Hello friends,

Today’s newsletter is a digital version of the recent print magazine article I contributed to Shroomski Magazine for their most recent issue release on June 24th.

At its core, Mycopreneur has always been about spotlighting and uplifting mushroom entrepreneurs — Today’s feature focuses on an individual who has been making major moves in the mushroom space and beyond: Edward Crowe.

I’m spotlighting him for the Mycopreneur community in honor of a very special event that we’re announcing today: The Phoenix Rising Psychedelic Speak Easy in Nashville on November 5th, an in-person event set to take place at Analog at Hutton Hotel in the heart of downtown. This is an evening of creativity, curiosity, and psychedelic education featuring a number of renowned artists and storytellers. I’ll be hosting the evening and dropping some fresh comedy material.

We’ve got more in store related to this event that will be announced soon, but tickets are live now so you know what to do…this will sell out, don’t sleep on it. Now let’s get to know the man producing the event a little more:

Years before the sold out concerts and collaborations with superstars like Yelawolf, Bam Margera and Jelly Roll, music industry executive Edward Crowe was tripping balls on a macrodose of LSD at a rundown motel party populated with unruly members of a regional biker gang in Antioch, Tennessee. 

Crowe and a friend had obtained a vial of liquid LSD by a man in a ski mask who emerged from the woods on an ATV after they’d coordinated the hand off through a burner phone. What followed was a kind of unhinged psychedelic outlaw free-for-all: strangers pulling up to their motel room function, bikers lining up to be dosed with the abundant acid, and the very fabric of reality coming unraveled in real time with no cooler heads on hand to prevail. Shit hit the fan – and the floor, literally, as one of the toughest looking gangsters in the room dropped trausers and took a ratchet dump in the middle of the room full of trippers. The situation was deteriorating quickly and escape routes were compromised, so Crowe did what he had to do: kicked down the locked door connecting the adjoining room as his exit plan.

“It was unregulated to say the least,” he says. “Wild, wild, wild.”

Edward Crowe doesn’t romanticize those early psychedelic years too much. There are no tidy origin stories or nostalgic longings for these tales of the trip. If anything, Crowe’s story is less about discovering psychedelics than it is about surviving them long enough to understand what they were trying to show him.

Long before his business acumen was dialed in and psilocybin mushrooms became a life-renewing ceremony for the entertainment industry executive and serial entrepreneur, altered states were an attractive if chaotic focal point for Crowe and his companions while they cut their teeth as roadies in the music industry.

(Editor’s Note: Edward Crowe and I connected journalist Mattha Busby with Jackass icon Bam Margera for this Rolling Stone profile on Bam that was published this week — Bam is wearing a Murder Cigars shirt, which is Edward’s cigar company)

“There was a time when I was in Seattle on tour and we had a bunch of acid that people had given us along the way on the road”, says Crowe.

He and a friend took several doses and wandered the city for hours. He recalls walking 17 miles in cowboy boots, drifting through crowds, convinced at times he was being followed by the CIA, discarding tabs in public trash bins to get rid of the evidence. The same characters seemed to reappear in different parts of the city, as if looping through some unseen script.

But even in that chaos, a meaningful path forward was beginning to form.

A pattern began to emerge: LSD experiences thrived in motion, in cities, in the presence of people and creative chaos. He could ride a bicycle for miles, navigate urban zones while evading imaginary intelligence agencies, and engage his sense of artistry with a can of spray paint in a decommissioned train yard. But psilocybin mushrooms were something else entirely.

“Mushrooms are church,” he says. “School. The doctor.”

(Editor’s Note: Imagine that there’s a company like Booming Acres out there right now that offers everything you need to start growing bulk amounts of exotic and gourmet mushrooms at home with zero experience — that’s a killer new hobby, monetizable side hustle or full on business in a box that thousands of people are benefitting from right now, and there’s no reason you can’t tap in and do the same)

That distinction took a lot of trial and error to recognize. Like many, Crowe first encountered psilocybin in a more casual context after getting stuck with a supply he hadn’t planned to use. At the time, it was just another substance in the rotation, another way to make money and live out loud. But the mushrooms had more to say than he was prepared to hear at first. 

Mushrooms afforded clarity where LSD provided novelty. After a difficult or chaotic stretch, a mushroom experience would reset Crowe mentally, emotionally, and even physically. Stress dissolved. His thinking sharpened. He began to return to them deliberately, spacing out sessions, trying to “complete the homework” before going back in.

Then shit started to get really wild in a more astral and personalized, internal sense. 

Crowe describes moments where communication seemed to occur telepathically. Insights and a sense of knowing arrived with a clarity. The line between internal thought and received understanding began to blur.

High-dose experiences brought sensations so strong he felt as though he might “burst out of my body.” In those states, control became less about navigating the experience and more about containing it. He realized quickly that there was a deep magic in the ceremonial setting.  

“In the city, if something goes wrong, you’re affecting other people,” he says. “Out there in the woods, I can yell, scream and roll around, and it’s not going to hurt anyone.”

So he took the mushroom ceremony outdoors into the Tennessee backwoods.

Then he embraced the silence. Eventually, all external stimuli such as phones, lights, and music were removed and replaced with silent ritual. It became just him, the environment, and the experience itself.

And then, without a clear moment of decision, it became a ceremony.

(Here are some shots of the Analog at Hutton Hotel in Nashville where the Phoenix Rising Psychedelic Speakeasy will take place November 5th)

Crowe is careful with that word. He didn’t set out to create a ritual space. It emerged gradually, almost accidentally. A crystal gifted by a friend. Another from his mother. After she passed, her ashes were placed beneath them. A fire helped anchor the experience. 

Over time, others began to share in the ceremonial container with Crowe.  And when they came, they contributed something too; A prayer or a moment of gratitude and acknowledgment of the space.

“It just got more sacred,” he says. “Every step.”

The evolution from chaos to intention is the spine of Crowe’s story. He doesn’t pretend the early years of tripping in  motels with biker gangs and running from imaginary intelligence agency operatives were necessary in some grand, ordained sense. There are moments he looks back on, such as driving through the night on acid in a car full of drugs, witnessing what appeared to be a robbery mid-hallucination, that he knows could have ended differently.

“You couldn’t pay me to do that now,” he says.

And yet, he doesn’t disown that version of himself either.

The kid flipping substances and moving too fast to reflect set a bigger destiny in motion. Without those encounters, however chaotic, he’s not sure he would have found the path he’s on now.

Because what mushrooms ultimately gave him wasn’t just insight—it was direction.

Raised in an environment where, as he puts it, outcomes tended to narrow toward “dead, in jail, or barely getting by,” Crowe sees psychedelics as an interruption to that trajectory. 

Today, his approach is measured, intentional and ceremonial in the truest sense. He spaces sessions out carefully. He prepares, respects the medicine, and integrates. 

What started with unhinged motel parties and aimless side quests filled with biker gangs on LSD has matured into a deeply reverent, focused high dose spiritual mushroom practice for Edward Crowe. Years of chaos have crystallized into a sense of wisdom that can’t be bought, only earned. 

“Mushrooms saved my life,” he says bluntly.

The Incubator is our weekly low-key, cost free mentorship and networking hub for mushroom entrepreneurs, researchers, advocates, and enthusiasts. It’s every Thursday at the same time, same link

Today 3 pm et / 12 pm pt U.S.

To add the Mycopreneur Incubator to your weekly calendar click here

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87575277676?pwd=w5k1GGlfZ22I3SOtolZbZokYnxpUi8.1

Meeting ID: 875 7527 7676
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PS I wrote an article titled “The Mushroom Industry Has No Borders” for Fat Nugs Magazine that’s out today

Thanks for checking out the Mycopreneur Newsletter,

Dennis