Aloha!
It is the year 2010. You are having coffee with friends and one of them says that within ten years the government will ban people from entering forests, for the sake of their health. Would you have believed it? Orwell's books were not taken seriously once either, and yet… welcome to the twenty-first century.
Before our eyes, freedom disappears every single day. Slowly, subtly, methodically, in white gloves. The tentacles of the beast reach deeper and deeper, and most of us are so immersed in the game that we do not even know we are playing.
"Progress" does not stop…
Today, in short, I will tell you why I stayed silent for so long. What makes me work fourteen hours a day, why I decided to change my profession, and what happens next with Aloha Fungi.
Is Aloha disappearing?
The shop is closed today, even though we need funds like never before... This time it is my conscious, deliberate move, meant to draw your attention to the fact that, given what is happening in Poland and the fate that herbs are meeting, mushrooms may be next.
When at the beginning of the pandemic I said not to let them inject you with that mysterious concoction at any cost, the people around me called me a lunatic, and META blocked my social media profiles for over a year. Why? Because I had the courage to speak the truth.
Lex Szarlatan is the next bomb: under it, an official can instantly impose a fine of up to a million złoty for a social media post (and order it removed) that criticises methods approved by the medical establishment. Welcome to the world of full-blown censorship.
Considering how many times in the history of medicine the "scientific consensus" has been wrong, and how badly they got so many things wrong during the pandemic, one can only hope this absurd bill ends up in the bin. But I have less and less faith. In fact I am convinced that soon, some fine night while we sleep, the Polish-speaking (because not Polish) government will do whatever it wants anyway.
A few years ago I still believed in social revolt, believed that the lines had been pushed so absurdly far (on so many levels) that people would finally take to the streets.
Today I no longer believe that. Not because I am a man of little faith or a pessimist, but because conformity is the greatest pandemic of our time, and the people who still have a soul are a small percentage of society.
The time for waking sheep is over. Whoever is meant to be a sheep will remain one forever, and I… since I have always felt deep down that my soul was made for wild lion roaring rather than bleating, I am leaving the pen and building my own Kingdom.
Poland has the most restrictive vaccination law in the EU. Everything is wrong.
Behind the scenes there is a grassroots witch-hunt against small supplement companies selling products from nature.
An ever-growing mania and obsession with the "purity of supplements"… what do I mean? Every other day I get asked whether my mushrooms are tested for heavy metals, contaminants and so on. And? Of course they are. We test every batch, even though our mushrooms grow in the mountains, in non-industrial regions. Quality and safety standards matter and I stand behind them, but… do customers buying tomatoes at the supermarket, or rice cakes, ask the producer for lab results? I guarantee you that most products in an ordinary shop are not fit to eat. And for some reason the authorities have become intensely interested in natural supplements, in the name of safety of course, while… they still recommend drinking tap water…
There is much, much more of this. You can see it yourselves, if your eyes are even slightly more open than the average person's.
Poland is a beautiful country. A pity it was sold long ago.
Soon it will be two years since we had to withdraw the beautiful Amanita from our shop (it is with unconcealed sentiment that I will remember my trips to the sanitary authority over that case). That dangerous, deadly substance from nature was given the status of a narcotic in Poland. More mushrooms and herbs are following in Amanita's footsteps. Lex Szarlatan will soon close the loop of a system built not to protect us, but to strip us of the last remnants of freedom and self-determination.
Of course most people still do not understand what is happening and are sound asleep.
The law today forbids us to speak of ANY health benefits of mushrooms. For attributing health benefits to them in our descriptions we can be hit with a massive fine that wipes us off the face of the earth. Add KSEF, which sees everything, more absurd regulations, and the taking away of the last bastion of freedom: CASH… The amount of paperwork and administrative matters stopped being manageable long ago, but that is exactly the point.
If the Beast does not like you, you can be swallowed and spat out in a second.
Aloha Fungi is still a tiny little company with… enormous aspirations and ideas. We have a brand, because we earned it with quality and an authentic mission of supporting people's health, but… without subsidies, outside investment or grants, survival is an ever greater challenge. We function only thanks to you, our regular customers (I dislike that word, you are like family to us), who have experienced first-hand what mushrooms are.
The past months have been an attempt to keep up with the law, the necessity of changing most elements of the site, and the realisation that… it is impossible to function like this. Zero predictability, an ever-tighter muzzle… that is not a life.
Only I know how many times I wanted to say fuck it (the word lands here precisely) and go sell something decidedly easier than "health". Running a company in Poland is an increasingly difficult extreme sport, soon reserved for the few. BUT…
With God's guidance, and in union with Him, I know I simply have to keep doing my thing, and that in the end everything always falls into place. Instead of fighting reality, you have to find your own way through it, still doing what the heart commands. Watching what is happening, and having a knack for sensing trends, I have been investing my time in AI for over two years. Why? That is a topic for another thread, but I simply knew that at some point we would reach a stage where not knowing the technology would mean having to submit to it completely.
Back to AI. One day I woke up with a sentence that had been playing in my dreams all night, and my subconscious ordered me to remember it:
IN A WORLD OF TECHNOLOGY, THE TECHNOLOGY OF NATURE.
And suddenly I began to understand everything…
Mushrooms as one of the oldest technologies on earth. Nature as our primal technology. In the age of AI, robotics, transhumanism…
From the very beginning of Aloha Fungi I knew what this brand was meant to be, and I knew it was meant to be something far greater than selling supplements.
I knew I was building something powerful in the name of something that guides me and demands sacrifice, obsession and… trust in spite of everything.
Mission number one at Aloha Fungi was to find the best source of mushrooms in the world. A passion for Chinese medicine led me to China, and there I met my Chinese brother, Yi, who has worked with mushrooms for twenty years. Mushrooms bound us together beyond any doubt, and what has grown out of that relationship I will be telling you about in my secret newsletter, to which I will be inviting people personally.
Meeting Yi opened a new era at Aloha Fungi, because I had finally found a trusted source and a man who loves mushrooms as much as I do. Today I say with pride that we have the best mushrooms in the world (more another time on quality, which I am obsessive about).
We will not be a brand for everyone, and access to it will be more and more limited. Not because we want to play at exclusivity like premium brands, but because soon it simply will not be possible any other way if… we want to keep standing behind ourselves and our values.
Back to the question: will Aloha Fungi survive? Many times this company hung by a thread. Running a venture like this is an enormous challenge. E N O R M O U S. If not for you and my closest collaborators, Aloha would have been gone long ago.
All right then! To the point! Because there is plenty to cover…
Speaking of quality: from the very start of building this brand I knew I wanted the best product, the best service, EVERYTHING THE BEST. For the past years I could not crack one challenge: creating an app, an internal system built on my ideas, that would serve our community. The popular solutions never satisfied me, or at some stage of growth they revealed their limits, and in the end you are always investing in a system that is not yours and to which you hold no full rights.
I knew Aloha Fungi needed its own system, but… it turned out that what it truly needed, software companies price at enormous sums. One software house quoted over 750,000 złoty for a custom solution for Aloha. Naturally, I do not have that kind of money. I started looking for investors, held very advanced talks, but in the end I never decided to let anyone into the company who diverged even slightly from my values. Besides, I have enough pressure and stress in my life; add investor stress on top and in the long run it simply cannot work.
I need my pace and peace… My tempo, my path, my rules.
I have been deeply interested in AI for several years, but mostly my interest was limited to following the news. At some point I asked myself… what if I learned to program myself and, with AI, took matters into my own hands?
From consumer to producer…
It was the same with mushrooms: I wanted my own source and access to quality. That is partly why I decided to produce mushroom-based supplements.
Long Story Short...
From reading and consuming content, I started creating. Complete devotion. Sleep. Training and… fourteen hours at the computer. That is what my life has looked like these past years. But I knew that if I did not take this road, sooner or later I would have to compromise, on many levels.
And what if one day they forbid me to sell what I have been working on for all these years? Amanita is already gone, they are going after cordyceps and turkey tail (coriolus), more herbs keep getting banned… how can I be sure that some clever lady in Brussels will not soon conclude that what I do is a crime?
That is why I will not fight the matrix. I am building my own. Today Aloha Fungi is already a technology company, and thanks to AI the financial barrier to owning our infrastructure and building our own solutions is no longer a limit.
After an extraordinary product, it is time for the whole experience around it. I want you to be cared for in every respect.
The limit of every founder or business owner is themselves and their time.
Oh… how I dreamed of multiplying myself! (Business owners, you know…)
Well then… I multiplied.
Today, while I sleep, the Aloha Fungi shop does not. It is watched over by a fleet of AI agents I built myself, line by line. Every hour one of them checks that everything works. When something breaks, no alarm clock rings for me. An agent wakes, finds the cause, proposes a fix, and in the morning a ready report is waiting for me. I only watch and govern. The last word is always mine.
In short: the shop grows on its own, optimises itself, evolves together with me (with us), without limits.
A system of our own, tailored to Aloha, on our servers, by our rules. Nobody can switch it off on us.
And here is the essence I searched for so long: we are not building a "supplement shop". We are building independence in every respect. Our own production, so nobody decides quality for us. Our own technology, so nobody decides our tools, or what we may and may not do. Our own channel to you, so no algorithm stands between us.
D E C E N T R A L I S A T I O N.
Notice that this is exactly the strategy of mycelium. It grows underground. Quietly. Thread by thread it weaves itself into a network nobody sees, until one day it turns out to be everywhere, impossible to tear out. You can pick the fruiting body. You cannot tear out the mycelium.
That is what we are becoming. A network that grows together and supports its own.
I am not fighting the matrix. WE are building our own. And that is exactly what I am inviting you into.
The shop has several levels of access; what you can reach will depend on many factors.
WE need YOU more than ever.
It truly still depends on you whether we keep going.
The coming days are crucial. How you can support us and how you can join the MYCELLIUM project, you will learn simply by staying close, and best of all by signing up for the mailing list.
Mail is becoming our main channel of communication...
Aloha
Fungi
PS we are zeroing everything. RESET... You decide whether you keep supporting Aloha Fungi as a customer or... a creator. And remember: the greatest secrets flow through the mycelium.