Open Fung: Phil Ross

Phil Ross is a legend in the bay area myco-space. If you don’t know him, I suggest you start with the first video that really propelled Phil and the idea of myco-materials into the world entitled "Built With the Cleanest Technology on Earth: Nature" … Within this short video made only eight years ago, the fungal-bug that had and continues to bite us all is ever-present. It shows the possibilities, asks the questions and proceeds to answer only what the knowledge of the time had to offer. From an outsider's perspective, it has been a mad-dash to the “goldmine” of “myco-materials” fraught with cut throat competition and agents of chaos continually at work to feed the world's obsession with materialism instead of revolutionizing it. But Phil and his massive contributions to the concepts and execution to the production of things like “mushroom leather” make him a different kind of human. He is not dead set on generating some sort of massive intangible entity to gain myco-dominator-status, instead Phil is focused on opening up the often clandestine institutional research to all the underground mycological networks. With his project “Open-Fung” there remains a focus to build and develop a community within the world as opposed to contributing to the fallacy that is our social-media-dilema can drag us into some “new light”…are we really connected or are we simply refining our puritanical ways with 24-7 access to the main vein of the drama drip? What I got after spending time with Phil last summer was this: The man wants to have a conversation with fungi, he wants to communicate with it and I'm 100% sure he will in due time. The exhaustive efforts of such a deceptively simple idea, has been a road of unexpected maneuvers for Phil, but alas we don’t talk about any of that in this podcast, instead we focus on the ideas above materialism and even go back to a time when zines, flip-phones and gatherings of like minded people had a greater impact than all the collective likes and hearts and emoji-con chaos one can offer to the world’s collective of serotonin-seekers. Phil is the heart, keep an eye on this man’s movement and seek to understand what it means to Open The Fung!