question. It was on to the next one. i Yeah, that was great. And then what would you think is our longest

Lera : 9:44

Larry Evans was up there.

Alex: 9:46

Larry Evans was long two hours. I feel like I feel like my China recap was pretty long. I feel like the quarter steps episode was pretty long. We've had some long ones that are like an hour and a half, almost two hours. Yeah. But yeah, we try to keep it around an hour. And that I think that's our, our go to is one hour. Seems to be the right. right amount of time. Yeah, I

Lera : 10:15

think we've found the sweet spot, like putting in just the right amount of effort to get, you know, the 8020.

Alex: 10:22

Yeah, and I think we've only had two in Person guests. Our whole three years.

Lera : 10:29

Chris Murano,

Alex: 10:30

Chris Maronna. Way in the beginning, and then. And then the second one in Telluride. Yeah. There, which was like half the interview was in person, and then some audio experiences. Yeah, missed it. But I would love to do more in person episodes. But like, we have guests from all over the world, which is so exciting. And both of our guests. Do we have two guests from Finland, both in the sauna? Yeah, it's really funny. Yeah, and we've wanted to make kind of a map of all of our guests that we brought on. And I think that would be really cool. We haven't gotten around to it. But what's really cool, one of the programs we use to kind of publish our podcasts, it has a map of all of our listeners. So 78% of our listeners over the last three years are from North America, under 1% are in South America. 12% of our listeners are in Europe, less than 1% are in Africa. 2% are in Asia and 4% are in OCEANA. So really cool. I would I would love to see more diverse groups of listeners tune in from from all over the world. And similarly, we are working on a project. It's kind of a, we're not pushing it. We're keeping it organic, but trying to get the word mushrooms in as many languages as possible. Do you want to talk about that? A little bit?

Lera : 12:03

Oh, sure. This idea actually came from a book called fearsome valid home from hot climates. It's a book by Tom Robbins, and the protagonist is a linguist. And he has this he picked one word that he would know how to say. And many languages, I think he could say this word in over 72 languages. I thought that was cool. I was inspired. I was like, I want to wear that I could say, in a ton of different languages. So of course, I picked mushroom. And then we I think we're talking about this and tell you right, like how cool it would be to turn that into a piece of content.

Alex: 12:43

But yeah, then we just we did it. And we have a good list right now. But we want as many people as possible to contribute. So if you speak an interesting language, or you have a friend or family member, someone you know, reach out and if you want to be part of this episode, and have your sound bite included in an episode. Yeah, definitely reach out for sure.

Lera : 13:07

Yeah, we should include in the show notes, maybe the spreadsheet that shows Yes, which languages we have. So check it out.

Alex: 13:16

But we obviously I mean, we have a lot of people tuning in from the United States. We have a fair amount in Canada, you know, UK, Australia, Germany, Ireland. And

Lera : 13:29

so our top city of all time.

Alex: 13:33

Oh, no. Cago Yeah, so this makes sense. This list so Chicago, Austin, LA, Seattle, Denver, Toronto, Atlanta, Portland all that yeah, all the hit cool. Say. Dublin. Dublin.

Lera : 13:47

First international city. That's the most listened to look.

Alex: 13:51

I can't wait to go back to Dublin. I love Dublin. Yeah. Yeah, I always tell people I had I had the best pizza in Dublin out of anywhere and I like been to Italy and the pizza was good, but I might have you know had a few beers and I was just maybe it tasted really good at that point of you know, but yeah, it's so strange. Yeah, so we are wrapping up season one and you know, it's up to me now I I will try my hardest to have some sort of schedule that is consistent. I will try my hardest to do weekly but most likely it will be more like bi weekly. To be honest, I am. I am so busy. You know I have my own full time job running mushroom revival and I will try to bring in as much help as possible to make sure that you know the the podcast gets edited and everything is tidy But, you know, not rushing it again, we want more quality over quantity. And so if you are a super active listener and you love tuning in once a week, I apologize to be a little patient, but we'll get you the episodes and they will be incredible.

Lera : 15:21

Yeah, and you know, you guys have been awesome. The stats get better every week. You know, we get a weekly email for how many downloads the whole podcast got. It's been consistently more, which is so fantastic.

Alex: 15:36

It's a hockey stick. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. I would love any suggestions, if you, you know, some niche person that studies this thing that you would love for us to bring on?

Lera : 15:51

Yeah, but you got to get a kind of in person.

Alex: 15:55

You got to set that up. You got to come back for that episode. If we do it.

Lera : 16:00

Maybe I'll ask Sasha if she wants to do it. Yeah, well, we'll figure it out. There's, you know, you open one fungal door, and there's just two or three more behind that one. So I don't think we'll be running out of content anytime soon. But

Alex: 16:14

we wanted to make this episode a little short. And just to recap, just to wrap up season one, it's been a beautiful last three years, we will continue with season two, and it's going to be a blast. We all love lira, she's gonna come back on, just going to be a little more space in between those episodes in the future. It's been a real ride, we want to thank everyone for tuning in and true me and with us. It's been such a roller coaster of amazing fungal knowledge and enthusiasm. And thank you everyone for writing in and living your views. You know, again, we don't, we don't take any third party advertising or we don't have a Patreon or anything like that. So, you know, we put in a ton of work and making this podcast and we don't really have a way to pay ourselves for it. But we do you know, have mushroom revival and we sell functional mushroom supplements. So that's a way if you want to support the business. Get some mushroom goodies, we just got approval. You know, the mushroom gummies are coming in hot in March. And so we're super excited for those they tastes so delicious. And there'll be the first certified organic mushroom gummies in the world. And they they're low in sugar, they taste phenomenal. They're super potent. And yeah, we're super excited for that. So if you're listening a coupon code you can use his pod treat for a surprise discount we change it all the time. And so you can use that for surprise discount at checkout and other than that, you know we'll we'll continue to shout out reviews that we'd love per episode so if you want to be featured leave a review and that helps a lot for us and you might even hear your review on on the next episode.

Lera : 18:23

It's been a really wonderful time novelist. Until next time, my mushroom family, much love and may this wars be with us.