About Tim Keck & the podcast

Hello and welcome to the very first episode of the Mush Love podcast. I'm Tim Keck, your host. Mush Love is a podcast about mushrooms, more specifically about people's relationship with mushrooms and maybe even more precisely about the people who are totally obsessed with mushrooms. I'll tell you how I got here. I've been a journalist my whole life. My parents were newspaper people. I co -founded three newspapers, The Onion, Portland Mercury, and the Pulitzer Prize winning paper, The Stranger. And over the last year, I've been working on a novel called Balance Rock.And one of the themes, or I guess maybe even main characters, weirdly enough, is a fungus colony in a meadow up high in a mountain of Washington state. It's a long story, and maybe you'll read it, maybe you won't. But for the book, I started doing research on mushrooms. I've always liked mushrooms. When I was a kid, I forged with my grandfather. I've taken shrooms. And like most people, thought mushrooms had a certain otherness to them. They're not really plant or animal. They're mysterious, maybe even powerful.

So doing my research, I started talking to people in the relationship to mushrooms, chefs, psychonauts, doctors, environmental climbers even. And I discovered something, people who are into mushrooms are really into mushrooms. They get obsessed and they have something in common too. No matter where they are or what they're up to with mushrooms, they often start kind of in a similar place, almost a practical scientific beginning to what their interests in mushrooms that quickly turns into something deeper and frequently almost spiritual.

Again, I'm not talking just about people who trip on mushrooms. Those folks, of course, too. But a retired cop who has never tripped, scientists, hardcore scientists, doctors, they all can't avoid going deep in a world that can't be easily explained. And this sure for sure has happened to me as well. In this season of the Much Love podcast, I talked to all kinds of people about the relationship to mushrooms. some of the folks I mentioned earlier, chefs and foragers, a designer who makes these amazing lampshades out of mycelium, a doctor who has used mushrooms to help people that are dying face their fears of death. And there's no other way of saying it a beautiful way. I hope you enjoy the podcast. I've really loved making it. I have one caveat, a big caveat. I'm not a scientist or a doctor or a serious forager or a designer or any kind of expert, but like the guy in Close Encounters who's just living his life and then has an experience. hard to explain. And the next thing you know, he's making devil's tower out of mashed potatoes. This podcast is my devil's tower. And who knows if you start learning more about mushrooms, you might start making your own mashed potato sculpture.